Finding Emotional Sanity: A New Path to Healing with Cedric Bertelli | EP 460

You know you need something, you're just not sure what. You've been listening, you're doing the work, but there's still this feeling that you're circling the same place, like you're waiting for the thing that finally moves you. Now maybe you've thought about working with me one-on-one. Maybe something's held you back, the timing, the money, or you're just not sure you're ready yet.

I get that.

And I want you to know there's still a place for you. I built a resource for exactly this moment, guided meditations for when the waves hit and you just need to breathe. Workbooks to help you get out of your head and onto the page, ebooks on what near-death experiences tell us about the people we've lost, and whether they're really gone, a full course for widows and widowers who are ready to find their way back to living, and a full course for the evidence of the afterlife. And all of it is available for pay what you want. Nobody gets turned away because of money. I think these resources are valuable, but I don't want to hold them back because you don't have the money to pay for them. You don't have to wait until you're ready for coaching. The next step might be a lot smaller than you think. To find out, go to grief2growth.com/store. That's grief, the numeral 2, growth.com/store. And check out the resources I've made for you. Close your eyes and imagine. What are the things in life that cause us the greatest pain? The things that bring us grief are challenges, challenges designed to help us grow, to ultimately become what we were always meant to be. We feel like we've been buried. But what if, like a seed, we've been planted? And having been planted, we grow to become a mighty tree. Now, open your eyes. Open your eyes to this way of viewing life. Come with me as we explore your true, infinite, eternal nature. This is Grief to Growth. And I am your host, Brian D Smith.

Hi there, I'm Brian D Smith, and welcome to Grief to Growth. And whether you're joining us for the first time, or you've been walking this journey with me for a while, for a while, I'm glad you're here. This show is a space for navigating the most difficult, difficult parts of life, and trying to answer the big questions. Who are we? Why are we here? Where did we come from? And where are we going? And if you're seeking healing, understanding, or deeper connection, yourself and others, you're in the right place. Today's guest is Cedric Bertelli. He's the founder of the Emotional Health Institute and co-developer of Emotional Resonance, otherwise known as MRES. It's a somatic approach to resolving emotional wounds at their root. Cedric has trained thousands of people around the world, helping them to free themselves from the grip of fear, anxiety, shame, and unresolved trauma, not by rehashing the past, but by tuning into what the body already knows. So in this episode, we'll explore what emotions really are, and how most of what we've been taught about managing, managing them might be completely wrong. Cedric will break down the difference between simply regulating emotions and resolving them for good. We'll also learn how your body, not your mind, holds the key to your emotional healing. So have you ever heard of interoception? Cedric says it's a missing piece in healing emotional pain. And it's likely happening inside you right now, without you even knowing it. We'll also talk about how the brain predicts our emotions, and how we can use that knowledge to free ourselves from long-standing patterns like fear of rejection, chronic anger, or paralyzing anxiety. And of course, we're going to connect all of this to grief, and how we can use emotional resonance, or EMRES, to move through grief with more grace, with more presence and true healing. I promise you, this will be an episode that could change how you think about emotions forever. And And if something resonates with you, I invite you to continue the conversation in our online support space at my Substack grieftogrowth.substack.com. You can— there you can listen to past episodes, connect with other listeners, and interact directly with me. So now let's dive into this fascinating conversation with Cedric Bertelli.

Hi, Brian.

Hi, Cedric. Good to talk to you today.

Good talking to you as well.

Emotional resonance, that's something that we all think about, but a lot of us don't really know how to do it. So before we get started, let's start with the basics. What exactly is EMRES and how did you come to develop it?

So, uh, EMRES, or Emotional Resolution, is, um, a methodology, I'd say, that was created based on how the brain constructs debilitating emotional patterns. So from understanding how the brain constructs emotional difficulties, recurring emotional difficulties, we found a way to help the brain deconstruct those emotions that are not congruent with our current reality. Because when we hear emotional resolution, sometimes say, well, I don't want to resolve my emotions. My emotions are here for a reason. And they're right. The idea, the aim, the goal of emotional resolution is to resolve those emotions that are not congruent with what's happening in our life right now. All those anxieties that we feel that have nothing to do with what's going on in our life now, or the sadness or the anger, so that we can actually feel the emotion that life is giving us currently. And how did I come to create it? I think there's two main pillars. In that. I think the first, the first trigger I was saying creating that is I was dealing with a lot of emotional difficulties myself. I had a lot of anxiety, a lot of self-directed anger, depression. So that was a motivation as I was doing whatever I could up until my late 20s to regulate those emotions. But regulate means control. So I was doing a good job in controlling them, but I was drinking too much to control them. I was doing unhealthy stuff to control them. So that obviously wasn't the right way to do it. So it was a personal search and, and quest. And the second thing that triggered the creation of Emrys is observing my grandfather. It was a World War II veteran. He passed away last year, was 101 years old. And see how him and men around him who went through World War II, how they were able to be resilient. Like, I always was fascinated by how people who lived such horror were able, without any help really from anybody, to be resilient and to start a new life and care for a family and set their family up for or say more success that they experienced themselves. And watching my grandfather and men who had similar experience, it made me realize very early on that we all have in us a capacity for emotional resilience. And my idea was, how can we bring this capacity for emotional resilience that some people found by themselves in life for absolutely everybody? And then it's— and then it was a lot of work. Of course, we work— I work with several people. Dr. Jacques Fumex in France, a man called Didier Godot in a French island next to Madagascar, who is a physical therapist. So it's a, it's a mix of— EmRest was created from a mix of personal wanting to, to discover, reading some specific philosophers such as Spinoza, Bergson, etc., etc. And the work of Lisa Feldman Barrett, who is a neurobiologist, a neuroscientist from Boston, and putting all this together and doing thousands and thousands of sessions on people to understand better how this capacity work and how to, well, start this capacity in everybody to resolve debilitating emotional pattern in their life.

