Rocking Change: Changing the World through Changing Ourselves: Rocking Change, #1

By Karl Ernst

Welcome to Your Personal Revolution!

 

The Rocking Change series gives you a guide to resolving both internal and external emotional conflicts.  With a unique mix of science, evolutionary psychology, logic, and poetry, it provides you with a map for developing a more positive, enjoyable, and healthier life.  Hypnotherapist Karl Ernst takes you on a journey where you will learn about:

• the nature of your mind and body
• how your environment affects you
• ways to change how you think and feel
• emotional healing techniques 

Each day we adjust to surprises and shifting demands.  The advantages of being able to make spontaneous changes are obvious.  Inside this book and yourself, you will find the tools necessary to unlock the spontaneity that will count most.  

 

Applying this information will help you find the obstacles to improving your life.  Eliminating  unnecessary stress will make you feel better.  It also will make it easier for you to focus on more enjoyable and rewarding things.   

 

Are you ready for what this book will do for you?

 

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Karl Ernst
• Release date: Oct 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201092597

Book preview

Rocking Change:

Changing the World through Changing Ourselves

Create the Life You Desire

This is Book 1 of the Rocking Change Series:

Rocking Change: Changing the World through Changing Ourselves

Rocking Beliefs: Denial and Acceptance

Rocking Alignment: Fundamentals of Change

Rocking Alignment: Your Vehicle for Change

Rocking Metaleadership

Rocking Leadership

Rocking Metacommunication

Rocking Communication

Rocking Relationships

By Karl Ernst (c) 2021 - All Rights Reserved.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the copyright holder, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For more information visit www.rockingchange.com.

First Ebook Edition

NOTE: This edition has been formatted for e-readers.  You may find that adjusting the font size may make the text more readable and may help with the poetry.

DISCLAIMER:

The information in this text is provided for informational and not medical purposes.  Like all things in life, applying it comes with risks.  You are free to use the information here and take on the corresponding risks at your own discretion, not the author’s.

Cover art provided by Ms. Muzammil, [e-mail], or www.fiverr.com/missmuzammil.

Table of Contents

Foreword by the Author

Choose Your Own Healing Adventure

About the Author’s Journey

Introduction

Chapter 01: Arationality

Chapter 02: Limits of Rationality

Chapter 03: Arationality and Your Environment

Chapter 04: The Arationality Paradox

Chapter 05: Your Human Machine

Chapter 06: Arationality and Change

Chapter 07: Our Evolutionary Drives

Chapter 08: Exploring Our Evolutionary Drives

Chapter 09: Your Evolutionary Guidance System

Chapter 10: Programming

Chapter 11: Emotional Release

Chapter 12: Clarity

Chapter 13: Overcoming Neglect

Chapter 14: Healing Perspectives

Chapter 15: About Emotional Healing

Chapter 16: Foundations of Change

Chapter 17: Reprogramming Yourself

Chapter 18: Healing Basics

Chapter 19: Basic Healing Techniques

Chapter 20: Using Techniques

Chapter 21: Leaving the Past Behind

Chapter 22: Boundaries

Chapter 23: Personal Boundaries

Chapter 24: Relationship Boundaries

Chapter 25: Boundary Violations

Chapter 26: Boundary Enforcement

Chapter 27: Small Things Lead to Bigger Things

Sections

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

The Oath of Service

Foreword by the Author

I believe that by its very nature, emotional healing can profoundly challenge the establishment because it requires intense focus on personal experience and emotion. Both things are difficult to replicate in an academic setting. The challenge is, in part, because our culture devalues emotional healing in the extreme.

I wrote this book to help people overcome this devaluation because it is a core problem for many. Your thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and behavior are both understandable and controllable. I learned this firsthand in my own recovery and by working for years as a hypnotherapist and master neurolinguistic programmer.

Furthermore, I will give you what you need to replicate most of my techniques. I will show you why they are useful as well as how much you can gain from using them. You can use the information here to heal both yourself and others, as I have done for many years.

