Gameplan to work on blushing issue

[AlexanderPSTEC User]

Saying “I'm weak” makes me feel icky..

I think people who blush are weak, and because I blush I subconsciously believe I'm weak, is that it?

So I should CT early memories of feeling weak? Or early memories of blushing?

[AlexanderPSTEC User]

I'm struggling to get to any early memories of feelings. I can remember early childhood but there are no good or bad feelings attached, only events.

Starting from early teens I have some vivid memories from blushing but there is nothing else I can connect to feeling weak or losing control.

[Paul McCabePSTEC Pro and Forum Moderator]

Hi Alexander,

I would recommend trying to find the earliest memories you can and from which beliefs like “I'm weak” would have been formed.

So, there are two ways I have done this myself.

The sub has stored all of our memories but, like a library, those are not always easy to access and (in real terms) a lot of memories may have been suppressed.

Not sure whether you have them, but the Accelerator tracks help aid recall. They are designed for this function and to speed progress with PSTEC.

If you do not have these, you can use extrapolation. Basically, if you cannot remember childhood events (akin to the ones I had mentioned in the earlier post) or the events you do remember do not seem to have any “charge”, go for the earliest “charged” events you can remember and then work backwards.

So, if you look at your early teens and those experiences, is it real to you that you MAY have had similar experiences earlier in life? For instance, if your parents/caregivers were critical in your early teens, does it make sense that they likely did this when you were younger and when you formed the beliefs?

It is worth noting that any belief we form, unless it is one event that is particularly traumatic, would generally be formed over a series of events. It made sense at the time and therefore our sub formed generalisations at that time. Imagine being a kid and every time you spoke up publically, you were shouted at, the sub would likely try to protect us with a belief like “It's dangerous to speak uo in public.”

Consciously we may disagree with this at a later time, of course.

In short, if you can, try to extrapolate backwards and bring up the emotions you would have felt at that time…. and as a kid.

Just another thing: blushing tends to be a conditioned response and I would suggest that it has its roots in some beliefs and emotions. It is a consequence of having certain beliefs and emotional triggers, so you may blush (whereas another person might cry, go quiet or get angry).

There may be some additional layers to this, so certain emotions can feed off of one another and trigger certain behaviours. Do you tend to worry about blushing and, when you worry that you might be blushing, does that tend to make the blushing worse? If so, you could also work on the worry of blushing.

However, as a starter, I would recommend working through the emotions/events chronologically, if you will.

Hope that helps. Please keep us posted.

Paul

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Paul McCabe – PSTEC Master Practitioner

http://www.lifestyleforchange.com

Please contact me anytime if you want any assistance in utilising PSTEC to help you live a life of tremendous freedom & possibility.

Recreate yourself with PSTEC.

Skype, Zoom, in-person & phone sessions available…

[AlexanderPSTEC User]

So, if you look at your early teens and those experiences, is it real to you that you MAY have had similar experiences earlier in life? For instance, if your parents/caregivers were critical in your early teens, does it make sense that they likely did this when you were younger and when you formed the beliefs?

Those early teens experiences were from blushing.  I felt weak because I was blushing. I can't find anything else that made me feel week. I was not criticized or abused, and I had a good childhood.  It is as if the blushing came first and any belief was formed around it, not the other way around.

Not sure where to go from here, but to keep clicktracking the emotions from blushing incidents?

[Paul McCabePSTEC Pro and Forum Moderator]

Hi Alexander,

Thank you for sitting with this for awhile. Usually those sort of beliefs are formed in early childhood.

Having such beliefs does not mean you had a bad childhood, or that your parents did a bad job. Rather, they did things and you interpreted their behaviour and words in a certain way and from a limited worldview. So, if you felt “got at” or “shouted at”, beliefs may have been formed and blushing would be an offshoot of certain beliefs and emotions.

There are numerous ways to get a resolution here, but neutralising the emotions in the first instance is likely to produce the most noticeable effect initially. Other modalities suggest that eliminating the beliefs first will ensure that the emotions disappear on their own. I personally recommend Tim's approach, which is to go for the emotions first.

However, you know the sort of experiences you had and did not have, so working on the emotions  you identified at the start of the thread systematically would be a great starting point.

Then, when you have neutralised those (along with the unwanted emotions from experiences you remember from your early teens), use PSTEC Negative on the beliefs you identified…and subsequently identify. Then, once these beliefs are eliminated using Tim's precise instructions, use PSTEC Positive to install empowering beliefs.

