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A note on the picture used in the header above: I was driving through a suburb of Melbourne in 1998 and could not believe my eyes when I saw this graffiti on a shop wall. It appeared that someone else had the same "feel imperative" that we do in Af-x. I took a picture of it. In 2007, nine years later, I returned to Melbourne, and there it was ... still there! I choose to think there is something about that message that said to folk, "leave it there". ... Priceless! ....Ian White
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"Thoughts are from the brain - Emotional feelings are from the mind."
Af-x is a whole and wholesome blend of science, history and success.
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For centuries, society has been fond of using the old Descartes saying, "I think; therefore I am". Modern affectologists and Af-x Therapists recognize this as being a deterrent to authentically successful emotional change. Neuroscientist - neurologist, Antonio R Damasio's book Descartes' Error, clearly points out that neuroscience today has reasoned that Descartes was wrong and that "I feel; therefore I am" is far more distinctive in its description of the human condition. This is echoed in all affectology teaching and the thrust of the book, Beat Depression the Drug Free Way: Getting Better by Breaking the Myths. In short, in the 21st century ... we overthink ourselves!
You may have heard of the Eastern "Quiet Therapies."
- most significantly are Morita, Naikan and Mindfulness approaches.
Many hundreds of years of practice in Japan have made these approaches
highly successful in the treatment of anxiety based 'shinkeishitsu' disorders (and the
Japanese traditionally believe that ALL disorders are anxiety based).
In later years, Western science - specifically Affective Neuroscience - has cemented propositions that every human being lays down their emotional (affect) sub-personality in very early times in life - well before the emergence of speech and maturity of the cognitive (thought and word) conscious mind. Affective Neuroscience has established that this early set of emotional reactions and learnings are carried over, in either subtle ways or directly, into adult person-hood. This being the case, then these emotional learnings (still existing in some way) have no means of adult analysis or verbal description, simply because they are technically known as "state-specific" (that is, that they exist today in the state in which they were learned - without words). This subconscious trace of early development creates an effect in adult life that is silent to us, unable to be described, yet has profound influence over our way of living, feeling, loving and reacting today to the world around us. A twenty-year-development has seen the time-honored ways of quiet therapies merged with the understanding of affective neuroscience to produce a therapeutic approach that requires little to no talking and reporting, is respectful of your potential toward perfection, focuses on what's RIGHT with you rather than what's WRONG with you, and has been proved to be highly successful as a means to modify anxiety and emotional-based disorders. |
"Thoughts aren't feelings and feelings aren't thoughts".
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In our day to day lives as adults, we
mostly rely on and trust the logical, reasoning and conscious parts of
our minds. At a stage in our childhood we develop the ability to think
things through, solve problems rationally and learn how to understand
what is going on in the world around us. From then on we learn to mainly
rely and depend on this ability.
But when it comes to our emotions and feelings, as both children and adults alike, we find that our emotional reactions seem to be driven by something deeper or beneath our logical, rational self. Although we are instantly aware of the feelings or emotions we have in response to situations and events, we experience these automatically without thinking them through, or even being able to think them through. The familiar statements "I don't know why I get so angry", "I'm not sure why I feel so sad" or "I can't help how I am feeling" and many others, all confirm that our emotional reactions are driven by something other than our reasoning minds and conscious will. If this were not the case, we would all be able to just consciously control or change any uncomfortable feelings or emotional reactions. We'd just "think ourselves better!" In our infant years we can only interpret things around us through our feelings and emotions; we have no other choice. So by the time any of us are able to talk, think or develop conscious memories, we have already learned how to respond to the world at the emotional or affect level. This is a protective mechanism and it's unavoidable. These early experiences and learnings form the basis for our own unique emotional matrix, which unconsciously influences all our future emotional responses and reactions. Even into today! This goes a long way towards explaining why we have so much difficulty in identifying and describing the real causes of our emotional discomforts and why we can't just consciously change how we feel and respond. Have you ever said, to someone else or yourself ... ... "I've talked all about it, tried to analyze and understand it but it hasn't changed how I feel." ... or ... "I've told them everything I think they want to hear or how I feel; but why do I feel guilty that I didn't tell them the right things to make me better?" Over the past decade or two, science has been catching up with the reality about human emotions and the existence of our own very individual and unknowable emotional matrix. Various researchers have been instrumental in alerting the world to the fact that our talking selves, our conscious perceptions and our reasoning minds play very little part in our actual ability to resolve our emotional problems. This knowledge has steered the development of the very different therapeutic approach used in Affectology and Af-x Therapy. The revolutionary Af-xapproach is based on a thorough understanding of how we learn, develop and maintain our subconscious emotional matrix, and how this understanding can be used to help us privately and permanently resolve our emotional problems, without the difficulty and pain of trying to talk about them. AND FINALLY ... (for this page): Traditional psychotherapy has been intent on trying to 'find the truth' about your life story and what has been influential in the forming of who you are at subconscious emotional level. We believe that we have shown on these pages that not only is 'the authentic truth' elusive and vague by the time that is has arrived at conscious verbal level today, but it may very well be impossible to uncover.
For this reason Af-x is particularized - targeting only affect or deep-seated emotional cause. One of the essential mottos of Af-x is ... ... rather than TRYING to work in the service of truth, Af-x works in the service of avoiding untruths. |
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At times I think and at times I am.
Paul Valery, philosopher
Paul Valery, philosopher