Everything in this book is designed to help you understand how to apply emotional healing for the greatest results. This journey will challenge you from beginning to end. It is also likely to change you irrevocably for the better. I believe the logic here is rock-solid, but I invite you to judge for yourself.

While reading the book, you may not absorb all of it at once. Certain pieces may come to you long after the fact, when suddenly the full meaning of a passage may click. This is typical. It doesn’t matter when the understanding of the material comes to you; it will happen in time. If you find yourself becoming emotional or numb, the book is doing its work. Press forward when you feel ready.

To validate my ideas, I invite you to journey into your beliefs and experience. I will help you explore key aspects of your past in a way that you may have never understood. For most, this will be challenging. When I have facilitated these journeys for others, the results have been shockingly positive.

The ultimate test of my logic is whether you find it applies to your experience. I invite you to test my ideas vigorously and thoroughly. I am confident you will find them both practical and profound.

Onward, and down the rabbit hole!

Karl Ernst

Author’s note: I have developed my logic through my extensive work with traumatic experiences and how they have shaped my clients’ lives and the lives of the people around me. My early drafts of this book were full of qualifiers to that effect, which caused text bloating and readability issues. Therefore, I am putting this global disclaimer here instead of littering the book with smaller ones.

Finally, as is customary with works of this nature, identifying details in the stories I have shared have been changed. A few of them are hybrids of real-world cases.

Choose Your Own Healing Adventure

The topic of emotional healing is complex. It has many layers, all of which are interrelated and dependent on one another. Distilling this topic into its components and essence is not easy. There is no ideal way to present the information covered here. The goal is to create a process where a reader can pick up the book and quickly generate positive results.

If I have done my job well enough, you will be able to pick up this book and begin creating positive results for yourself quickly. In fact, I have received significant feedback that people have already done exactly that.

Here you will find that the theory comes first, and then the practical tools necessary to apply it. As your theoretical understanding of healing increases, applying the theory will come easier. Still, you are welcome to skip forward to the chapters on emotional healing techniques if you prefer, or any other chapters that grab your attention.

Emotional healing has the potential to benefit everyone. This book will build your understanding from the ground up. However you choose to read it, I hope that you enjoy what you find here and gain firsthand understanding of what emotional healing will do for you.

About the Author’s Journey

When I was in information technology, I found myself at the flashpoint where dysfunctional business processes met dysfunctional business behavior. I discovered that there was rarely the political will to fix the process problems, much less the people problems that were keeping the process problems in place. Eventually, I realized I was part of the problem.

At that time, I did not have clarity about how to change my own behavior. Pushing others to do it was hypocritical, but sometimes I nudged people anyway. I was further frustrated by their lack of response. I had to burn out spectacularly before I gained any kind of useful perspective on these challenges.

First, I had to begin pursuing change for myself. That turned out to be the most difficult thing I have ever done.

Because of how badly I burned out, I had to pursue enormous personal changes. Now I’m at a point where my daily existence has become a whole lot easier. That took over a decade of intensive recovery work.

Over time, I discovered that what I learned has been useful for others. So the Rocking Change series is my effort to distill the hard lessons from my own recovery and the recovery of others in ways that will be useful to you.

Introduction

The Call of the Light

The nature of the game

has always been the same.

Forward, forward, and ever more, forward.

No matter how others it might regard,

Journey within yourself to find your nature.

No matter what might be the danger,

your travel inside is about what you can reveal,

perhaps in spite of those who see it as trivial.

Deeper, deeper, and ever more, deeper.

You drive to face whatever might appear

behind the many masks of your illusions.

You will expose the source of your confusions

about who and what you might think you might be;

you will align yourself with reality.

Further, further, and ever more, further.

Tread your path through whatever you will find there.

Your answers will be both universal and preset.

On the way, your vulnerability must be met.

You’ll discover your evolutionary machine,

and the decisions that it makes, with logic most keen.

