1. The Technique

1. Sitting quietly and without distraction turn your attention to your body. Just sense all the parts of your body: your neck, your arms, your legs, your feet, etc.

2. Find any little area of tension in your body. It can be strong tension or minor tension, it does not matter. It can be your fist, it can be your calf, it can be your chest; it can be any large or small part of your body.

3. At this point there are two ways to proceed to arrive at the same data. What you want to do is name the tension. That is you want to put either a single emotion word on the tension or a short action-descriptive phrase.

One technique is to ask yourself: what does that part of my body want to do if it had its own will power, its own ability to perform an action. This is good for people who think verbally.

The second technique is to picture a blank black board and let a word be written on that board that names or describes that tension.

Keep in mind that the goal is to put an emotive word on the tension or a short action-like phrase (at most three words, hopefully one word). Some made up examples to illustrate. I find tension in my right calf muscle. I ask what it wants to do and find the answer is that it wants to play "kick the can." The emotion: child-like fun. I sense my body and find some hard to pin down feeling in my abdomen. What does it want to do? It wants to cry. The emotion: sadness or depression. I sense my body and find the back of my neck is tense. What does it want to do? It wants to keep my head attached to my body. The emotion: stubborn control.

4. Having identified the feeling, now spread that one feeling over the whole of your body. Let every part of you want to do or feel the same thing. It you find that this scares you, makes you very nervous; just stop the exercise. There is always tomorrow.

5. Now that one feeling is everywhere in your body. While holding on to that over all state, now again sense your body. You will find a new area of tension.

6. Again by using 'what does it want to do' or 'what word gets written on the black board', name that new tension (as a feeling or an action).

7. Now put the two emotions together. When did you feel both of these emotions together at one time? Usually with just two passes (initial emotion and subsequent emotion after spreading) you will recover a memory. Sometimes it takes three passes but usually two is enough.

8. Hold on to that memory and examine in what way it has influenced your life, in what way has it been or is it being expressed in your way of being in the world. What you have accomplished here is finding that incident in your life which got built into your character and is today determining your way of being.

That's it. That's the whole technique. But, boy, can it yield dividends if you make real use of the recovered memory. The technique was one I developed, but it is based on loads of research in psychology, on major theorists of emotion, and on philosophers who have taken the issue of emotion as a major area of study.

2. The Theory

There are six major theories of emotion (Cornelius, 1996): (1) Darwinian, (Darwin, 1872/1965), (2) James-Lange (James, 1884; Lange & James, 1922; cf Schacter & Singer, 1962), (3) cognitive (Izard, 1977; Lazarus, 1991; Ben-Ze'ev, 2000), (4) social constructivist (Harre, 1986; Gergen & Davis, 1985), (5) emotive neuroscience (Panksepp, 1998; Lane & Nadel, 2000) and (6) evolutionary psychology (Barkow et. al., 1992). All of them have evidence for them and evidence against them. We are still feeling our way when it comes to emotion. The theory here is agnostic about which of those six theories is the most correct; to the contrary the theory here is mostly a blending of all six theories.

The technique is based on a theory of both the way the mind works and on the nature of emotion in relation to man, a cognitive animal.

This could be an immensely long discussion dealing with all the variables and their interaction; but the only purpose I have here in presenting any theory at all is to justify the utility of the technique. To explain how I came to it, why it works, and why it is useful.

I take it as proven that there is a subconscious. It is the repository of our experiences and our thoughts about those experiences.

I also take it as proven that each person is 60% to 80% genetics and 20% to 40% environment. Our personal life experiences, our personal environment, works on our personal genetic predispositions to form who we are at any given time.

Now I need to introduce a concept put forth by a once famous and now obscure philosopher, Sir William Hamilton. He proposed that we store information as a gestalt. That is, we don't store in our subconscious isolated bits of data, rather we store complete scenes as a unit. Sir Hamilton's term for this was "redintegration."

Let me illustrate that. I would ask you to recall the first two wheel bicycle you ever got. It you picture that bike, you will find that you don't just see the bike, you see a complete scene. For me, it is the basement in which I stored the bike when I was not riding it. It is also riding alone down the street without my hands on the handle bars; I see the buildings on each side of the street, the summer sun and the clear blue sky. I store these scenes as gestalts, as whole scenes.

