The Importance of Updating Our Emotional Software
When I began using unconscious methods for addressing emotional issues in my medical practice in 1987, I utilized techniques that I had learned from others. Over the course of my greater than thirty years in this field, I modified what I started with and developed my own method called Emotional Updating.
The Emotional Updating technique enables individuals to eliminate unsatisfactory post-traumatic learned emotional responses to triggers, replacing them with new satisfactory emotional responses.
This method can be used to update any out-of-date or negative learned emotional response. Everyone has experienced trauma. Our traumatic events cause us to develop new emotional responses that get turned on automatically and repeatedly by certain triggers or cues. We develop these post-traumatic responses within the context of who we were in the specific situations when the trauma occurred.
With the passage of time, things change. We get older and acquire new knowledge, wisdom, and resources, and find ourselves in different external circumstances.
Despite these changes, our post-traumatic responses remain the same. As a result, it is extremely common for these automatic responses to eventually become out-of-date for who we are or want to be within our present-day realities. However, once these responses have been established, they become part of us, no matter how limiting or unpleasant they may be.
Most people do not realize that we can change our responses or have any idea how to do so. Thus, due to the negative impact our out-of-date responses have upon us, we typically spend our lives suffering, avoiding, and coping. But there is good news — It is possible to change our responses.
These responses are mental software which, like computer software, can be updated. Once updated, the same triggers will then automatically and repeatedly turn on new emotional reactions which can be comfortable, empowered, and appropriate for who we want to be. After recognizing and updating these automatic responses, we subsequently react effortlessly in a positive manner.
Once we update software in our computers we do not need to keep dealing with the deficiencies of the old version. Nor do we repeatedly have to keep updating that same old version to the new version with each use of the computer. It is the same when updating our out-of-date emotional responses. Once a response is updated it is updated - there is no longer a need to cope, suffer, or avoid due to the old response because the old response is gone.
Once a response is updated we do not need to have a number of strategies ready and waiting to manage our old uncomfortable feelings - because they are no longer there.
Once a response is updated we do not need to mindfully observe our reaction first in order to analyze and then control it. Our new automatic reaction is fine and we naturally react the way we want to in the situation.
In fact, the new response is often so natural and automatic and appropriate that we typically do not even realize that we reacted differently despite having a response that may be radically different than whatever was turned on previously with the same trigger.
My Emotional Updating method allows us to update our software - our learned responses. But what about our hardware—the brain itself? My clinical observation has been that, with few exceptions, the average person’s brain is inherently excellent and not the cause of the symptoms and problems. Their problem is virtually always to do with their software and not their hardware.
By updating out-of-date post-traumatic emotional responses, symptoms and problems improve and — with enough updating — ideally resolve completely.
– Dr. Peter Hercules