So hold your sword of truth up high,

and watch as misconceptions die.

Accept the origins of your internal darkness,

as every evil within you will now confess.

Learn their positive intentions and their desires:

to keep you alive and well, no matter what conspires

to impose itself upon your general well-being.

Do have you the courage, for these truths, to be seeing?

For these rules about suffering and denial,

always will find their ways into your life’s trial.

These things are yours to untangle and to unwind,

however deep it takes you into your own mind.

Through these obstacles is the path we all must make.

It is the painful journey that we all must take.

Your darkness, what will it take for you to accept it?

And, that your light shines from the same place, will you admit?

(c) Karl Ernst 8/2/14, reworked 10/1/20

Chapter 01: Arationality

Humans are arational; acting otherwise invites suffering.

Welcome to Your Machine

This book and this series are all about what runs your human machine: your emotions. When you understand how your feelings shape your thoughts, beliefs, and behavior, you gain the power to change all of them. Understanding ultimately allows you to change just about anything about your life.

The process is simple but not easy. While it takes time and effort, the results will speak for themselves. Not only do you get to feel better, but you also get to enjoy what you are doing more. Furthermore, understanding often reduces the amount of effort required for doing the things that matter most to you. All these things will improve your life.

In my own case, I used to hate how I felt about almost everything that was important to me. This included how I felt about myself. I suffered from severe depression and post-traumatic stress disorder from a difficult childhood. Almost nothing in my life was the way I wanted it to be.

Knowledge Is Power

Once I found the information in this series, I changed almost everything about my life. I changed how I felt about myself, my career, and even my family. Slowly but surely, I was able to eliminate many symptoms of mental illness. Along the way, I learned many lessons about how to do so.

I also gained peace of mind and body. Better yet, I was able to help others do the same. I continued to refine my methods.

I have written the Rocking Change series to give you this power: the ability to change your life in the same ways. The information here will give you the ability to take control of your emotions. In turn, that will give you the power to become the person you want to be.

What You Feel Matters

Emotions are central to almost everything about our human experience. They control how we experience both the people and the things in the world around us. They are at the core of how we make sense of the world.

In turn, how we feel about the world around us drives our behavior, for better or for worse. As a result, emotions have a tremendous impact on how much we can do and how well we can do it. Even more importantly, they also control how rewarding we find what we do. For all these reasons, this book is primarily about our relationship with emotions.

Avoiding Difficult Emotions Leads to Stagnation

Many people think of intense emotions as something to be avoided. I used to think that myself. However, with time, I realized that when I did not confront my difficult emotions, they controlled me. This realization did not come easily.

Part of the problem was that I lacked positive examples of others who were supportive or in control of their lives or their emotions. This led to both poor performance and yet more bad feelings about what I was doing and who I was. I had no way to build positive change on this unhealthy emotional foundation.

As a result, I had problematic feelings that bothered me every day. The largest problem I faced was that I had no way to resolve the rottenness at my emotional core. I felt like a horrible person; I even felt guilty daily about being alive. These hefty emotional roadblocks drained me of energy. Eventually this became such a large problem that I had no choice but to do something about it.

Your Emotions and Your Environment Are Related

I used to value logic and science above all else. While they gave me some insight into the problems around me, they were of little use in resolving my self-sabotage. The way I was applying them to my life was not effective, nor was it making me happy.

I was stuck. Even though I had some intellectual understanding of the changes that would be best for me, I did not feel positive enough to pursue them. As a result, I was used to being emotionally out of control. I also had issues disconnecting from others who had similar problems.

Feelings Have Their Own Logic

At that time, I had no clarity about what emotions really were. I was not used to thinking of emotions as having any kind of logic behind them. This lack left me with no map for what a healthy life might be like. My lack of clarity was not unique.

It was only as I started understanding why I felt the way I did that my recovery really started. I learned that when you do not understand what you are feeling or why, change is difficult. Resisting your feelings makes change even harder. Overcoming this lack of understanding allowed me to build a foundation for positive change.