But that is not the whole of the gestalt. It also contains the emotions I was feeling at the time. It was the pleasure of seeing the bicycle in the basement, it had not been stolen. It is the joyous freedom and pride of riding my bike without my hands on the handle bars and the freedom of doing things my way; with no parent or adult to tell me I could not do it.

Now one more basic element of the theory. Data in the subconscious is stored as a branch tree structure. I'll try to make this clear, but if I lose you just skip this and go on to the rest of the chapter.

If you use a web search engine (and who does not now), then you have used a branch tree structure. Here is, diagramatically, what it looks like (on the next page).

Figure 158

Each time four (or five) lines come together we have a "node." Obviously I have drawn only a simplified diagram. There is no reason, in theory, why one node cannot give rise to many branches, not just three as shown above. The important point, however, is that each node in the diagram represents a gestalt scene. Each node in the diagram (that is, in the subconscious) contains all the elements of a scene; but most importantly it contains the physical scene, the thoughts at the time and the emotions at the time.

Footnote 98. For the professionals among my readers, you can recognize this as a simplified version of the connectionist and neural net theories of mind.

For illustration, let's take my memory of riding my bicycle.

We have the physical scene; we also have my thoughts at the time of observing my own competence to ride without holding onto the handle bars; we also have my response to that observation: pride; and we have my thoughts that I was not under the watchful eye of any adult and my response to that thought which was joy.

Now a memory like that is easy to recall. But the incidents that go into making up our character are often forgotten or not even recognized at all.

Now to this stew, we add the James-Lange theory of emotion as modified by cognitive neuroscience (Damasio, 1999, 2003).

In brief, an 'affect' is what occurs in the brain, an 'emotion' is what occurs in the body, a 'feeling' is what we have when we recognize and evaluate that body state.

And that is where Reichian comes into the picture. One of the things that this therapy does is to make one much more sensitive to his body states. That is, it allows one to be much more aware of emotions and be able to name them as feelings.

Just one more step and then we can put it all together. Back to the branch tree structure of the unconscious. Let's continue with my bicycle node. It has three elements stored in it: scene, thoughts, emotions. Each of those three elements gives rise to a branch from the node. In turn each branch contacts another node which also has at least three elements in it. Then that node gives rise to branches which connect to other nodes and so on. If a particular node is accessed (by the subconscious) then the next node can be from any one of the three branches. In turn that node will have at least three elements and any one or more of its branches might be followed to another node by the stream of subconscious thought.

Footnote 99. There is a medical/psychological condition called alexithymia in which there are no feelings or in which they are severely blunted. The condition can result from injury to or malformation of the prefrontal cortex. It is the prefrontal cortex that evaluates emotion to result in feelings.

I know that's messy; but hopefully it will become clear as I continue with an examination of my bicycle memory. I had pride as an emotion in my bicycle gestalt. Then at school, I got the highest report card in the class and, of course, I felt pride. The two gestalts are linked by the common element of the emotion of pride. That second gestalt has a branch that contains the school setting. That branch leads to another school gestalt but here I was proud of my test score until I found out that it was not the highest score and then felt shame. The result: I have an experience in the pres ent time where I start to react with pride; but my subconscious, following the branches, ends up with the bad test scene and instead of feeling pride, I feel shame.

Here is an incident where I would expect to feel pride, yet I am feeling shame. The conclusion: emotions are irrational. Where one would expect me to feel pride, I feel shame. But are they irrational? No, not at all. The subconscious simply followed the branches from node to node and ended up where it ended up; the whole process is completely logical. I just don't consciously know the connections. All I know is the end result and I am mystified by it.

What the technique is doing is making use of all of these concepts and theories to work backwards, to go from an emotion to a memory.

The technique identifies two (or more) emotions that are linked (in the subconscious) and by that means recovers the memory where both emotions were present at the same time.

Recovering that memory I now can reevaluate that shame I felt and anew judge whether it was appropriate. I can also understand why in life I tend to shy away from situations where I might be the best and why I regard pride as shameful.

Just to clear my name, all this is simply an example. Any relationship to me is a subconscious accident.

That's nice. If you are good with this technique — or learn to be good — you can recover incidents in your life that, over time, formed the basis of your character.

"Ring and the rosey, a pocket full of possey, we all fall down" goes the old English nursery rhyme. So you have a pocket full of memories, now what do you do with them? I'll come back to that. Just keep reading.