Stress Management Archives

Of Interest To All Stress Sufferers

The following is an excerpt from Centerpointe's "MindChatter" Newsletter. I believe the
subject at hand speaks for itself...

SPECIAL REPORT:

"You Push Me Past My Threshold, Baby!"
or
"Your Stress Threshold and How You Can Raise It"

By Bill Harris, Director, Centerpointe Research Institute

I've been mulling over the following ideas for many months, and I finally
thought it was time to share them with you. What finally prompted me to put
these ideas down on paper was new research information regarding stress and
early life trauma, and the fact that this new information confirmed
something I've intuitively felt was true for many years, based on my
observations of thousands of The End® program participants. Quite frankly,
I think this may well be the most important Special Report I have written.
I hope you will read it carefully, thoughtfully digest what it contains,
apply it to your own personal situation, and occasionally come back to it.

I'm always trying to fine-tune the models I use to describe how
theHolosync® sound technology affects the brain, and therefore our personal
growth and evolution. As you probably know, models and theories are only as
good as their ability to describe reality and to predict what will/should
happen in a given situation. One of the most gratifying things about my
"discovery" of Nobel Prize-winner Ilya Prigogine and his description of how
complex systems evolve and grow has been to watch this model successfully
predict pretty much everything that happens as we use the Holosync®
technology on a daily basis to push our brains to reorganize at higher
levels of functioning and higher levels of awareness. (See the "East Meets
West" article on the web site, Support Follow-Up Letter #2 which is sent
via snail mail to all new participants, or "The Management of Evolutionary
Change" book that comes with the second level of the program for more
information about Prigogine's work and how it applies to what we do at
Centerpointe.)

I honestly have not seen any response to this technology that does not
make sense within this model of change. This, of course, has led me to
greater and greater confidence that this theory accurately describes
reality, and that we can rely on it to predict what will happen as we use
the Holosync® sound technology and move through The End® program.

I don't want to give an extensively detailed description of
Prigogine's work here, as I have done so in several of my other writings,
but I will briefly summarize the high points here, since they are pertinent
to the main points I want to make in this Special Report.

(When I use the word "system" below, remember that physically,
emotionally and mentally you are a system and that system obeys all the
laws discussed below just like any other complex system.)

We start with the Law of Increasing Entropy (the second law of
thermodynamics), which states that all things tend, over time, to break
down and become less ordered - unless energy is added in some way. This is
one of the most basic laws of the universe. It has been scientifically
proven beyond a shadow of a doubt and has been accepted by the scientific
community for over a hundred years.

Systems that maintain their orderliness instead of breaking down, or
even become more ordered (as happens with human beings), do so because they
have the ability to get rid of entropy by dissipating it to the
environment. But each system has an upper limit of how much entropy it can
dissipate, based on its degree of complexity: the greater the complexity of
the system, the greater the amount of entropy it can dissipate.

Since each system (or, for our purposes, each person) is really an
on-going flow of energy, this upper limit of how much entropy can be
dissipated puts an upper limit on how much input the system can handle. As
long as the input level does not exceed the ability to dissipate the
resulting entropy, everything is fine and the system remains stable. When
this upper limit is exceeded, however, the entropy that cannot be
dissipated instead begins to build up in the system. As this happens, a
breakdown of order begins and the system becomes increasingly more chaotic.

If this continues, at a certain point, which Prigogine called a
bifurcation point, the system either totally breaks down and ceases to
exist as an organized system or, more often, spontaneously makes what is
known as a quantum leap, reorganizing itself at a higher level - one that
can handle the input that was too much for the old system. The most
important characteristic of this new system is its ability to dissipate
more entropy to its environment and therefore handle more input from the
environment.

I have been developing a theory for several months that is an
off-shoot of this Prigogine/chaos theory view of looking at change. The
prevailing view in personal development circles is that if you are
traumatized, especially in childhood, you then have all this "stuff" buried
in the unconscious mind that is causing all kinds of problems for you and
that this "stuff" needs to come up to the surface and be "healed".

I'm not so sure any more that I think this description reflects what's
really happening.

So here's another way to look at this subject. Every person has a
threshold for how much they can handle coming at them from their
environment (including their internal environment). If that threshold is
exceeded by whatever is happening in that environment, they begin to feel
stressed. If things continue in the same manner long enough, they
eventually become overwhelmed. When people begin to feel stressed, they
begin attempting to cope with the feeling of stress in various ways (most
of which actually don't work) they learned while growing up.

My contention is that all the neurotic, addictive,
obsessive/compulsive, dysfunctional, etc., etc. feelings and behaviors that
send us to therapists, personal development seminars, self-help books, and
all the many other ways we seek help, are all attempts to cope with being
in an environment that gives us more input than we can handle.

Another way to look at this is that people who have been traumatized
in some way have a lower threshold for stress than do other people who are
able to handle their environment more easily.

What, then, is responsible for this "lower threshold"? I believe that
when people experience some kind of trauma in their upbringing they do not
mature in the same way as they would have without the trauma, and part of
this lack of normal maturation is a failure to develop a "normal" threshold
for stress. These people are bothered by aspects of their environment more
often, and to a greater degree, than these same things bother people who
have not suffered the same degree of trauma. Because of this, these people
are more frequently exhibiting their own personal coping behaviors (and
experiencing the uncomfortable feelings that go with them). These include
anxiety, confusion, withdrawal, depression, anger, plus all kinds of
neurotic behaviors such as alcohol and drug use, sexual acting out, eating
disorders and even more severe problems such as personality disorders and
psychosis.