Your Feelings and Your Environment Are Connected

As many do, I lacked the understanding and social environment to face how my emotional pain was driving my self-destructive behavior. I had no real understanding of what my emotions were. Nor did I understand how they were driving me.

As a result, I had surrounded myself with like-minded people who shared similar emotional foundations. I did not have individuals around me who understood emotional intensity, or how their emotional experience was connected to their environment. I did not have individuals around me who had significant experience with emotional change.

Do You Have Space for Emotional Intensity and Change?

At that point in my life, I lacked anyone who could have helped me. Nothing was providing me with a solid enough foundation for pursuing meaningful change. Even more importantly, I did not have a frame of reference for meaningful emotional change.

I had similar experiences while I was doing talk therapy.¹ I did not find it very useful because I was unable to find the space or the right kind of connection to make direct contact with my emotional core. Internally and externally, I lacked the support necessary for facing the feelings that were barriers to improving my life the way I wanted to.

Awareness Supports Positive Change

Eventually, I did come to some level of acceptance about the depression and anger I carried. At first, acceptance only helped me to see more of my problems. My feelings of hopelessness continued.

Over time, I became increasingly aware of how my personal problems hurt my loved ones. I did hurtful things to those I cared most about. I sabotaged relationships with my romantic partners and my friends. I knew I had major problems, but I did not understand what to do with them.

Emotions Will Become Your Ally as You Learn How to Change Them

The pain of my self-sabotage kept me looking for answers. It was only by learning about what was going on inside me that I finally began to find some relief. I had to accept how my emotions were driving me. Doing so allowed me to start breaking my pattern of running from my pain.

Thinking of feelings as the enemy tends to cause problems. That attitude was an obstacle I had to overcome to make progress. Avoiding intense feelings denied me the knowledge I needed to begin changing my life for the better. Eventually I learned that when you embrace emotional change, you become happier and healthier.

Face Strong Feelings

A cliché in healing circles is that people have all the resources they need to solve any personal challenge. Less often mentioned is that the solutions to emotional problems are found by changing what we feel for the better. This can be done by facing feelings and truths that may be uncomfortable. The challenge of facing strong emotions also helps explain why so many people accomplish less than they would like.

When you open yourself to understanding your feelings, it will help you build a healthier emotional foundation for positive change. It will also help you find others who can support you in the change you desire. It took me many years to learn this lesson.

You Can Understand Your Feelings

My life got a whole lot easier once I started understanding exactly where, how, and why I had been driven in the past. I began to use emotional healing techniques to purge bad feelings when I was not feeling the way I wanted to feel. My results got stronger with time.

Additionally, once my emotional healing started, I began connecting with people who were more aware of their own feelings. I noticed they were more readily able to resolve their inner conflicts than others I had known. Similarly, I observed that individuals who valued emotional healing seemed more rational and relaxed. They seemed to be less stressed, get sick less, and complain less than others. Additionally, their increased peace of mind seemed to help them deal better with the insanity and suffering in the world.

Best of all, they did not blame others for their problems in the ways I had seen during my childhood. As a result, they were also less likely to take their problems out on others in the way my family had. These new relationships allowed me to expand my recovery efforts as I learned to trust the process of emotional healing and other people more than I had in the past.

Humans Are Arational

Many of us like to pretend that we make our decisions only with logic, but that is not the case. Everyone is moved by what they feel as well. This was a hard lesson for me.

Arationality comes from our emotional and instinctual evolutionary roots. We will explore arationality in ways that will show how emotional forces shape our thinking, our values, and even our sense of what is rational. You will also see how arationality is a means to an end, which serves the evolutionary forces that drive all of us.

Understanding Arationality Will Help You Understand Your Emotional Experience

Eventually, I accepted that all human behavior is either driven by or affected by emotion. I learned emotion is behind both the best and worst of what everyone does, including me. Understanding how emotion touches all of us is practical. It allows you to gain more control over yourself and your environment. This was something I desperately needed for myself.