That leaves you with plenty to do, but the whole “house of cards” can come tumbling down remarkably quickly.

Here's something else that might be worth pondering: How do you KNOW blushing is a problem?

With this in mind, see what comes up and it might be worth writing down your response to that.

Again, if you need any clarification, please let me know.

Paul

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Paul McCabe – PSTEC Master Practitioner

http://www.lifestyleforchange.com

Please contact me anytime if you want any assistance in utilising PSTEC to help you live a life of tremendous freedom & possibility.

Recreate yourself with PSTEC.

Skype, Zoom, in-person & phone sessions available…

[AlexanderPSTEC User]

I'm still on this, but not making much progress with beliefs. I have hit this wall before in other personal development work not related to blushing. Eventually I always end up feeling like I am not in the same species as other people. I hear people describe this rich inner word of sensations and feelings, approval and rejection, connection and love and what not. For me it's blank. My memories are nothing but a series of events. My emotions are more like thoughts, not sensations. 

I am fine with all that, but as to the question “How do you KNOW blushing is a problem?” I recognize that it is not a problem, my interpretation of blushing is the problem, but after that I hit the wall. I can't describe my interpretation more than that it makes me feel bad, and as we figured out in a previous post, I think people who blush are weak.

The progress I had on clicktracking blushing scenarios and memories works like a decoy, it is like tricking a dog by making a throwing motion with your hand. It captures the dogs attention. I've experienced the same thing a few times when I was close to blushing, it felt as if my sub was diverted for a few seconds, shifting attention from inwards to somewhere else, but the effect is very faint. Still, it's something.

Therefore I think I will give up the belief-route and just keep brute force clicking memories of blushing and imagined scenarios.

[Paul McCabePSTEC Pro and Forum Moderator]

Hi Alexander,

Thanks for posting and updating us on your progress. It is good that you are making some progress and you are probably a LOT closer than you realise to cracking this. Keep at it. It really does pay off in the long run.

Beliefs are worth eliminating, but they are not the initial step of the PSTEC process. Tim recommends going for emotions first, and I think that is a very effective strategy. After all, emotions are what we feel – we have a conscious awareness of them too. Behaviours are what we do.

The CTs allow you to access the beliefs too, so you can work on those patterns of “feeling weak” or “not like other people”  (if you have a negative sense of that) and see where that leads.

We do not always have an awareness of our beliefs, but our behaviour can allow us access to them. They give us clues, I think.

If you have certain avoidant behaviours or “driven” behaviours, beliefs and emotional conditioning will underlie them.

In your particular case, you have the behaviour (blushing) and this is probably based on certain feelings, triggered by certain events and driven by beliefs. Then you have the emotions that arise from your interpretation of your blushing.

It all sounds quite complex, but I believe that they all feed into one another. If you changed a certain behaviour, that would affect your self-concept, your emotions and (on some level) your beliefs.

Similarly, if you eliminated the belief and replaced it with an empowering belief, that would impact  your mind model. There are different ways to access this.

A lot of modalities come at personal change from different angles, and using different presuppositions. It would be great if we could just consciously change all our behaviour, but that is the hardest one to do. Yet we all have some experience of how changing our behaviour “in the moment” can change our perceptions; so, if you were sitting around feeling sad, going for a walk or a jog (i.e. a change in behaviour) will likely change how you feel…for a while.

I think some people feel emotions very deeply and can describe a rich tapestry of emotions and sensations. Ultimately, we do not know whether anyone's internal wotld matches our own. Years ago, I would have not had the words to describe what I was feeling, as I suppressed a lot of emotions. It was generally not seen as a good thing to express emotions when you were a boy where I was growing up.  It is not that uncommon, I hear – “big boys don't cry”, “stop feeling sorry for yourself.” Did that happen to you?

Whether it did or did not, CT can be a private process. You do not have to share, but be prepared to “visit” the memories that bothered you, the imagined outcomes that worry you… and then neutralise those emotions. This will work.

You could definitely work on the belief that “People who blush are weak.” Using counterexamples, you could assess that people blush for all sorts of reasons – joy, surprise, excitement and even due to illness. There are many more counterexamples. Going through that process would prove very useful, I imagine.

So, CT first, don't the Positive and Negative tracks once you FEEL that the unwanted emotions are as close to 0 as possible.

Please keep us updated. It helps others.