A recent article in Psychology Today, "Stress...It's Worse Than You
Think" discusses this increased sensitivity to stress:

"...we can become sensitized, or acutely sensitive to
stress. Once that happens, even the merest intimation
of stress can trigger a cascade of chemical reactions in brain and body
that assault us from within."

Psychologist Michael Meaney, Ph.D., of McGill University has said:
"What happens is that sensitization leads the brain to re-circuit itself in
response to stress. We know that what we are encountering may be a normal,
everyday episode of stress, but the brain is signalling the body to respond
inappropriately."

Everyone, it seems, has a built-in gauge that controls our reaction to
stress, a kind of biological thermostat that, when working properly, keeps
the body from launching an all-out response literally over spilled milk.
Sensitization, however, lowers the thermostat set-point, according to
psychologist Jonathan C. Smith, Ph.D., founder and director of the Stress
Institute at Roosevelt University in Chicago.

"Years of research," says Seymore Levine, Ph.D., of the University of
Delaware, "has told us that people do become sensitized to stress and that
this sensitization actually alters physical patterns in the brain. That
means that once sensitized, the body just does not respond to stress the
same way in the future. We may produce too many excitatory chemicals or too
few calming ones; either way we are responding inappropriately."

Another researcher, Jean King, Ph.D., of the University of
Massachusetts Medical Schools, believes that when certain stresses occur
during developmental periods may be more damaging than stress suffered at
other times. "The psychological events that are most deleterious probably
occur during infancy and childhood - an unstable home environment, living
with an alcoholic parent, or any other number of extended crises...What we
now believe is that a stress of [great] magnitude occurring when you are
young may permanently rewire the brain's circuitry, throwing the system
askew and leaving it less able to handle normal, everyday stress."

This, of course, is where all the various coping behaviors and feels
begin to pop out, causing all the various life-problems that lead people to
therapy and other personal growth/personal development solutions.

Traditional approaches for dealing with all of this have always seemed
to me to be symptom-oriented, including the prevailing therapeutic methods
I mentioned previously dealing with the so-called unhealed "stuff" "down
there" that must be brought to the surface and healed; or the increasingly
popular method of using drugs that will "retune" the neurochemical system
in the brain (though I'm not a fan of drug therapy, it can certainly be
effective and sometimes is a welcome emergency alternative to the suffering
caused by the symptoms themselves).

But as I have administrated The End® program over the years, a more
basic and more effective solution has occurred to me: what if we could
raise the threshold at which these dysfunctional feelings and behaviors
are triggered? If this could be done, these feelings and behaviors would
fall away because they would never, or at least rarely, be triggered. The
new and higher threshold where these feelings and behaviors are triggered
would be reach less often or perhaps not at all.

As those who have been in The End® program for any length of time and
who have spoken to me on the telephone or read my writings know, I firmly
believe that when we are exposed to the Holosync® sound technology it
brings about the whole Prigoginian process of change described at the
beginning of this article. The technology slows electrical brain wave
patterns, which causes electrical fluctuations in the brain that the brain
cannot handle as it is currently structured (in other words, the system
experiences input beyond its ability to dissipate the resulting entropy).
In response, the brain reorganizes itself at a higher level to create a new
structure that can handle this input. It is in this process that the
threshold for stress is raised.

This is the reason why people in this program have such dramatic
positive changes and why all kinds of neurotic and dysfunctional feelings
and behaviors fade away as people progress through the program. It explains
why people in the program often successfully go off their depression
medication after ten or twelve months, or why problems with anger or
anxiety disappear, or why a whole list of other complaints fade away as
people move through the program. These responses are all coping methods
gone awry, and once coping is no longer needed (or needed less often)
because the system is no longer so easily stressed, the coping strategies
are called into play less and less often.

I see the Centerpointe program and Holosync® technology as a very
effective method for undoing the traumas that caused the threshold for
stress to be set too low in the first place. This method attacks the
problem at the root and bypasses the short-term treatment of symptoms. By
pushing the nervous system to reorganize itself at higher levels of
functioning, we give the person a second chance at creating a more normal
coping system that does not rely on coping through dysfunctional feelings
and behaviors.

In fact, after completing several levels of the program, participants
typically begin to develop what might be called a "super-normal" coping
system, where very little bothers them. Life zooms to and fro around them,
but they remain an island of serenity in the center of it all and life
becomes more than just coping, leaving room for exploration, fun, vision,
creativity, and the making of dreams into realities.

Be well.
_________________________________________________________________________

Lightwalking,
Gregory

Follow Ups:

• Re: Of Interest To All Stress Sufferers (Archive in stress.) Walt Stoll 10:04:41 5/20/02 (0)
• Re: Of Interest To All Stress Sufferers Rebecca-NYC 07:06:15 5/20/02 (2)
  • Centerpointe IS Holosync ® Technology Gregory 09:21:47 5/20/02 (1)
    • Re: Centerpointe IS Holosync ® Technology Rebecca-NYC 21:08:12 5/20/02 (0)
• Limitless Grace Jim H. 23:51:14 5/19/02 (0)