Okay, so emotional resolution is really basically dealing with the emotions that are congruent with our current circumstances, if I understand you correctly.

Yeah, we talked about not congruent, that are not congruent.

Okay. Yeah. So it's so dealing with the ones that are not congruent, right? So we can resolve those. All right. So then emotional regulation is what we all— the term that we all know. And how is that different?

Emotional regulation is what we teach our children very early on at school or us as parents. To deal with their emotion. Like, for example, you feel nervous, count until 10 and take 4 breaths. You, you're afraid of this kid. Well, tell yourself that this kid is exactly the same as you, or this teacher is, is exactly the same as you. Emotional regulation is very important because it allows us in a way to survive, right, in the world without being overwhelmed by our emotions. But emotional regulation is a way to cope with our emotion. Is a way to control our emotions. There are strategies, again, necessary, but emotional regulation most of the time prevents emotional resolution. Very early on, we teach our kids to regulate their emotions, to give them, we give them techniques. I mean, I have a 4-year-old and she's already using a lot of techniques that she learned in preschool when she feels nervous or shy. And then she comes home and I tell her to do basically the reverse. Because what we discovered— I can, I can tell you, maybe it will help— how the brain constructs emotion and, and how, why emotional regulation prevents emotional resolution. Um, here, I think it's— yeah, I think it's the best to demystify what an emotion is. There's two things we need to understand when it comes to debilitating emotional patterns. Number one is as you said earlier in the introduction, the brain constantly predict. This is what keep us ahead of the time, ahead of the game. For example, you see that on everyday experiences, such as you having a Granny Smith apple, maybe when you're 5 years old, and you bite it, and you have a sensorial experience, right? The crunchiness, the acidity, the juiciness. Okay, that's the first time we have this kind of apple. But after this one time, every time you're going to take an apple in your hand, that specific type of apple in your hand, and you're about to bite it, your brain is going to predict instantly what physical sensations you're about to feel. Instantly. Same thing for a cup of coffee. Before drinking your coffee, you know exactly how it's going to taste like. And sometimes you have to adapt because it might be a different type of coffee, but your brain predicts how it's going to taste like. Something we have to keep in mind as well is from the day we're born until we die, we update predictions. This is how we learn. For example, if there is an ice cream store opening down the street here and it's a hot day and decide to go have an ice cream. If I enter the store and I see different batches like a pink batch, white batch, brown batch, and there's no name because that's a new store, so there's no label yet. And I decide to go for the pink ice cream, I'm going to think, well, that's going to be raspberry or strawberry. And the person gave me a scoop of that ice cream. I don't ask any question. I just ask for a scoop of this. If I go out and have one little bite of this ice cream and, wow, when I take it in my mouth, it tastes like smoked salmon. I'm going to be surprised. It's not going to be a trauma. It's going to— I'm going to be surprised. And this experience is going to update my prediction. This one bite in one second is going to change my prediction forever. That means that now I know that in this specific store, the pink bash is smoked salmon. Now I know that in this store, I better ask what flavors are there because it's going to be different. And because of this experience, if I enter in a store when there is no label, before asking for any product, I will ask, what is it? I've learned from this one experience. I updated my prediction for this specific store and I updated my prediction globally in my life. Okay, so the brain constantly predict and we constantly predict, update prediction. That's the first thing to remember. The second thing to remember is we know today how debilitating emotional patterns are created. At the origin of every single one of those patterns, anxiety, anger, all this stuff that comes back, at the origin is always the same type of event. It's an instant of trauma. That we know. Now, what is a trauma? A trauma is an instant that holds too much stress physically or emotionally for us to take on at the instant when we live it. So for a baby, a trauma might be too hungry. It's going to be very like an event is going to be very different for a little baby than for a 45-year-old man. Right. But that's what trauma is. That's it. There's no big T or small t in my word. It's just an instant that holds too much stress for us to take on when we experience it. Now, what we understand to go further in that is that what creates the pattern in the future is not the trauma, actually. It is the instant of dissociation happening during the trauma. When we have too much stress, too much fear, we dissociate. It is a natural process that happens so we don't suffer too much during the traumatic event. Now, we're not going to go in depth, but so people really understand what you and I right now, are able to gather as information is about 2,000 bits of information per second, consciously. So I'm seeing you, I hear you, I hear noises around me, taste in my mouth. That's about 2,000 bits of information per second processed at the speed of 150 miles per hour, consciously. Subconsciously, our brain has a capacity to gather 400 billion bits of information per second. At the speed of 150,000 miles per hour. So our prefrontal cortex is used as a filter because if we were bombarded by 400 billion bits of information per second, we would not be able to sit here and have a conversation. So when we're conscious, the prefrontal cortex is used as a filter. Now, when we live a traumatic moment and the stress is too high, there's dissociation, the prefrontal cortex shut down. You could say that the conscious mind shut down. There's no more filter. Now your subconscious is like this huge whirlpool that gathers information at extremely high speed, extremely high definition. It's gonna take, it's gonna, your subconscious is gonna gather what you see, what you taste, the temperature, the taste in your mouth, all the information happening around you, in a non-logical, non-linear way. Just imagine, yeah, a tornado gathering information extremely fast. And our subconscious is also going to record what physical sensations we are about— we are feeling in our body at that instant. So imagine a tornado opening in and out, everything happening inside, everything happening outside at the same time. And after a while, after a few seconds, or maybe a quarter of seconds, depending what we are living, the tornado shut up and shut down, and we are back to be conscious. But what we have to remember as well is, let's say if I'm being sexually abused for 5 minutes, I guarantee you that I'm not going to dissociate only once. I'm going to go in and out, in and out, in and out. And every time I go out, so to speak, in dissociation, that's another opportunity for the brain to gather all this information.

