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Following on from my last post about memories, I want to discuss why some memories create behaviours, whilst others do not.

A Significant Emotional Event is an experience (or experiences) that creates an emotional meaning – a belief if you like – which affects us in later life. That emotional meaning could be positive (enjoying a School nativity play as a kid; enjoying public speaking as an adult) or it could be negative (hating a school nativity play as a kid; hating public speaking as an adult).

An event often becomes a Significant Emotional Event if it is an intense experience, for example something traumatic which creates great emotional power. The younger you are, the more difficult it is to deal with that emotional power. If your parents divorce when you are 35, you will be pissed off at them. If your parents divorce when you are 5, you will be shattered, inconsolable and probably forming beliefs about yourself that do not reflect the reality of the situation.

(The fact is, children do not have available to them the full array of thought processes that an Adult has; this leads to invalid conclusions being made – “It was my fault that daddy left us…” which is something I’ll be discussing next week).

An event could be come a Significant Emotional Event based on an individual’s threshold. Some people have less capacity when handling information being sent by their nerves, which might be why different people have different capacities when dealing with Stress.

A series of events could become a Sensitising Event based upon repetition – for example constantly failing at an exam could form the belief that “I’m no good at exams”. In this example, failing the exam wasn’t as traumatic as the divorce example noted above, but the cumulative effect of failing repeatedly was enough for the mind to attribute a significant emotional meaning to the experience.

So a Significant Emotional Event is anything in our past that forms beliefs or behaviours in the present, because of the emotional meaning given to the event at the time (a time where, often, you probably weren’t old enough to fully understand what was happening).

These Significant Emotional Events (from now on ‘SEEs’!) form chains. Tad James describes a collection of memories that become linked together as a ‘string of pearls’. When memories form chains in this way, the potential for those memories to affect our life increases. The first event (for example, seeing your Mum being scared of a spider) becomes an Original Sensitising Event, which then gets connected to further events (various memories of yourself or others being scared of spiders). This would probably result in One Big Phobia of spiders!

Sometimes, these chains seem unrelated when looked at consciously, but chains have been formed unconsciously (for example a person with a jealousy issue might, through hypnosis, reveal a string of memories encompassing problems with snobbish relatives (a Sensitising Event lowering self-esteem), problems with bullying at school (a Sensitising Event again lowering self-esteem) and then a problem with an unfaithful boyfriend (a Sensitising Event also lowering self-esteem, but now throwing in a fear of the pain that the difficult relationship has caused).

(Understand that this is just an example. The variations of course are as infinite as human experience – and human creativity – itself).

So if you can understand that your past affects your beliefs, emotions and behaviours in the present, then you can also begin to see that it is the emotional meaning that you have given to the past that counts. Unfortunately, it is unlikely that you can control this consciously at the time, especially when you are little…

However, if you have a Significant Emotional Event in your past that is holding you back, I have the tool for you!

I hope you found that interesting (and not too confusing!) and next week I hope to post on the meaning of emotion (and, naturally, the emotion of meaning).

Warm regards,

Adrian
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