SENTIENT TIMES

April/May 2008

Numbing Attractions

by Peter Moore

There seems to be some confusion lately over the power of emotions and the ability to make real one’s goals. For example, I’ve had people in my practice who have been very involved with the teachings of Esther Hicks for many years yet be surprised at what they have created in their lives. In one of Hicks’ books, she spells out a twenty-plus scale of feelings all the way from deep despair to fully empowered joy. (See, for instance, her Ask and it is Given or The Amazing Power of Deliberate Intent.)

The basic principle is easy to grasp: as you feel, so your vibrations resonate with life, and life experiences which match your resonance show up accordingly. If you’re gloomy, you’ll notice only gloomy things which fit your mood; if happy, you’ll notice the bright side of life. Taken another step, you seem to attract to you or be attracted to what harmonizes with the vibrations set into motion by your overall emotional tone. An act of faith or confidence in the outcome has been readily demonstrated in people’s lives—a simple example is the rather banal experience of a parking spot showing up right next to the store you’re intending to enter. It’s not so banal when it confirms the amazingly interpenetrative and interrelated world in which we live.

Research has confirmed the role intention and perception has in creating reality—and not just at the quantum mechanical level where the setting up of a photon detector creates photon particles, whereas without the detector there are interacting waves of light, not particles. Researchers have found that people who think of themselves as lucky were more likely to notice realities in favor of their wellbeing, which had real world consequences. Subjects were asked to complete a several page test. “Lucky” subjects noticed a sentence early in the test stating that they could stop there. Subjects who considered themselves to be unlucky failed to notice and went on to the bitter end.

Another researcher, Wilhelm Reich, the great pioneer in somatic psychotherapy, measured in one experiment (back in 1934) the electrical potential on the skin when it was tickled. Only when there was a subjective awareness of pleasure did the electric charge increase. Same tickling, absent a perception of pleasure, meant no increase in electrical potential.

Think about that for a minute—a subjective ori-entation to pleasure can produce an actual change in electric charge. In my therapy practice people naturally come to me because they need help with their suffering. Every single one of them, however, when asked, has been able to perceive pleasure in their bodies. They may need some guidance, but they find it. Or is it that they have become willing to create it? The more they can ground and orient to this pleasure, the greater their charge, and the healthier they become.

This is where things get tricky. In our trauma culture (a society based on fear and the manufacture of false desires, creating an endless cascade of dissatisfaction and waste), the signals for pain have a much higher amplitude than the signals for pleasure. For the last five thousand years or more, the dominant culture spread values of competition and power in a human-kill-human world. Longer-lived societies that are closer to the natural order go to great lengths to downplay individual achievement and the accumulation of prestige (see for example The Old Way: a Story of the First People by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas).

Pleasure is your body’s way of saying that what’s inside of you is not only in alignment with you, but also in harmony with all of creation. And I don’t mean sensual pleasure, but a subtle—or, if your breathing is markedly deepened, not so subtle—sense of flow of pleasure, say, in the muscles of your legs, or a pleasurable flow of energy in your abdomen or down your arms.

Since Reich, attachment theorists have pointed out that severe anxiety arises in babies who don’t experience skin to skin contact at birth, and who are not kept as close as possible to parents in slings and baby carriers and with co-sleeping. It is apparent that most of us are suffering from an acute yet unrecognized deep fear which goes almost to the core of our being. Since a sense of self doesn’t even emerge until about two years of age, we’re talking about an extremely intense set of feelings (because rage is also a part of this picture) about which we have very little or no awareness.

This is why the law of attraction as described by various authors is so hard to actually sustain in the right way. Off the scale, so to speak, below the most negative emotions, lies a huge and unspecified range of feelings called “numb.”

In deep change work, the terror or rage can be released directly by learning how to experience these feelings in a safe manner. Remember, these so-called negative feelings at one time had a positive purpose: if, as an infant, I’m terrified at being alone, my expression of this—a scream of terror—is designed to produce an overwhelming feeling of horror in the mother or mother substitute. If things are going well, the negative feeling is information being conveyed from the dependent one in the relationship to the powerful caretaker. Once this mammalian information penetrates the caretaker, she springs into action and provides the positive answer to the negative feeling. In holding and comforting her infant, it’s as though the two of them together have used the power of the feeling to manifest the fulfillment of the infant’s need.

On the other hand, if the instinctive caretaking reaction is too much denied, if, in other words, these powerful negative feelings are not attended to, the feelings will be eventually numbed out because it’s like having a blindingly bright warning light on your dashboard you can do nothing about—except disconnect the light bulb.

Clearly, when we do this numbing, it doesn’t mean the unmet need, which gave rise to the feelings, has gone away. The more important the need, the more it will exert an influence over the whole of a person’s life. (Think of how many things you’ve said yes to, which you didn’t want, in order to stay in connection with someone or have that person love you.) Now, however, we’re unconsciously stuck in negativity.

Let’s go back for a moment to the ideal picture: the constant conjunction of an infant’s negative feeling with a parent’s creative response, grows in the child the eventual fusion of negative feeling with positive transformation. This is why a negative feeling can be experienced as a tremendous power force arising in the spine or back, propelling us toward fulfillment.

By contrast, when things haven’t gone well in the early imprinting stage of life, it’s only the first part of this process which gets started, not only in childhood, but into adulthood. A negative feeling is triggered by a present event, and, instead of it inevitably leading to positive manifestation and transformation, this creative impulse is held back in the spine, which now provides leverage to control the flow of feelings in the front of the body. Instead of effortlessly being guided by our feelings towards what is right for us, we may whine and complain or attempt to bully others—perhaps our spouse—into giving us what we want, which, of course, they resist. This is because not only are we giving them mixed messages, but the power of our feelings to affect us and the world has now been severely limited.

So the purpose of experiencing or releasing long-ago numbed feelings is not to get the feelings out, as if they were toxic, rather it is to free up the whole process so that the body can function as it was intended: as a clear transmitter and receiver of energy. It is the chronic holding patterns or blocks in the body—the physical counterparts to numbing—which are toxic. However, we must be careful to appreciate or even thank the work of these blocks, because it is precisely their presence which has enabled the core life energy to remain in existence.

Think of the tightnesses, the blocks, the repetitive self-incriminations, the depressions, as creations of a very talented but tired child adapting to the level of functioning of the family you were raised in. To lovingly thank that child for all of its heroic work and to say that he or she no longer needs to do these things in order to survive or be loved is a much better strategy than trying to disown that child—which, as we’ve seen, can only lead to more fear, numbing, and disempowerment. Once appreciation is practiced, these states can become ones of joy, awakening, and transformation.

Peter Moore contributed over seventy articles for Sentient Times, dating from 1995 to 2003. After a rest, the writing bug is back. He continues to be busy with his growing family, but takes time away from them for his therapy practice in Eureka, California. He can be reached at (707) 442-7228

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