Gudrun Frerichs, PhD

Understanding Feelings

Many theories about feelings exists and it can be a little bit confusing to make sense of all the different opinions (see Wikipedia). I am going to present a view that is informed by NLP and has proven useful in my practice over the years.

Stripped to the bare bones we can say that feelings are just information. They are feedback that informs people about their experiences.

Seeing feelings in this light, it doesn’t make sense to label them good or bad. They just are. Feelings tell you something about what is going on around you and propel you to take action. The following is a schematic view of how feelings come about. 

The Brain Loves Gossip

Do you love to gossip and feel a little bit guilty about it? I do. Usually, gossip is connected with some inferior way of communicating with and about others, mother told us "You shouldn't do!" Now, I found this delightful artlicle with a passage from the book "Your Brain at Work".

Your brain is immensely social. If you were a wolf, large parts of your brain would be devoted to getting resources directly from the wild. You would have complex maps for interacting with the physical landscape, like maps for sniffing out a distant meal and others for finding your way home in the dark. As a human, especially when young, you get your resources not from the wild, but from other people. Because of this, large amounts of human cortical "real estate" is devoted to the social world. If you work in an office, you could probably close your eyes and describe ten people around you, how important they are in relation to each other and to you, how they feel today, whether they can be trusted, and how many favors any of them might owe you. Your memories of your social interconnections are vast.

Gossip is something that the brain likes to do. As neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman says, "Four out of five processes operating in the background when your brain is at rest involve thinking about other people and yourself."

David Rock suggests that people love to go on social networking sites because they give them the opportunity to check out what other people are up to and spread a little bit of gossip. Kind of what I am doing right now: gossiping on about a paragraph that put the workings of the brain into words that put a smile on my face.

Uncertainty & Negative Emotions

Do Dom, Do Dom, Do Dom .... remember Jaws? I think I saw it more than 20 times and yet, I never saw it! Although being a movie lover I have to admit, there are many of my favorite movies that I've watch over and over again - and I never saw "it". By it I mean the moment when the shark attacks, the intruder slides through the dark house approaching the non-expecting victim to be, the ice is breaking underneath the child's feet, or the gun is about to get fired. I never really saw Bruce Willis getting shot in the sixth sense. I leave the room, get a drink, adjust my hair, file my nails .... anything really. Go figure!

Facts About Being Gay

There are a lot of myths, facts, semi-facts, and wild stories that circulate around homosexuality. The following video is a 5 minute Tiki-Tour of education about some of the facts regard 'gay-ness' that have such a hard time to combat old theories of:

1. The absent or domineering parent
2. It's un-natural
3. It's a choice

and new theories of:

1. It's in the genes
2. It may be about having older brothers ! <:0

Why Do You Feel The Way You Do?

The secret to effective and successful in communication with a partner, friends, family, colleagues, or acquaintances lies in a person knowing her/himself. Only when you know yourself, when you know why you act, behave, and being aware about your beliefs and values will you be able to understand the other person.

Why is that? That’s a good question. It has to do with the way our brain functions. We will never be able to encounter another person without projecting or transferring material from our own life onto the other person. Everyone transfers feelings (positive or negative) they have about significant people in their childhood onto people in the present that have traits that remind them in some ways of the person from the past.

How To Get Over Childhood Stress: The Process Of Healing

I have explained in the previous article “How to Get Over Childhood Stress: The Process of Getting Hurt" how childhood experiences became part of the child’s neurological physiology that over time, through re-enforcement and repetition becomes an aspect of its personality structure.

The task of recovery is to stop the process of repetition and re-enforcement of the unwanted beliefs, thoughts, and behaviours and to encourage new, positive ways of being in this world. Thus new neuro-pathways need to be created (if you remember that has to happen through experience!!) or if they exist but are just faint connections they have to be strengthened through more and regular traffic. At the same time it has to be avoided to go down the familiar path of neuro-connections that are negative and unhelpful so that they wither away. On paper that sounds very easy, doesn't it?

How To Get Over Childhood Stress: The Process Of Getting Hurt

This is the first of two articles about how to get over childhood stress or - how does therapy work - in which I will explain how people get hurt by childhood stress (1^st article) and how they can recover from it (2^nd article “Healing from Childhood Stress and Abuse: How Therapy works”).  I have included the impact of childhood stress seen through neuro-biological eyes because it shows clearly the pathways to how the healing can take place

Stress Impairs Thinking

Stress seems to have a negative impact on people’s ability to think clearly and quickly, and attend to new information. The study investigated male doctoral students shortly before and after their board exams and found that although students did not perform well under stress, their brain’s ability to do so bounced back in less than a month after the stress went away. 

This may be quite different in the case of chronic stress that can lead to major health problems such as chronic fatigue, depression, post traumatic stress, and Alzheimers.

Rockefeller University (2009, January 28). Stress Disrupts Human Thinking, But The Brain Can Bounce Back. ScienceDaily. Retrieved February 1, 2009, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­ /releases/2009/01/090127190442.htm

Impact Of Early Childhood Stress

 For psychotherapists working with people who struggle with the legacies of an abusive and/or traumatic childhood, it is no news that people are affected way past their childhood years. It’s good to see that research is coming to the party and provides scientific evidence for the long-term struggles people have.

"The immune system is not preset at birth…The cells are there, but how they will develop and how well they'll be regulated is very much influenced by your early environment and the type of rearing you have." We know from trauma research the same to be true for people’s self-capacities involved in distress tolerance and emotion regulation.

Indeed, even if the life circumstances improve people show that early childhood stress has a negative impact on their learning capability, on their behaviours, and on their immune system.  Thus they are disadvantages with regard to their future careers, to how they integrate into society, and with regard to their health status.  

Stress Can Be Bad For Your Body

Chronic stress can lead to a number of behavioural changes and physical health problems. When a person is subjected to stress the body responds with activating the neuro-hormone ‘Corticotrophin Releasing Factor’ (CRF). In the case of chronic stress this release is increasing in length and volume in areas of the brain associated with fear and emotion. It thereby changes the body's response causing health-related stress problems such as anxiety, depression, irritability, insomnia, and even infertility.

Dermatologists have identified that increased cortisol levels in the body caused by stress can lead to hair falling out, acne breaking out, and to many other problems.

Indeed, stress can lead to an increase in inflammations and central nervous system infections. It is known to affect the effectiveness of vaccines, is linked to endometriosis, and can cause digestive difficulties that range from stomach aches to diarrhoea.