Okay.

Okay. So that's what's happening when we are experiencing a trauma and we experience tens and tens of traumas from the moment we are conceived up until we die. Right. There is a great study by a French doctor called Boris Cyrulnik that showed that the first 1,000 days of life from conception is a great garden for trauma because we're so vulnerable. But of course, afterward, you can also experience trauma. Anyway, so we experience all these moments of trauma and we don't remember them most of the time. Sometimes we remember our trauma, sometimes we don't, often we don't. Later on, when we are in life and our brain, our subconscious recognizes one or several elements, a smell, a situation, a silhouette, whatever it is. When your subconscious recognizes one or several elements that were present during a past trauma, your brain, my brain, is going to instantly predict what physical sensations you're about to feel, just like for the apple. And those physical sensations that your brain is predicting that you're about to feel are the physical sensations that let you know that you have an emotion. You know that you're anxious, you know that you're angry, you know that you're sad because you feel sensations in your body. It's not only in the brain, it starts with physical sensations. Those physical sensations, we call that interoception. Now, what is very clear to us now is that those physical sensations that let you know that you're feeling an emotion is nothing else but an outdated prediction from your brain. So as your brain gather— like gathering a stimulus, there's a stimulus that activate a memory, and those physical sensation is what let us know that we feel that we're about to face a danger. Most of the time nowadays, not real. Now what is happening is with emotional regulation, those physical sensations are uncomfortable because you feel them in your body during a traumatic event. They are uncomfortable. And we learn very early on to control them, to take breath, to have water, to numb them maybe with alcohol or marijuana or whatever it is that we decide to do. And we control the physical sensations. Every time you control those physical sensations, you're sending the signal to your brain that it might be a danger. That's why you're controlling them. And every time you control them, the pattern is not reinforced maybe, but is meant to repeat itself. What we discovered at the Emotional Health Institute, and it's not a discovery, I mean, it's all over the text. You can take philosophical texts, you can take the Bible, it's said everywhere, right? Some people call it the power of now, even if you know Eckhart Tolle, but it's always very cryptic. We brought it to the bone. And what I can tell you is that, is that what we discovered, what we put into light, is that when you feel those physical sensations in your body, knowing that you have an emotion, if you're able to feel those sensations in a safe place, in a safe environment, without trying to control, that means no breath, no intellectualization, no stretching, nothing. No distraction. If you're able to feel those physical sensations until the end, that means those physical sensations are going to change in your body. And the change, the transformation, the evolution of those sensations is going to take between 2 seconds and 90 seconds. If you're able to feel them without interacting with them, at the end of this evolution, your brain is going to realize that you're safe and sound. When the brain realizes that at the end of the prediction, there is no danger, because the brain is expecting to be hit by some kind of danger at the end of the prediction. That's what the prediction is. When you're able to feel them without controlling them or without having anybody controlling them for you, at the end of the prediction, the brain instantly realizes that you're safe and sound. The prediction is updated. That means that this emotion that kept on coming back in your life will not come back. Your brain realizes that this stimulus is not holding any danger anymore, the emotion will not come back.

Okay.

Wow. So it's a long answer, and I apologize, to show the difference between emotional resolution and emotional regulation. And often as parents, we try to, quote unquote, control our children's emotions because we feel bad about it, right? If my daughter is having a tantrum or is upset, I have the tendency to try to make her feel better in a way.

Right.

When actually, if we want this natural capacity for emotional resolution to kick in, what we should do more often is to be with them in presence, loving, and just let them go through their emotion. So be present, attentive, but let them feel those sensations. Without, without trying to cope with them.

Stay with us.

We'll be right back.

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Find me at grief2growth.com/substack. That's grief, the numeral 2, growth.com/substack.

