Removing Emotional Blocks to Success

We are all blocked to some extent by the effects of painful experiences. I give some thoughts about how this happens and practical ideas on removing blocks and moving on. Emotional blocks can get in the way of our being happy and successful.

What are the issues about “emotion” and “emotional blocks”?

Most organisations still follow the “machine” or “military” model to a great extent. In this model, people have relatively tightly defined roles and use their intellect, logic, and professionalism to perform those roles. They help the organisation achieve its objectives and get paid for it.

But people are more complicated than that, as we have feelings. When our positive feelings of excitement, comradeship, determination, and hope run, we can achieve extraordinary things. We achieve very little if we feel angry, afraid, powerless, sad, abandoned, ignored, and confused. Difficult experiences now immediately reduce our performance. Difficult experiences from the past, even the far-distant past, can also limit us.

An example

As a small child, I was allowed to ask many difficult questions, and my parents were always frank with me when they did not know the answers. They would say, “We don’t know; you will have to find out for yourself.” So, I continued to ask questions when I was at school and later. I got into trouble with teachers and headteachers who often didn’t like being questioned. I was humiliated for “impertinence” and caned for breaking silly rules.

This experience made me very uncomfortable meeting senior people in organisations, as I anticipated they would ridicule and humiliate me. No, there is no “rational” logic in this. I am not going to be caned and am very unlikely to be ridiculed when I meet the CEO of “Intergalactic Enterprises,” but it still felt like that. There was emotional logic.

After removing the block

I put up with this for far too long. Then, I had a session with my co-counsellor (see below) and shifted the painful emotion associated with being humiliated. I became free of it and soon established a very close and trusting relationship with the COO of a large organisation. I found working with her more straightforward than with less senior people. She appreciated my approach more, and if she decided to do something, she had the authority to do it.

Why do we get blocked?

We literally record everything that happens to us as sensory data, sights, sounds, smells, etc., together with our feelings. When we have an experience in the present that reminds us of a difficult experience in the past, we feel those feelings again, lose our ability to think clearly again, and may do ineffective things.

So, I avoided meeting CEOs because I thought they would see me as an impertinent rebel with nothing to offer. This avoidance was not sensible, as I had been working and thinking in the development field for over forty years!

Why is this important?

We all have painful experiences that can condition and limit our effectiveness and happiness. All our clients, colleagues, and friends do, too. So, understanding this and not blaming people for being “difficult” or unhappy is helpful.

There is hope, as we now understand how to remove these blocks and free our intelligence and thinking.

Removing emotional blocks

The natural way

If you see a very small child fall over and bang her knee, she will typically whimper a bit and then look for her Mum or someone she knows who cares and run towards that person. Her carer will hold her warmly and kiss her better, and the child will cry. If the carer allows that to happen, she will cry and cry and then stop and go back to what she was doing, full of energy and fully recovered.

This behaviour is the natural way we recover from hurts: by finding another person and having that person listen, support, accept, and help us express our feelings fully. We do this by talking, laughing, sweating, shaking, crying, engaging in angry movements (a “tantrum”), or yawning.

You will all have done something silly sometimes—I know I have. You laugh and get hot when you talk about it with a friend. After this, you realise it was not as bad as all that and that you have learned something valuable to use in the future. What you did was based on your best thinking at the time. You get new insights after your emotional release.

Unfortunately, there are some problems with organisations using natural processes. First, most organisations do not encourage or accept the free and full expression of feelings. Doing so is the best way to free the intelligence of their staff and thus improve the organisation’s ability to deliver. Second, most of us don’t appreciate the value of paying attention to others and allowing or encouraging other people to express their feelings. It does not have to be this way.

Every attempt we make to listen to people or to help them listen to each other will help.

Cocounselling

“Counselling” is associated in people’s minds with dealing with deficits, illness or personal trauma, and so cocounselling may be too.

However, cocounselling is not this; it is a way to organise and enable the natural growth process. In a cocounselling session, one person, the client, works on an issue, and the other person, the counsellor, provides the support, attention, closeness and love that is enough to help the client feel safe enough to express all their feelings about the topic thoroughly. The client may talk, laugh, cry, sweat, shake, and get angry, just as above and afterwards, have new insights and be able to move on. After, for example, for half an hour, the participants can have a little break and then swap roles.

You can learn much more about this via re-evaluation counselling or cocounselling international.

Coconsulting

You take turns listening to each other but keep the process lighter, which is easier for some organisations. There is more here coconsulting. Sometimes, people find talking to each other about their issues and actively helping by listening quite difficult. You may need to build more mutual trust in the organisation. Paradoxically, doing coconsulting or cocounselling together is one of the best ways of building trust that I know.

A few techniques for shifting emotional blocks

Use a “contradiction”

A contradiction is something that goes precisely opposite to the emotional block. It can be something you ask the client to do or say. An example may help.

I was teaching a counselling course and showed people how to do it by working “live” with one of the course members in front of the group. K’s issue was that she liked J very much but was too embarrassed to ask him out. She also did not want to appear “cheap.” I asked her what she would like to do if she were totally unafraid.

Eventually, after getting very hot, she said she would like to say, “I really like you and would like to get to know you better.” She liked this, as it was direct and honest. Then we contradicted the embarrassment by her saying this directly, with much laughter and more heat, to the other eight people in the group. Afterwards, she realised she could talk to J and would, and any residual anxiety was not going to stop her.

She talked to J as planned, and the last I heard, they were happily married and had two children!

When was the first time this happened?

Emotional blocks can arise early in life and still have long-term consequences. You can still help by asking simple questions and listening.

F worked in a large company and was technically excellent. Her manager told her she would not get any further until she learned to be less aggressive in meetings. That was the bad news; the good news was that I could help her. She was the youngest of five children; all the rest were boys, and the only way she could get any attention was to SHOUT. When F realised that she was doing what she had to do as a child at work, she changed her behaviour.

What is the worst that could happen?

Another paradox is that fear is only powerful if we take it seriously. Susan Jeffers’s classic “Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway” is about this. The question above can help people face their fears and realise they don’t have to be imprisoned by them. Another example follows.

P was overwhelmed with work. His health, marriage and work were suffering. We talked about what he could do and realised one possible source of help was his staff. He was a bit scared of involving them; he wondered if they would find him weak and if he would lose their cooperation. He realised that the “worst thing that could happen” would be that he would then find his job intolerable and leave, which would mean he would have a break to think and spend more time at home, which would be OK!

He levelled with his people and asked for their help, and it worked wonderfully well. He realised he was doing half of his manager’s job as well as his own and was able to stop this work. His staff offered to do some of his work. His team was glad to help because they understood why it was necessary. By being open and vulnerable, he created great support and team spirit, too.