How to handle Cathartic or Crisis Experiences

For help with any of the issues raised here please contact Life Magic Healing Centre, Auckland.

During the process of self-development you may at times reach certain crisis points, or have a cathartic experience (repressed experience or emotion brought out into consciousness). You may wish to stop the process, or flag it all away as too difficult to face.

Such an experience is, however, a normal part of evolutionary change, and rather than avoid it, you should embrace it and press on through to the other side. When you reach the calm waters on the other side of your crisis, (and those calm waters are there), you will find that you have evolved to a higher level of experience, and that the process cannot be reversed. This is true evolution, and you are now closer to your goal, as well as equipped to move on to even greater experiences.

When you feel you have reached such a crisis point, here are a few thoughts to help you through:

Continue with what you are doing, but perhaps slow down the pace a little. Don’t push too hard.

Identify and acknowledge any Unconscious Avoidance Behaviour, focus on the current cathartic experience, and let any self-defeating activity subside. (See below for more details).

Take time to observe yourself in the current situation. Be aware of your feelings and reactions to the experience. Bring as much of the experience as you can into conscious awareness. Don’t try to rationalise it or explain it to yourself. Just experience it fully.

Accept what is happening and don’t fight it. Pain is not caused by the experience itself, whether you classify it as good or bad. Rather pain is caused by your resistance to the experience.

Accept also that the experience you are having is within you and is uniquely your experience. You have either chosen consciously to have this experience, or it has been triggered unconsciously as the direct or indirect consequence of your own thoughts, desires and/or beliefs.

Accept that you are the creator of your experience and as such are responsible for it. Take ownership of what has been created. However, there is no question of blame, guilt or shame. You are also not the victim of an external power.

Accept that everything is in its right place.

Make a special effort to eat properly, drink lots of water, get enough physical exercise, and get enough rest and sleep during this period.

Use this breathing exercise to help you accept your current situation: Breathe slowly and evenly. On the in-breath say to yourself “accepting”, and on the out-breath say “releasing”.

If the experience includes a strong feeling of negativity, note down in a notebook your every positive and every negative response to yourself and to the world around you, throughout the day. This exercise will bring your negativity into focus, and you will find that it will enable you to identify and break the negativity pattern.

Observe and get a good feel for what the experience is, and then identify the core beliefs behind the experience. Identify what a person needs to believe in order to experience what you are experiencing. Write it down. Also write down the negative phrases that come to mind, the sort of things that you are saying to yourself. Complete this exercise on one day, adding to the list if anything else comes to mind, but without analysing what you have written down.
Next day (or certainly some hours later), review what you have written down. Identify basic patterns in what you have written down. These are core beliefs that you hold, and they are likely to be behind the experience that you are experiencing. Whatever you believe, your mind (and the Universe) will create the experience for you to prove the “truth” of your belief. You will now have brought the core belief into consciousness.

Now comes a vital aspect of this process to enable you to take a personal growth step. Continue to focus on the experience you are having and see it in light of the core belief/s that you have uncovered. This is not a justification or rationalisation, but a deep understanding of the nature of your experience. Doing this may be an emotional experience, but persevere and live it.

This experience, like all other experiences, will end. If there is something to be healed, it will be healed by this process. If a core belief that you have held has proven to be false, and you are ready to release it, it will dissipate now, and you will be healed in that regard as well. Finally, new, more appropriate creations/experiences will follow as your mind manifests its new beliefs.

We encourage you to keep open to new ideas and new experiences, and to accept that from time to time you may overload the system – this is the whole source of personal development and evolution. To always stay within your comfort zone, never to challenge your beliefs, and to resist new experiences, is the path to stagnancy and ultimately to extinction!

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A Note on Unconscious Avoidance Behaviour (as mentioned above)

There are three types of self-defeating Unconscious Avoidance Behaviour that you can experience when you reach a crisis point or cathartic experience:

Dispersing behaviour – an attempt to get rid of the excess energy that you are experiencing. Shouting, anger, talking a lot, acting compulsively, heightened physical activity, increased sexual activity, and illness all try to dissipate that excess energy.

Blocking behaviour – an attempt to block more energy coming in. Withdrawal, being reclusive, loss of appetite and depression all attempt to stop more energy from coming in. These activities seldom work and often lead to the need to disperse the energy instead through illness.

Distraction behaviour – an attempt to distract oneself from the feeling of crisis. Resorting to drugs, alcohol, sex, food, sleep, television, the movies, books, gambling – in fact anything to get one’s mind of the overload experience. Also believing and acting as if you are a victim.

In the end all of these activities are self-defeating. The reason you might resort to them is to avoid the pain of the crisis experience. However remember the pain is not caused by the experience itself, but by our resistance to that experience. These 3 behaviours are just attempts to resist the original experience, and therefore just lead to pain in themselves.

The key is to go through the original experience and come out better equipped to handle the next step in your personal development. Remember that as you come through that experience you won’t go back again – you will have made a permanent step in your personal evolution.

So how do we tackle Unconscious Avoidance Behaviour? Straight resistance to these three self-defeating types of behaviour is still pain-causing resistance to experiences. Essentially the answer is to consciously identify and acknowledge the nature of this behaviour as being an attempt to side-step your original experience and the source of the overload situation. Then focus back on the original experience and let the self-defeating experience subside. You need to be very careful to differentiate between what is the original cathartic/crisis experience and what is the cover-up.

Go well.

alan

Alan Dawe
Life Magic Healing Centre

If you have any queries or need help with the practical aspects of this article, please contact us. We are located in Howick, East Auckland. And if you haven't seen it, take a look at our Home Page.

Reference Sources

The Management of Evolutionary Change – William R Harris. 1990 – 2003. Centerpointe Research Institute.