By: Shlomo Vaknin, C.Ht

Since this is going to be a bit more complex, I ask you to first read it very slowly and carefully and second – read it more than once. We do share quite a lot of ideas and concepts in this lesson, that the understanding and comprehension of them will enable us to move to practical exercises and techniques.

We’re going to discuss a few major concepts today, the type of concepts that stretch out and touch every aspect of our lives. One of those is the concept of time. Another is the concept of emotions.

Time is an abstract concept. You can never really define it accurately, it is organic and keeps on changing constantly. Your feeling of morning might mean the feeling of night to me. The feeling of time is of importance here, and not how it is moving in the world outside of you.

Emotions, oddly enough, work the same way – our emotions are never defined accurately, they are organic and they keep on changing constantly. Every emotion you choose or notice you’re having, is never the same as you felt it before – there are different intensities, different contexts and different meanings which you take with you forward.

Emotions drive your neurology. And it can only mean one thing. Emotions drive your life.
You engage in an emotional reaction as a result of extracting meaning from time stamps. You do it very fast, and that might be the reason you might not have noticed it – until now.

Time stamps are stored in your memory. It happens automatically and you have no control over it. That is why psychologists need years to work with you in order to change a behavioral pattern or thought. They go over your past, extracting the most emotional time stamps and work their way logically to change the meaning so that your future choices will extract information differently.

Time stamps are neurological connections – associations – between a stimulus (mostly an out-of-body stimulus) and an imaginary conclusion, which is usually also the trigger for an emotion.
A time stamp is an important emotionally charged association that defines who you are. You have many of those. You have collected time stamps since birth.

A time stamp is created when you feel a very strong emotion as a result of an outside event. Something happens, you react – an association was created. That is one time stamp. If other events occur, that inspire the same emotion to arise, other time stamps are created and linked to the first.

The importance of the emotional intensity of the time stamps is the key to understand why you are being effected more negatively from other people, than positively.

If your mother was furious and slapped on your face, even one single time, that is a much more intense experience than all the times she caressed you. The shock and amazement – the emotional intensity you experience at that moment – those will embed a very strict time stamp in your neurology, that will rise again and again in all kinds of variations in your future.

It is not easy to identify and not easy at all to take care of. However, knowing that information and learning how to work with those time stamps so that your neurology will work for you instead of just protecting you (mindlessly) – that will make a huge difference in how you handle yourself.

Take Alfred for being the best living example I know of. Alfred was one of my latest clients. He’s over 40, a career oriented person, married and has 4 children. To say the least, he is not happy at all in his life. Not because of his wife or his kids or his job, but because of his thoughts.

Take a look at Alfred’s major time stamps, and see if you can guess his immediate ability to face a challenge:

Age 5 – Alfred remembers he went with his mom to the market, they came back and his uncle offered them a lift in his big van. Alfred was thrown in the air by the uncle, without an advanced warning, and landed on the ground crying. His mom yelled at him to stop being a baby and told him to climb to the van. Alfred remembers seeing that van’s door so high, and felt a fear which he later on associated with the fear of heights.

Age 8 - Preschool. Alfred and a few of his friends were playing a game of “wars”. One group against the other. Alfred heard one kid saying something like, “I am going to be with whomever is going to win”. He liked the idea and later on said the same words. One of the teacher heard him and laughed saying “Alfred, you’ll never have real friends this way”.

Age 10 – Alfred was a little chubby. Not fat but not thin “enough”. Kids at school picked on fat kids, and Alfred in their eyes was no difference. His nick name became “potato chips” and for quite awhile no one called him Alfred.

Age 12 – Alfred got a “sex” tape from a friend. Alfred’s brother, who was a few years older than him, heard the tape and “made a report” to mom about it. Mom didn’t care, saying that it is Alfred’s privacy and as long as he doesn’t hurt himself – no one should interfere. However, the brother (obviously) didn’t leave it alone and told the neighbors.