Thanks,

Paul

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Paul McCabe – PSTEC Master Practitioner

http://www.lifestyleforchange.com

Please contact me anytime if you want any assistance in utilising PSTEC to help you live a life of tremendous freedom & possibility.

Recreate yourself with PSTEC.

Skype, Zoom, in-person & phone sessions available…

[AlexanderPSTEC User]

Hi Paul

Regarding clicking the emotions. I get the SUD's down without much problem but SUD's are not real life. When I am in a real life trigger situaton my subconscious doesn't give a f*** about how low I got my SUD's this morning. To me, scoring SUD's is pointless unless you're a therapist.

Still I HAVE seen results and that is why I'm still here. If the trigger situation comes up within a couple hours of a morning clicking session there is a noticeable difference, and I do not blush as easily. It is fading throughout the day though, which is why I think I would need to mass attack it to produce any lasting change.

Regrding emotions. I can't recall being supressed like that, but I have held those views for as long as I can remember. I can't stand self-pity and I judge people left and right in my head all the time. Have you had a look around some of the forums online where blushing is being discussed? They are beyond help, they don't want to be helped, all they want is to be victims and stay suffering so they can keep feeling sorry for themselves.

Bottom line: Self-pity is a very bad thing, and suppressing it is a healthy thing to do!

If you're familiar with MBTI I identify as INTJ. Reading some discussions from other INTJ is the closest thing I've gotten to my way of experiencing the world. It is possible I was very sensitive at one point, and then developed in a certain way to deal with that. But I like myself the way I am, I just don't want to be blushing.

Reading through it this post had an angry tone to it, but that was not my intention, please dont interpret it as such. Thank you Paul again for putting your time into this.

[Paul McCabePSTEC Pro and Forum Moderator]

Hi Alexander,

Thanks for your post.

You are correct: SUDs are not real-life and are, be definition, just a subjective measure of the emotion. As you are working alone and are effectively being your own therapist, they may prove useful. If not, and you find them a bit gimmicky, then you could use “the emotion is less than it was, but still not gone.”

Then, keep working at it until it is. I am very confident that you will get there. To the extent that you are your own therapist, you will likely have an intuitive sense of the best approach for you – going slow with PSTEC, or “mass attack” it.

You will have a memory of your first blushing experience and there is unquestionably a pattern to it. You already identified that. Hitting it from all angles will, I feel, prove really beneficial.

So, if you blushed 10 mins ago (for example), you could work on that at the earliest opportunity.

Have you read some of the PSTEC interviews about how some users used the tools to eliminate blushing?

You mentioned in a previous post that you “hit this wall before.” Some therapies want to spend lots of time talking about the wall,  how it got there and how to demolish it. Other therapies ask you to visualise that it's a castle, and not a wall. Other therapies suggest you walk around or climb over the wall. PSTEC is a special therapy in the sense that it enables you to take down that wall brick by brick….and put a better structure in its place.

I am not familiar with the acronyms you referenced, but will look into them further. I believe I know what you mean by “self-pity”, but that is just a judgement we put on others.  We do not know what is someone's heart, and sometimes what might appear to be “self-pity” can be the biggest cry for help.

It could be learned helplessness and some people feel generally trapped and, in that state, they may worry who or what they would be without the problem. Having a problem, while uncomfortable on one level, can paradoxically be comforting for some people. It allows some people to feel a degree of significance, connection and certainty.

I used to wonder why anyone would want to retain a problem but, from the perspective described above, it makes sense. I think everyone gets there in their own time and in their own way and, please note, what I wrote above is not in any way to blame people for their problems. I am, in general, describing subconscious processes.

However, with that in mind, eliminating/softening negative judgements of others (or at least considering other possibilities about them and their behaviour) can be very beneficial too. That's not to enforce that on you, of course, but I have found that doing this can have profoundly positive effects.

Please let us know how it goes.

Paul

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Paul McCabe – PSTEC Master Practitioner

http://www.lifestyleforchange.com

Please contact me anytime if you want any assistance in utilising PSTEC to help you live a life of tremendous freedom & possibility.

Recreate yourself with PSTEC.

Skype, Zoom, in-person & phone sessions available…

[Speedlogic007PSTEC User]

This stuff works for blushing. I realized that blushing is a symptom not the root. It has to do with self image most of the time. I started tapping on my skin problems indivitually, and let me tell you, it removed the emotion!

This is the best therapy I have ever experimented with.  Dont give up.

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