Emotional flooding is a form of psychotherapy that involves attacking the unconscious and/or subconscious mind to release repressed feelings and fears.
Many of the techniques used in modern emotional flooding practice have roots in history, some tracing as far back as early tribal societies.
Tribal communities often have a shaman, or a medicine man, whose primary responsibilities includes: diagnosing illnesses, prescribing herbs and suggesting other treatments to cure the afflicted of their ailments.
[2] Dr. Paul Olsen said, "Implicit in the belief that any sort of illness contains emotional elements is an unverbalized acknowledgment of an unconscious process.
[2] Psychiatrist Ari Kiev said, "[groups that] facilitate change by producing excessive cortical excitation, emotional exhaustion, and states of reduced resistance or hypersuggestibility, which in turn increases the patient's chances of being converted to new points of view [are consistent with modern-day modalities of primal therapy and encounter.
[2] Doctors from the Renaissance period also practiced treatments that resembled emotional flooding for patients afflicted with demonic possession.
Paul Olsen says, "Possession was truly a diagnostic category of its day, encompassing practically any form of religi-culturally determined psychopathology.”[2] Practitioners frequently attributed many ailments, as well as most odd behaviors, now recognized as mental diseases to Satan and other demons.
In all likelihood, pain stimulated a flood of unconscious crimes, such as murderous rage against authority figures, incest wishes, or any number of socially determined offenses.
[2] In A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, Charles Rycroft said that abreaction was the term applied to the expression of affect, with the subsequent alleviation of symptoms being the catharsis.
[8] Researchers now understand these displays as physical defenses; the body reacts in certain ways to defend the person against the expression of undesirable emotion.
Mann explains the build-up of armoring as the body's physical response to create blocks for natural biological movements such as curiosity, play, sex, exploration, or defiance of authority.
[2] Essentially, the technique meant that to properly treat the problem, the therapist must break down the body's defenses to allow repressed emotion to come out.