Or just go to Substack and search for Grief to Growth. I hope to see you there. So I can see how this relates to something where you're, you're fearful, where you feel like you're in danger, like maybe you're having a panic attack, or you're getting, you're getting activated or triggered by some past danger that there's been. How would this relate to something like anger? You mentioned anger, so how does it relate to that?

It's exactly the same process. Let's say something that makes you angry might not make me angry, and vice versa, right? Let's say road rage. Some people get into crazy road rage. I used to, not anymore. It's wise because when the person is driving and I don't know, somebody cut them in front, that cutting in front, which is something that happened in their life, but it's really not a big deal. This, what they just experienced, it's a stimulus. It's going to reactivate a memory of something that the brain linked to something similar, a moment where their life was in actual danger. Where they suffered very much. So they have those physical sensations in their body and they express it as anger. But the anger is just a consequence of the physical sensations. Why are we getting angry? We're getting angry because we're packed with tension and we are screaming or, I don't know, punching the steering wheel to release the tension. We are feeling angry because we are afraid. So most of us, we don't link anger to fear. Anger is always a consequence of fear.

Right.

Always.

Yeah, that makes sense. And that's something I think I kind of figured out on my own after a while. It's like the reason why we get angry is because we feel like we're being attacked. We feel like we're under threat. So it is. It makes sense that that would be the same the same type of thing. But you know, it's, you know, so the physical sensations, and we've all, we've all had that. I just had that very recently. Someone said something to me that really triggered me. And I could feel those emotions just, you know, rising up, you know, the blood pressure, and then the feeling in my head and stuff. This is really interesting, because I was like, I could— it was a big, big, you know, physical thing. So we think— so the feelings, I guess, is what's letting us know we're having the emotion. Is that the way it is?

Correct. So you have this, you have this. So I got to be precise here. So let's say something is actually, someone is actually threatening you. If somebody is actually threatening you, chances are you're not going to feel anger, right? If somebody is threatening you and there is no past trauma related to that instant, you're going to be in a state of high arousal, right? Which is very different from anger. If there's an actual danger and you're angry, you lose your capacity to defend yourself in a way because you're overwhelmed. It's like in martial arts, right? If you go into a fight and you're angry, chances are you're not going to perform as well as if you are centered. You're losing a lot of your capacity because there is tension, because you're not open to what is actually happening. You're almost like a horse with, you know, what they put around the eyes. I don't know the word in English, ornières in French, you know, blinders. That's right. It cuts you. So if something is not right, somebody is threatening you or says something that is not right, you're going to have a physical information, right? It's a gut feeling. It's like, well, that's not right. But if there is no trauma that comes in resonance with that, you will be able to argue. To have a point and argue and defend yourself without tension. But if you have information and the tension stays and you feel like you're reacting out of this tension, chances are it's because there's something in you that is being triggered because you experienced a past trauma in your life. This we can resolve.

Okay.

This we can resolve. So the emotion, an emotion is purely physical. An emotion is purely sensory. And then we react, you know, we react out of those sensations. But what we see in the world, when we see people having an emotion, when we see a person having an emotion, it's already a reaction to what they feel in their body.

Interesting. Yeah.

And an emotion lasts between 2 and 90 seconds, never more. So if you feed in a funk for several hours, or even days sometimes, it is because either way you keep on thinking about the same things and you keep on retriggering the emotion. Or what happened often is there is an emotion that triggers, let's say, anger. And then right away, right after, your brain is triggering maybe resentment and then shame and then guilt. And so your brain is building emotion upon emotion based on your history, your beliefs, etc., etc. But the brain is extremely quick. Remember, 150,000 miles per hour. So within 2 minutes, something that you call anxiety in your brain actually might be 5, 10 emotions triggered one after another. And we just label it anxiety because that's what we've learned, right? As a conceptualization.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And as we were talking about this, I used to have terrible panic attacks and I did a lot of stuff to try to regulate them and stuff. And what I finally realized, this was decades ago, was fighting the feeling just made it worse. It just, it seemed like, and I finally just learned to relax into it and say, okay, I've lived through this before. I've had the same thing and I've never died. So because that's what it feels like, you're having a panic attack, you feel like you're dying.

Heart attack almost. Yeah.

And I've like, I've never died. So that was the only way I could get through it. But as long as I kept fighting it, it just kept coming back.

It is the same thing for everything. So basically what you did on you is MRS, right? It's, it's, uh, accept, yes, not accept it. It's what you did at the end of the day. It is accepting the sensations. So if you were doing it with a practitioner, like with me, I would have just helped you to stay, to be in your body as it's happening. And the panic attack is only increasing when you let it overwhelm you or you try to fight it, as you said. You know, and you're afraid of it. So you're having a reaction and then there's extra fears like, I'm going to die, what's happening? The body is in panic. If you stay just with the sensations and feel what's happening, in a way you're becoming the master of your inner world. You're with it. And the brain realizes that at the end, everything is happening. Nothing is happening. And it will go away.

Yeah.

Easier said than done though.