The challenge with making this transition is that accepting arationality can be uncomfortable. It frequently requires leaving behind our preconceptions and can include departing the familiar frame of mind that most of us are used to. It requires facing and accepting things we have less control over than we would like, including our own emotions and behavior.

Both Positive and Negative Feelings Matter

Arationality simply means your feelings are connected to everything you do. These emotions can both help and hurt you as you pursue your desires. In other words, the emotional component of your behavior matters. It can be dysfunctional or functional.

While irrationality is commonly used to label problematic behavior, we will use the term arationality instead. It includes the healthy, positive feelings behind what you do and experience as well as negative emotions that are problematic. The term is a gentle reminder that your feelings can be more important than you think they are.

In short, understanding arationality helps you work with your feelings instead of against them. Accepting how and why you feel the way you do gives you the power to change it. Arationality also helps you gain clarity about what aspects of your behavior are contributing to your conscious desires, as well as what behavior gets in the way. These things can increase your clarity about what you can do to improve your life.

Understanding Arationality Is about Understanding Your Other-Than-Conscious Mind

Many people assume that they understand why they think and feel the way they do. And, in many cases, they do. However, most people find they lack clarity in the problem areas of their lives.

When people lack clarity, the quality of their decision-making suffers. The more something bothers you, the more you stand to benefit from gaining clarity about it. Understanding arationality can help you open the box of your feelings and find out what is happening and why. In turn, you will be able to make better decisions in your life.

Arationality Is Both the Problem and the Solution

Understanding arationality will help you gain increasing understanding about the nature of feelings—both your own and others’. It will highlight how positive and negative feelings play into your own decision-making and that of others. Understanding arationality will help you better grasp the drivers behind all human behavior.

At the same time, understanding how your emotions and environment drive your behavior is practical. It will help you better recognize what you can control as well as what you cannot. In turn, this will give you a deeper understanding of how you have made decisions in the past and how you can make better decisions in the future.

All these things will give you more control over how you behave, which will allow you to respond more effectively to what is going on in your life. It will also enable you to build a healthier emotional foundation for yourself.

Accept Your Arationality

Understanding arationality helped me gain clarity about why I had conflicting feelings. It allowed me to start teasing apart my many inner conflicts and begin resolving them. Part of that process was admitting to myself that my problems were emotional.

Accepting how my emotions were driving me made it easier to shift my focus from my external physical world to my internal emotional world. For example, I discovered that my lashing out at others was protective in nature. By meditating on my protective behavior, I discovered I was afraid of being hurt. I was also afraid of vulnerability, which was at the root of the issue.

Embrace Your Arationality

Ultimately, understanding arationality helped me face the things that had caused me so much suffering. Facing the reality of my fear opened the box to the deeper, more uncomfortable truth. I was automatically running from many things in my life I could not control, physically and emotionally.

Over time, accepting that I was running allowed me to deal directly with the real roots of my issues. It helped me target and resolve problematic feelings and beliefs with emotional healing techniques. Along the way, I eliminated many obstacles to things I wanted, and I gained much peace of mind and body.

Accepting what drives your own behavior is powerful. It will allow you to do the same things I did. Then you can begin changing your life in the ways that count the most. Over time, this will give you the power to start living the life you really want.

All these things can build your awareness of the limits of rationality, which we will talk about more next.

[←1]

Talk therapy is a form of unstructured emotional healing where people talk about their feelings with little formal direction.

Suggested Exercise: Exploring Arationality and Irrationality

When do you feel most irrational? What kind of irrationality bothers you most when you see it in others? How do you act when others are irrational? How do you seek to control your own irrationality?

What do you find it hardest to be rational about? What kind of rationality from others bothers you the most? Where would you most like to be more rational in your life? Where do you think being more rational would make the most difference for you?

