Resolving Emotional Baggage
There
are two ways to deal with this baggage, from the top-down and from the
bottom-up. Traditional talk therapy is primarily a top-down approach.
This is where you learn to reconceptualize your problem, to use your
thinking mind to control your feeling mind, to use your logic and
understanding to prevent emotional baggage from the past from
interfering with your life. This is an important approach, however the
underlying baggage does not actually heal and so problems can develop
later on. The bottom up approach focuses on healing the underlying
baggage, clearing the emotional channels so that you can think more
clearly.
At Russell Associates we use a blend of bottom-up techniques that we have refined over the past 15 years. These techniques are designed to help you to achieve four goals.
Emotional Evaluation - First we do a baggage check to help you to uncover and map out the emotional baggage associated with the issue or problem that is bothering you.
Emotion Control Training - Second we train you in baggage control, showing you how to identify and use some ‘off switches’ - mental tools that you can use to temporarily turn off emotional reactions that get in your way.
Emotional Resolution – The third step is the hard part, a type of emotional boot camp. We roll up our sleeves and help you to fully heal and resolve each piece of baggage. To do this we use powerful tools and techniques developed to help people fully resolve major life traumas, like military combat or rape. While these techniques were designed to address these big ‘T’ they work just as well and even faster with little ‘t’ traumas like divorces, breakups, loses, illnesses, job or family conflicts, etc. that generate emotional baggage for just about everyone.
We have the same goal for big ‘T’ and little ‘t” baggage, we want them to completely and fully heal. For instance, if when you really allow yourself to think about some emotional baggage you get upset at a 9 or a 10 on a 0-10 scale when you begin then it should be at a 0 or a 1 by the end of our work. The healing should be so complete that you will not be able to get yourself upset about it even if someone paid you to try.
Cognitive Behavioral Resolution –If you can’t solve something in the past with 20/20 hindsight you have no chance of being able to solve it in the future. Once the emotional wounds have fully healed it is time to rewrite your history using counterfactual scenarios. Counterfactual scenarios are the things we wish we had done but didn’t do or the things we wished had happened but didn’t happen.
In this last step we help you to rewrite your history. Although you can’t change the past, you can change the automatic programs associated with past events in your life. When you change the way you think and react to a memory you have changed the only history that can affect your life now, the history stored in your memory. Making these changes allows you to spontaneously react like the person you would have been if things had happened the way they should have happened. While it is tempting to start with this step, we have found that this step is easier and more effective once the old emotional wounds have healed.
As these four pieces fall in line we both watch as you begin to spontaneously react calmly, confidently and creatively in those same troublesome situations that used to stress you out. Without the emotional baggage you are now able to use all of your abilities all of the time -- especially in the situations that used to give you the most trouble.