Yeah. Well, to be really frank with you, I don't have panic attacks much anymore, but I hate traveling, and I just told you I just got back from, from Europe. So I'm— Venice, last week I was, I was in Venice, and I started having these feelings, and I get— and it starts with the feeling, right? You start to feel like— I feel like my heart's racing a little bit, you know, and then, you know, your brain starts to tell you, this is going to be bad, this is going to be bad. And I've, I've learned over the decades that I've done this, it didn't get— it didn't spin out the way that it used to, but it's from all experience that I've had that I was able to, to try to regulate it. So I can relate to what you're saying.

Yeah. So next time that happened to you, as soon as you notice that, wow, something is feeling bad, or I feel like you recognize the symptoms of the panic, what you do, I'm going to tell you very pragmatically how to do it, if it's okay with you.

Yeah, please.

What you do is you sit down, you sit down, try to be in a place where you're by yourself. And where you feel safe is most important. You sit down and you close your eyes. So closing the eyes is important, not because it cuts you from the outside, but closing the eyes is going to show you if your body feels safe or not. At the Emotional Health Institute, we work with a great veterinarian. Her name is Dr. Nayla Sherino, and she does MRES with horses and cows.

Oh, wow.

And what we, what we know now is that, do you know what the first sign of fear is in a mammal?

Um, no, I don't.

We stop blinking.

Okay. Yeah.

That's the first sign of like a cow, a horse, a dog, a human. The first sign of fear is we stop blinking. We stare. And it's important to close your eyes before you do MRES because if you cannot close your eyes and feel comfortable with your eyes closed, it shows you that your body doesn't feel safe, which is very different from is your body feeling safe? Do you know that you're safe? You might think that you're safe. For example, if I'm afraid of spiders, right? I'm afraid of spiders. And there's a spider 2 meters away there on the wall. I know that I'm safe. But I guarantee you that if I close my eyes, all I'm going to want to do is looking at the spider, just in case. So it's important. You feel something is— you're feeling in a funk. There's something happening. Close your eyes. Sit down, close your eyes. Can you close your eyes and be okay with that? Yes. Perfect. Then you continue. The next step is going to be to pay attention to two sensations in your body at once. Two physical sensations. So you'll notice the— you mentioned the heart. Maybe it's difficult to breathe. Maybe you have a pit in your stomach. Maybe your legs feel weak. Maybe you have a knot in your throat. You've got to pay attention to two physical sensations at once. If you only pay attention to one sensation, you're going to have room to think still. And the thought, the thought is going to add fear, right? It was like, wow, something is coming up. I know what's coming up. No, no, no. You got to overwhelm your thought with physical sensations. So feeling two sensations at once, maybe your heart and your throat, whatever is happening for you, put your attention on them, intense attention. That means that you put your you put your attention on what's going on in the body and nothing else. And after a while, after not a while, like a few seconds or one second, those sensations are going to start changing in the body. Now the key is for you to do nothing other than to feel them change. You've got to keep your attention sharp in feeling what's happening in the body as the sensations change without trying to control them, without trying to understand them, without trying to hold on to them. Feel. You're going to feel those sensations for a strength of 2 seconds to 90 seconds, never more. At the end of the sensations changing, moving, evolving, you're going to feel calm. At that instant, open your eyes. And that's it. That's it. So it's very pragmatic. It's recognizing when the emotion is starting to be present in us. It's important to do it when it starts to be present, not at the peak of the emotion, because what we feel as a peak of an emotion is an accumulation of emotions.

Right.

It's important to start the process when you start feeling that something is happening in you. Not trying to understand why, just accept it. There's something that doesn't feel right. Boom. Close your eyes and get into your body. Feel the sensations and be attentive to the sensations and only the sensations. As the change in your body without controlling them, interacting with them, or having somebody doing it for you. It's very pragmatic.

Yeah, very. And it makes a lot of sense. And as I said, it took me a long time to get to something similar to that when I was going through this 30+ years ago, because I tried all these different techniques and then I finally read a book I think it was called From Panic to Power. And to me, it was not, not anything nearly as sophisticated as what you're talking about, but I just learned I have to lean into it, you know, instead of fighting it, lean into it and actually, you know, just, just kind of ride it out and feel it as opposed to trying to fight it.

That's exactly what it is, right? The thing is, it's, it's always people have been using words such as, uh, lean into it, uh, be in the moment. But what does that mean? Right. What does that mean to lean into it? Like, if I'm angry and I lean into my anger, I might scream and try to beat a pillow.

Right.

You know, but that's nothing. That's just riding the wave of the emotion. It's like a panic attack is the wave of the emotion. And as human beings, we ride the wave all the way to the shore and we crash on the shore every time. The idea here is like the wave is just a signal. Get in the current, get into the depth of the ocean. That's where the currents start. This is where the wave starts. Starts just like in the ocean. The waves are not created so much by the elements. Sure, a little bit, but mostly through current in the depth of the ocean. The depth of the ocean is your flesh. It starts in your body. And these physical sensations, what I call the current of the emotion, it's nothing else but an outdated prediction. You've got to feel the prediction until the end. Without trying to serve the emotional way. And that's difficult for humans because we are highly emotional being in a way. We love the quote unquote, the drama of the emotion, right? We love the emotion, even anger. Like there is something a lot of people say, oh, I use anger to— no, you don't use anger for anything good actually, because after anger, after anger, either way, you're going to hurt somebody. You're going to hurt yourself. Well, after being angry, you're going angry, you're going to notice that you're absolutely exhausted.

