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A Simple Method to Undo the Emotional Conditioning Which Has Wrecked Your Client’s Self Esteem

In the first part of this self esteem series, 10 Ways Emotional Conditioning Could Be Ruining Your Clients’ Self Esteem, I showed how emotional conditioning underpins so much low self esteem.

We looked at how dealing with someone’s thoughts is trying to turn the cart instead of the horse.

Man breaking chains image

Early conditioning can persist into adulthood, causing low self esteem.

In this piece I’ll show you how to undo the emotional conditioning holding low self esteem in place.

Because emotional conditioning runs deep. That is to say that the brain structures that are involved in emotional learning are literally deeper in the brain than the thinking structures at the top in the neocortex.

Valerie, for example, is one of the clients whose video sessions are highlighted in my new course How to Lift Low Self Esteem in Your Clients. Valerie’s neocortex knew that she didn’t have to bow down to other people all the time, but her more powerful limbic system felt as though she did because of her past emotional conditioning.

And so, when an actual problem situation occurred, that emotional conditioning overrode her intellectual understanding and made her behave accordingly.

How Valerie’s low self esteem came about

Valerie had been bullied at school. She had also been forced to adopt the role of emotional support and carer for her deeply depressed mother. She had learnt through the “glue” of strong emotion that:

  1. Other people were a threat.
  2. She was little more than a laughable figure of fun.
  3. Her role in life was exclusively to focus on the needs of others but never on her own needs.

We could have worked on Valerie’s cognitive insight until the cows came home. She knew on one level that she should stick up for herself in relationships and did have her own needs, but it wasn’t that level which was determining her behaviour.

We always need to work at the level of the problem, so how do we work directly with the feelings creating low self esteem?

Rescued by the ARC

Now of course we need to be sure that our client recognizes how self damning thoughts undermine them. When we help them in this way they can, in effect, start to see these toxic thoughts “from a distance.” When they start to see the thoughts ‘from the outside’ more, they identify with them less.

But before that we need to do something else.

We must help our clients no longer be automatically triggered by events or situations which make them feel alone, small, unloved and insignificant. When we work on that level it’s so much easier to then make further changes at the cognitive level.

Here I’ll give you some quick steps and principles when working on the level of the problem with low self esteem clients. We call this the ARC principle.

1. Access memories associated with low self esteem

The first step is to (briefly) access memories which are attached to low self esteem triggers in the present. So if your client chronically fears abandonment then you can help them access the formative times from their past which may have created that conditioning. You can do this by using the principle of The Affect Bridge, which is a way of simply asking the client to focus on the feelings from problematic current times and waiting to see if a memory comes to mind.

Valerie felt scared, disempowered and pathetic whenever she was being manipulated in the current time by a ‘friend.’ I asked her to home in on that feeling and eventually a memory of being horribly bullied many decades before came to mind. This memory is our ‘way in’ to help change her automatic emotional trigger in these current times.

The way to see whether these memories are still causing problems for your client is to see if these memories are still painful. But be warned. Only do this for a few moments. Just to get a brief sample. We do not want to have our clients suffering during therapy.

Then we need to access those times in a new kinder way.

2. Relax to get a different emotional perspective

Next we need to calm our client deeply. When they are physiologically deeply calm then we can have them access that time whilst feeling calm and peaceful. We can have them do this through a sense of observation rather than a re-living of the conditioning time. Valerie went back to a time of being bullied at school and watched it calmly in her imagination for the first time ever.

Next we further reframe the memory so its emotional tag in the mind is degraded, giving our client space to grow as a person in the current time, rather than constantly being dragged back to the past by their emotional conditioning.

3. Change the meaning

When we perceive a situation differently – with both feelings and thoughts – then it has become reframed for us.

Re-experiencing troublesome times whilst feeling calm and resourceful unhooks the old trigger as the memory is re-tagged as non-threatening. But we can go further than that. We can reframe the past experience to give it non self harming meaning.

In this method we first build up our client’s sense of resources. We then have them re-visit the time in their mind where the emotional conditioning originated, but calmly.

We then have them comfort their younger self whilst feeling calm and resourceful. We sometimes also encourage them to “sort out” that time in some way, perhaps by saying calmly and assertively what they wish they had said at the time.

We see Valerie do this in the video inside the course when she goes back and sorts out the times she was bullied horribly at school.

Afterwards she says that she no longer feels bad when recalling that time but also that she no longer gets a horrible feeling when she has to stick up for herself in her current life.

Summing up emotional conditioning and low self esteem

So we see:

  1. How an old memory can drive behaviour even decades later. We know this is so because the current emotions and the feelings of experiencing the original time are similar.
  2. How clients come to view themselves through their conditioned-in feelings.
  3. How we can decondition and reframe the feeling so that the feelings and thoughts change.
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