Age 14 – Summer vacation. Alfred asked a girl from his class out for a day of fun on the beach. She refused claiming she doesn’t even remember him.

Age 16 – Alfred’s high school friends asked him to host a party in his house. He agreed, mom and dad agreed (of course), and Alfred did all the necessary preparations. No one showed up but Alfred’s two best friends. Everybody had something else to do on the same day they asked for a party.

Age 17 – Alfred went on a field trip with his school. One of the instructors said he looks scary, and one of Alfred’s friends picked that up and made up names for Alfred.

Age 23 – Alfred is being intimate with a girl he likes and fails to maintain an erection. He kept thinking about others criticizing him.

These are only some of Alfred’s major time stamps.

Are there any positive time stamps? Of course there are, but the negative time stamps make a greater effect on how you behave and make choices.

Alfred didn’t have a lot of choices facing new challenges, when instantly as he thinks about his abilities to face a challenge – a stream of “proofs” from his past burst into his consciousness. Since it happens very quickly, it is not always recognizable before you feel the result – the negative emotions. They fill you up and you need to take care of a stressful feeling, not exactly the right frame of mind to think on how not-real those feelings are.

Every time stamp can expand itself to all kind of contexts. A time stamp that describes a high school harassment which left you bitter and emotionally bruised will find a way to be reflected in the way you put meaning on your relationships. You might have concluded that some people are out there to get you, to humiliate you and criticize you. And therefore, since you cannot trust strangers immediately – they have to go through a screening process.

That screening process can be very non equal. Because every person in this world is facing life as he or she sees it. Every person has good mornings and bad mornings, has challenges and outbursts of his/her own.

Who are you to judge them upon one or two single occasions? If god didn’t judge them yet (hey, they’re not burning in hell right now, are they?), so why should you?
Those time stamps in your past are defining who you are today, your choices that made you what you are and that brought you to where you are today. Those time stamps control your life, not the other way around!

When you face a new challenge, whether it’s meeting new people, getting along with a stubborn boss, moving physically in a room full of people and any of the other numerous life challenges – your mind needs to decide fast on what is going on. Thoughts are streaming in and out of consciousness in a speed much faster than you can grasp, and associations are bursting right out of those time stamps in an attempt to give an answer to your mind.

“What is going on?”, your mind asks as you face entering a new office. To know what IS your brain goes to what WAS. What was – in your past. Since there’s no much time – answers must be provided almost instantly – it looks at your internal map (ahh, remember that one?) and make conclusions. Time stamps are very distinctive in your internal map, since they are intensively emotionally charged – they are the milestones. Since your mind doesn’t have the time to compute each and every single experience in your past, both positive and negative – it goes for the milestones, the time stamps, those memories that get immediate attention since they are so emotionally attractive.

“I am worthless”, screams one time stamp. “remember THAT feeling?”, screams another and with a glimpse of a tiny visual memory evokes a stream of harsh emotions. Lying on the ground beaten on your first day in sixth grade… being laughed at as the teacher calls your name… being criticized by your first boss on your first week at your first job… so many memories, such a huge mass of brain cells to store it in.

The illusion of “self control” is only temporary. You don’t control your destiny consciously. That cannot be done, because if you did – you would have failed in 5 minutes! You would have died if it was up to you to control every aspect of being alive.

Can you imagine how complex that is to breath? Did you ever see those life support machines in the hospitals? When a good friend of mine was dying after a car accident, I saw it. It looks complicated! I wouldn’t be able to operate that machine if I had to, so how could I possibly operate my own blood stream, heartbeat, breathing, detoxification, oxygenation and digestion – all at the same time?

Animals have less worries than us humans. That is easy to understand – they are less conscious. You don’t see an adult tiger with self esteem issues. His time stamps include many different experiences, but with one conclusion – food, chase, eat, sleep, have babies, food, chase, feed… There’s no much room for thinking on what stupid peers have roared to him in the past.