Yeah.

So this whole paradigm of like, oh, I use my anger for— no, that's, that's, it sounds good. And you can keep on saying that. But if you have recurring anger, I guarantee you that either way you're hurting yourself, you're hurting somebody else, or anyway, you completely drain at the end of the experience. It's going to keep on coming back.

So we've talked about some emotions like, like anger. We talked about, you know, panic or fear. What about emotions that seem to be more deeply embedded, like grief or shame or something like that?

Great question. So for me, there is emotions on 3 layers. There are the conscious emotions, and these are the emotions we just talked about, right? They are quote unquote in our face, the anger, the anxiety, the fear. We recognize them and we accept them. So we try to regulate them most of the time, right? So we try to, I don't know, we have, we read books again, we use booze that we try to do something about it or not, you know, then there are the unconscious emotions, which are the ones that are, we know that they're there, but we don't want to look at them, the shame, the guilt, the I don't feel like I'm enough, etc., etc. So we can, if we, if we stop and do an introspection, we might realize that they're there, but we don't like them. We don't accept them. We let them run in the background most of the time. We deny them. And then there's a subconscious emotion. The subconscious emotions don't have a name. They're just tension in our body. All day long, you, me, everybody, we are walking the world with tensions. And those tensions they are an emotion. They don't have a label because they're not strong enough to be conceptualized.

Wow.

But let's say you and me, we meet for the first time, and when I meet you, I start feeling tense, and I'm going to make up a story for that, right? I'm going to say, well, I met Brian D Smith, and there's something about that guy I don't get, right? And I'm going to make up a story. All it is maybe is because you have a specific smell that I don't even consciously recognize, but the smell of a kid who used to beat me up 30 years ago. Or maybe your head shape is the same shape as a teacher that I used to have and that used to, like, I don't know, scream at me or whatever. It has nothing to do with you. But I'm going to come in your presence and my brain is going to recognize something about you, link it to a past trauma. It's going to— I'm going to have tension and I'm going to take this tension as there's something about Brian that I don't like.

Yeah.

And I'm going to make up a story. I'm going to believe this story. And that's going to create already a dynamic in a relationship. We could have been close friends if I didn't have this reaction. But because I have this reaction, chances are we're not going to seek your friendship, right? I'm not going to try that. These subconscious emotions are creating the dynamics of our lives. And for those subconscious emotions, for that you need a practitioner that helps you to isolate them and resolve them. But to, so to answer your question clearly here, for conscious emotion, the one we talked earlier in the conversation, we can do it on our own, often by the, by the methodology I explained earlier. For unconscious and subconscious emotion, it's better to do it with a practitioner because a practitioner will help you to isolate those emotions that we don't realize we have or that we don't like and resolve them in a safe place. Now, when it comes to grief, for me, and it is just my vision, I'm not saying it's right. For me, grief is something that has to be experienced. So it's not something that can be resolved. So, so you will lose someone, family member, a pet, a relationship. And, and there's a grief period that happens. Let's say I lost my, listen, my mother or something. I lost my mother and I used to have this body, this person that I used to love right there and I could have physical contact with and communication, huge part of my life. And now she's not here anymore. There is an emptiness. There is a missing. This emptiness, this missing has to be completely experienced rawly, like in a raw way. There's nothing we can do about that. It's part of the human experience. Now, what can be resolved is what I call the parasites emotion that prevent us from grieving.

Wow.

So what are those? The shame, the anger, the guilt, the victimization, all those emotions that come on the grief experience like parasites and hook to the grief experience.

Right.

And when we are busy with those emotions, the anger, the incomprehension, when we're busy dealing with those emotions, we don't grieve. And so that's, that's the difference. Griefing for me is the experience between me and the person that passed is a continuum of the relationship, the adaptation of this physical form to not having this form to communicate like I used to with. That's grieving, and it's going to create pain and sadness and missing, and that will, will have to be experienced. Takes about 2 to 3 months for the brain to actually realize and somebody that was very close to you is not there anymore. That's why very often when somebody passed, we talk about them in the present tense without wanting it, because the brain actually do not integrate the information they're gone for 2 to 3 months. But then if we are too busy by those parasites, those me emotions, my problem, my shame, my guilt, my anger, those me emotions is cutting us from the grief. So when people come to see me and they say, well, I've been grieving for a year, you haven't been grieving. That's the problem. You have been busy. You have been chewing on stuff that do not allow you to grieve. So what are those emotions that do not allow you to miss the person, the relationship, or whatever you lost that you care so much about? And that's how we're going to approach grief with Emrys, so that the person, the person actually have an opportunity, the space to experience the rawness and the continuity of the relationship with the person that passed.

