For instance, a fear of rejection forces us to avoid others, inhibits a true and authentic expression of the true self, blocks our ability to form intimate romantic relationships, hampers our career performance and impedes clear and focused thoughts. All this makes a person lead a lonely and unfulfilled life. Although, the consequences are clearly evident the source of the problem i.e. the fear itself remains hidden and pulls the strings.

Throw those demons out

Since emotional discomforts remain hidden deep in the unconscious part of the mind, they become inaccessible to us. Making things worse is the fact that most people have not developed awareness or language to discern or discuss such internal experiences. So where does this leave us? Dis-empowered and controlled by an elusive inner force that we refer to as our ‘inner emotional pain’.

As long as we choose to remain oblivious to what controls us, we will lead an unfulfilled and empty existence. This will only add to the emotional aches and pains we are already suffering from. So, feelings of disillusionment, disappointment, unhappiness, failure, despair or despondency will team up with the existing unconscious demons.

Diffuse emotional landmines

Can anything be done to stem this tide of negative emotional turbulence brewing within? Absolutely! It’s also easier than one might think. I have to qualify this, however, because it took me over 20 years of training in psychiatry to find the solution. It arrived not from my training; rather it came from personal insights into why everything that I had been taught did not work at all.Before I expound on the answer, I must explain a few basics that will help you appreciate its significance and simplicity. So if you’re ready, here it comes:

• An emotional ache and/or pain, in whatever form, results from some old negative painful emotional experience that a person had as a child and that got stored in the unconscious mind and body as a memory of that event. That memory metaphorically, like an open physical wound that never healed, remains vulnerable to being re-injured, or re-ignited.
• I have coined the term ’emotional landmine’ as an apt metaphor to bring to light how the old unconsciously submerged painful feelings from old negative memories can easily become re-triggered by causal and seemingly insignificant events in our day-to-day life. When this happens, we are not only overwhelmed by the emotional intensity associated with the eruption of pent-up old feelings, but also surprised at how such a ‘small triggering event’ could have made us so unstable emotionally.
• Similarly, if we envision ourselves tripping off a real landmine we will immediately know that the explosion is the result of a tremendous amount of potential energy getting released in a short space of time. This is exactly what happens when emotional aches and pains are experienced.

Plan the diffusion

Now, with this background, you will appreciate two things. Firstly, common approaches to dealing with such aches and pains are to:

• pretend they don’t exist.
• attempt to suppress them or cover them over with drugs, medications, and other forms of addictions or distractions.
• make friends with them and understand them through such strategies as psychotherapy and the like.

Secondly, we will recognise that it might simply be easier to deal with these landmines if someone could figure out how to find them and permanently diffuse them so they never get set off again.

Choose your option

So, which option above feels preferable you the first or the second? If you prefer the latter, try the following: place one hand over your heart and as if you are speaking from there, simply say the statement that follows:

“I would like to become fully aware of what emotional landmines live in my unconscious mind and then I would like to find a way to permanently diffuse them so that they no longer pose a threat to me and my life.”

Now, take a moment and notice how you feel inside. If you are sufficiently discerning you may notice some interesting and desirable feelings such as peace, stillness, lightness, relief, contentment, the ability to breathe more deeply and so on. If you like any of this, then simply affirm that to yourself as if you are speaking from your heart and it will get stronger.

Now, here comes the interesting part. The reason you felt anything at all after those statements is because you are beginning to tap into a deep inner wisdom that has been dormant inside of you for probably as long as you have been alive. That wisdom is sourced from what I call your Life Force Energy—the energy of consciousness, strength, confidence, resilience, peace, clarity, joy, and life itself.

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To do so requires the courage to face the deeper emotional roots of poor self image and low self esteem and permanently release them from the unconscious mind and body.

Look for deeper emotional roots

Why would anyone ever have a poor self image or low self esteem? Many of you might think it’s because of the societal messages that subtly and not-so-subtly invalidate your inherent attractiveness as a human being. Well, here you are only partly correct. The problem actually began well before you were exposed to those messages.

You see, many individuals, carry negative memories from early life in the unconscious mind that they identify with and with which are associated negative messages about who and how attractive they are. These memories consist of traumatic events as seen through the eyes of a child that essentially leaves them feeling unwanted, unloved, neglected, useless, and ugly and so on.

Worst of all, when you complacently accept it as truth and identify with these internally stored messages, you are left with no other option but to dislike who and what you are. Negative feelings of low self esteem, poor self image and low self worth become constant painful internal emotional threats that must be parried and pacified in order to feel comfortable, at ease and peaceful.

Try to break the cycle

The need to keep these painful feelings at bay leads to the adoption of numerous strategies often classified as addictions. These addictions attempt to suppress, bury or distract one’s self from feeling and becoming incapacitated by the negative feelings. The individual who learns to use food as a pacifier at an early age may continue this compensatory approach to the internal pain eventually culminating in obesity.

This strategy, which attempts to bury emotional discomfort, also leads to a partial desensitisation to the physical discomfort of the obese condition itself. The awareness of this discomfort, which is supposed to act as a self-regulatory mechanism then fails. Sadly the approach to coping with the emotional turmoil is also untenable because the emotions don’t go away, they only go underground. Further, they become accentuated by the emotional repercussion of being obese. So the individual is faced with a growing onslaught of negative emotions as well as the health problems of the obesity that result. It all then becomes a vicious circle.

Weed out the bad memories

It becomes imperative to diffuse the negative emotional charge that emanates from early unconsciously stored negative memories that I call ’emotional landmines’. And the only way to do that is to completely eradicate the memories themselves. So what does that mean?

Well, it effectively means one must effectively ‘erase the past’ as it is stored in the person’s consciousness. Although there are many modalities that attempt to simply decrease the emotional charge of such negative memories, it has been my experience that this alone will not yield permanent results. It’s much like the metaphor of the weed growing in the garden, unless one pulls it out from the root, it will simply re-grow.

Don’t fill it with wrong things

While working as a psychiatrist about 10 years ago, I learned a sad fact and it completely changed my view of many of the therapies I had been employing until then—negative memories, while stored in our mind/body deplete us of our life force energy.

You experience this depletion in many ways, but one of the prominent ways is a deep feeling of emptiness that you desperately need to fill in order to avoid feeling like you are going to fragment or disintegrate emotionally. Individuals with obesity simply happen to choose food as their solution to their inner feeling of emptiness. Unfortunately the only thing that will fill it is their depleted Life Force Energy.

Refuel the energy

This insight evolved into a powerful new coaching modality I call the Mind Resonance Process [MRP] that is able to challenge many of the beliefs we have about why the past cannot be erased.MRP helps erase the offending negative memories from the mind/body and causes a spontaneous return of this vital energy. The individual experiences this as feelings of wholeness and completeness.

In other words the driving force for all the overeating disappears, thus breaking the cycle. Now, I must give a simple word of caution here. This process, albeit simple and straightforward, doesn’t happen all at once; it’s an evolutionary journey to wellbeing and happiness. This is because such individuals often have many negative memories of early life that must be processed with MRP.

So, in effect, what is experienced is a progressive accumulation of self empowerment, self esteem, enhanced awareness and self control. As they begin to feel ‘filled-in emotionally’ their need to fill themselves with food externally disappears.

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