All these questions can help you think about the roles that emotions currently play in your life. Considering them can help you identify problem areas you may be able to improve, especially over time. Remember, even simple awareness can help you work more with your emotions instead of against them.

The Call of Arationality

The complex call of Arationality

is a song of a real possibility:

to change how you feel about what you might see.

Quickly, in your mind, other-than-consciously,

driven by whatever around you might be,

your focus chooses each thing that you can see.

Regardless of what might be your commands,

inner distractions can have many demands.

Focus, it can devour in its shifting sands.

How does your attention become directive?

Learn secrets of your feelings and perspective,

Find answers and become more reflective.

For when you accept your emotions,

it will change your daily devotions:

from serving problems to solutions!

(c) Karl Ernst 12/26/16 reworked 8/29/20

Chapter 02: Limits of Rationality

Behind the masks of rationality lie emotional reactions to threats and opportunities.

The Roots of Many Key Problems Are Emotional

The limits of rationality are all around us. When you look at the world we inhabit, it is hard not to notice insanity and suffering that seems irrational. In fact, I used to be a significant example of someone who suffered and lacked enough rationality to do anything about it.

There is an abundance of emotional and physical violence, which rarely serves anyone well. To understand ourselves and the world we live in, we would all do well to consider the role of emotions in creating these situations. It is even more important to consider how we might use emotions to resolve these problems.

Your Environment Affects Your Rationality

Everyone is irrational sometimes. How much of a problem irrationality is varies. However, it often has to do with how aware people are about their feelings and behavior. The less aware individuals are that they are being irrational, the more of a problem their lack of clarity tends to be.

When people lack awareness about their irrational behavior, it can overflow from being just one person’s problem to being a problem that others have to deal with. When this happens, others have to focus on the irrational person’s emotional and illogical problems. It can cost others both time and peace of mind until the irrational person has calmed down.

Do You Recognize Your Own Irrationality?

It can be even more challenging when you are the person being irrational. It is one thing to have some idea of what you are upset about and what to do about it. It is another thing entirely if you don’t know what you are upset about or how to resolve being upset.

It can be painful, confusing, embarrassing, or frustrating when you lack control over your emotions or behavior, yet everyone goes through times where they lack emotional control, at least to some extent. The question is always this: What can you do about it?

One thing that frequently helps is considering what is happening around you. More often than not, that will help you get clarity about what is happening and why. In turn, you can use that information in whatever ways will give you more control over yourself and your environment. Often, simply knowing why you are upset will help you feel better.

How Rational Is Your Environment?

Often, bystanders do not realize consciously how they are affected by other people’s emotional upsets. This was a major problem for me in the past. I did not realize how much my friends, coworkers, and family were upsetting me. Nor did I understand how much my own upsets were causing problems for those around me.

It is not unusual for people who lack clarity about their emotional upsets to have the same problem I did. This is particularly likely to be the case when individuals lash out at others. It can cause people to adopt a keep your head down mentality. While this happens, the real issues causing the emotional upsets typically remain unresolved.

No One Has Full Control over Their Emotions or Behavior

The degree of irrationality that people experience varies with their histories and environments. What causes one person to get irrational and upset can make another happy, and vice versa. Everyone is irrational at times. The degree of irrationality varies, but irrationality tends to close down options.

Regardless, when people get emotional, they are obviously not in a rational state of mind. Judging them for their emotional responses makes no rational sense at all. Yet it is astounding how frequently people do judge others.

Judging People Negatively for Being Irrational Is Irrational

A standard dysfunctional pattern in human interactions is that one party accuses the other of being irrational and attempts to take a position of superiority as a result. (I saw this pattern all too often growing up in my family). The problem with this behavior is that it is useful only if the target is flexible enough to change behavior.

It is amazing how often people complain about others not being logical or rational. I frequently complained about others being illogical myself. Even though it is a significant part of our culture, all this complaining is not very useful. Only rarely does it lead to positive