Yeah, that is so well said. And I completely agree with what you just said. Because I realized, you know, I work with people that are in grief. And as I've been doing this over the years, I've realized, okay, there's a couple of things I usually look for as I'm coming, new clients coming Do you have unresolved guilt? Do you feel like you did something wrong or you didn't do something, or whatever it is? Do you have anger at the person who passed, or the doctors, or anybody else? You know, because these are the things that prevent people from processing their grief. And I feel like sometimes they almost like get attached to those things because then they don't have to process their grief.

That's what I call them, the parasites. Yeah, right. And so it's, it's, it's, and it feeds in a way when they're quote unquote busy with the anger and such, it's, it keep in a way, right? It keep the person that lost alive for them. And for some people, it's so difficult to let go of those emotions because they feel like if I don't feel the anger toward the doctor, if I don't feel the guilt for not, I don't know, whatever it is, then I'm losing this person even more. So it's creating this shift. No, it's not what's going to happen. You don't need to suffer in order to grieve.

Right.

There's no value. There's no added value in your suffering because of anger or guilt or shame or whatever else your history is giving you. It doesn't— no, it's not what grieving is. Yeah.

This has been really helpful for me to put language to this for my clients because Again, I'm like, let's deal with these emotions. Let's deal with the anger. Let's deal with the guilt, you know, so then we can work on processing the grief. Because grief does have to be experienced. We can't, we can't resolve the grief, we've got to go through that process. And I, again, I see people that come to me and say, I'm stuck where I am, you know, it's been 3 years, been 2 years, or whatever. And as you said, you haven't been grieving, you've been dealing with all these parasitic emotions that are keeping you from your grief.

I couldn't agree more. I couldn't agree more. And grief is, for me, pure grief is a sacred process. It's almost, it's a continuity of the relationship, continuity of the relationship under another form. There's no physical anymore, But the relationship continues in a different way. Right. And it's this peaceful— at first it's not that peaceful. It's painful. It's painful. And then it's transcending or transforming into this new relationship.

Yeah. I think that's so well said. And to me, it's like grief isn't— it's not an emotion. I heard a guy say it's a collection of emotions, but it's this process that comes with these emotions. And, and they're going to be different for different people depending on circumstances, depending on your background, depending on relationship with the person, etc. So those things need to be resolved, and we can use MRS to resolve them so that then we can process the grief.

It's exactly it. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, that's exactly it.

So tell me about, um, MRS. How do people find out more about what it is? You said sometimes people could do some things on their own. Sometimes they need a practitioner.

Yep. So we are nonprofit. It's the Emotional Health Institute. And if you want to know more about us, you can go to emotionalhealthinstitute.org. And we— so there are several things we do. We, we have a directory of certified practitioners and some are therapists, some are coaches, some are just MRS practitioners. It's a large large, how can I say that, there's a lot of diversity in the people that do this work. And so if you feel like you need somebody to support you to resolve some emotions, or if you know that you have a pattern in your life that keeps on coming back and you cannot really pinpoint what emotion creates it, find an EMDR practitioner and they will help you to change a pattern. But we also give classes for free or for, I think, some of with the practitioner charge like $8 for them, where we teach you in depth how the brain construct emotion. So we vulgarize what an emotion is. So people are not seeing an emotion that is mystical or Freudian thing, but how, what is an emotion? And we teach you to do self-EMRAS. So you can, by yourself, on yourself, resolve those conscious emotions. So those classes offered I have at least twice a month. It's most, uh, some are in, uh, in person all over the US, some are online, and people can join for no money or, or very little money and to learn about what an emotion is actually and how to resolve their own debilitating emotional pattern. And then we offer classes for, um, coaches, therapists, HR professionals, policemen, you know, people who, who work with, with other individuals. For them to learn to apply EmRes on their clients or their patients. It's called the EmRes Practitioner Training.

Wow, that sounds, that sounds fantastic. You know, I, I was— as we're talking, you mentioned, we mentioned different types of emotions. You mentioned some of these that are so low-level or subconscious, they can't really be named. Um, how do we, you know, I wonder how do we deal with those, you know? As you said, I just, I just get a bad feeling about that person, you know, and, and it's, and it's really fascinating because it's like it could be because of the shape of their head, right? They remind you of somebody else has got nothing to do with them. So is there a way that we can start to recognize, like, I mean, maybe recognize, okay, I'm having this feeling, but what do I do with it?

I think on for, for so for this, that's where MRS became very strong, right? We were able to develop methodology to if, if I realize and there is a feeling, but I cannot pinpoint exactly when it started, what we, we develop a whole methodology on, on how to isolate it and resolve it. But that's something that you need to do with somebody. And the reason is the person, the MRS practitioner is going to ask you specific questions that don't make any sense to trigger some of those sensations to resolve them with you. Like even I've been doing that for a long time now. And even some stuff, like for example, my hands used to be covered with psoriasis. You know, it's an eczema. I used to have eczema on my hand and I knew it was psychosomatic because when I was in the US, I didn't have any eczema. I took the plane to go to France and by the time I leave the plane, that finger was covered with eczema and then it was very quickly growing in my hands. So, but I was not able to, to do it by myself. Right. It's something, you know, some stuff linked to friends and my story. So I, I, I, somebody that I trained did sessions with me so I could get rid of the eczema. What I mean is there's some things that are difficult to deal on our own because they're buried and, and because we need to let go of control in order to find them. And when we go in ourselves, often there is a, um, there is an element of control. It's difficult to let go of control when you go into yourself and to ask yourself the right questions. So it is absolutely possible to resolve those latent tensions that create the dynamics of our life. But at least for now, I don't know if we're going to develop something that will allow people to do it on themselves by themselves. That would be kind of like the best. But so far, it's better to work with a practitioner. And, and you see, it's not like— MRS is not something that you're going to do for a long time. Like, you see the practitioner once, twice, maybe 3 times, and that's it. Uh, it's not, it's not a recurrent thing. It's a— there's a problem, we're going to resolve it.

Okay, that's it. So you mentioned, you mentioned a medical thing like psoriasis. Um, I'm thinking about things like maybe high blood pressure. Have you had, have you had any experience with people that are experiencing maybe high blood pressure, it says, you know, they may not understand because a lot of some of that is physical, but some of that is emotional or tied to stress.

Absolutely. I mean, any— there's a lot of, a lot of symptoms that happen in us that don't have any biological explanation. High blood pressure, pelvic pain, chronic pain. They go to the doctor, they run a bunch of tests on you, and biologically everything is okay with you. And so, and so people say, well, what the heck, you know, I know what I feel. I know what's happening to me. And the doctor said, no, there's nothing happening with you. It's always this, this, uh, it's paradoxical, right? So you think I'm lying or what? No, it's often it's, it's psychosomatic. The pain is real. The high pressure, the high blood pressure is real. The psoriasis is definitely real, but it is, it is psychosomatic. So we developed, and that's mostly Dr. Jacques Fumex, who is a gastroenterologist. From the Lyon University in France, we developed a specific way to do MRES starting from the symptom. So starting from the symptom, we're going to be able to go into the flesh, so to speak, and isolate and resolve— how can I say that— hidden trauma or hidden memories. So when it comes to physical symptom, we start with the symptom. And we resolve emotions that are fueling the symptoms.

Wow. Wow.

Because if you have a symptom coming up, eczema, pain, it's never one emotion. It's always an accumulation of emotions that are not being taken care of.

Interesting. Well, I happen to believe that the more I've been around, the more I'd study that much more psychosomatic. We want to use that word than is actually physical. I think, you know, our minds do manifest, you know, through our bodies. And, you know, Western medicine always says there's a, you know, physical cause for things. But we know our emotions, our thoughts, etc. We see with the placebo effect, you can give someone a pill and if they think it's going to solve their problem, you know, a lot of times it does. That's why pharmacy companies have to run placebos because they have to show their pill actually does something. Physical.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, it's complex, right? It's even walking in your house, you know, you have a picture that you think brings joy. And maybe this picture, which is, I don't know, you and your father, consciously you think is bringing you joy, but your brain sees this picture and links it to something maybe terrible that happened on that day, you know, and that creates tension. You don't realize it, but this tension is present in you every single day of your life. Through this one picture.

Yeah.

And you can't realize it. We do something called clearing the house with Emrys, which is like, I'm asking my client to like stand in front of every single picture of your house or ever, like even an old chair that you got from your grandma and feel like, what are the sensations in your body? Is it relaxed? Is it, does it feel good? Is it joy? Or is there tension? You'd be surprised how much people feel tension in front of pictures or furniture that come from the family. You know, and they sit on every single day, how much tension they generate in the body.

Yeah.

And this is an accumulation of tension every single day that's going to deplete your, your, uh, your, um, physical budget. Emotions don't make any sense.

Yeah, it's really interesting. You know, our brains are, are fascinating. They, they've evolved to keep us alive. You know, they, they're always looking out for fear. They're always saying, watch out for this, watch out for that. But what I've realized is they haven't really evolved to make us happy. They could make us pretty miserable because they're, again, they're always looking out like, look out for that, look out for that. That guy looks a little bit like the guy that beat you up when you were in second grade, so stay away from him.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. It's what we said at the beginning, right? A lot we don't even enjoy. Let's say I play with my kid, right? She's 4 years old and all I should feel is joy and enjoying being with her. But I might be thinking about what happened at the office yesterday. Right. And this anxiety is wasting the time that I have with my daughter. This is not natural. This, yeah, my brain is looking, is always in the radar mode. Well, you have to be careful that happened yesterday. But that's not, it doesn't help in any way.

Yeah.

So yeah, you're right. You're right. Our brain is wired to detect any danger, and this constant detection is cutting us from joy.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Well, Cedric, this has been fascinating. Thank you so much for being here today. Remind people again of how they can find out more about the Emotional Health Institute and EMRES and if they can reach out to you.

Sure. Thank you for having me, first of all, Brian. And they can go to emotionalhealthinstitute.org. Or emres.com goes to the same place. And if they want to find me personally, they can type Cédric Bertelli and my first name and last name, and they will find my website if they have any questions or anything like that. All right.

Well, thank you. Thank you so much for doing this. Have a great rest of your day.

You as well. Be well.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

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