A is for the Amygdala (and Anger). Part 2

Why are we afraid of anger?

I talked in the previous blog about how we can easily re-activate our early experiences of emotional and energetic distress. If we’re feeling irrationally angry, fearful or shut down, it may mean the amygdala – the earliest transmitter of difficult feelings – and its body brain connectivity, has been come into play. This dynamic is difficult to regulate as the process is not under conscious control. In fact, this is a very early response in humans, so early in fact that our ‘memory’ of the process forms before development of the prefrontal lobes (the thinking part of the brain). It feels like this is simply ‘what we do’  or ‘who we are’ rather than something we can control or change.

How does the activation feel in a person, particularly when it is is very strong?  The ‘feelings’ transmitted through the amygdala may be difficult to distinguish, most identifiably expressed as ‘distress’, not even as separate ‘feelings’ at all. Within this distress, however, it may be possible to distinguish some singular energetic forces. Anger, for instance. We might not call the feeling ‘anger’ but we might agree there is an energetic power of anger in the baby’s cry. The cry is certainly designed to alarm the parent; there is an aggressive purpose to it. We might consider what happens if there has been an early development that has foreclosed an infant’s anger. If the baby’s ‘anger’ has been met with indifference, anxiety or even retaliation and aggressive anger on the part of the caregiver, then expression of the baby’s own primary feeling (baby rage) can feel unsafe; life-threatening, catastrophic, even. It becomes life protecting for the infant  to develop a mechanism to keep this primary feeling deeply under wraps and out of conscious awareness.

What happens to the anger?

The developing infant does not learn that their distressing angry feelings facilitated by the amygdala can be welcomed and soothed by the caregiver.  Anger and fear become difficult to separate in the developing human as a first response. Not necessarily because life itself is frightening, but the powerful feelings of anger trigger an accompanying fear message. Not unusually, the person may only experience the feeling of fear, with the ‘anger’ completely locked away in dissociation. They may also feel  ‘distressed’ but also confused by what exactly is going on inside.

Getting Stuck

We can easily get ‘stuck’ in the early cortical responses, be unable to soothe ourselves in our ‘distress’ or meet ourselves in our powerful sense of ‘anger. In order to regulate anger this feeling would have needed to have been received and regulated by another person. Mirrored and soothed in early infancy. So what happens to the powerful energy contained in this very early response? If it’s not welcomed it somehow gets held in the body, or even shut down. Does it disappear, flatten out and find another way to resolve itself energetically? I think this is where it gets interesting and also troubling since it seems more likely that the energy is still there – with ‘there’, however, being an implicitly unknowable and potentially threatening disposition for the human being involved.

In the early infant life is either good or bad – the amygdala’s response to experience is fairly primitive. If the parent cannot transform the bad to good through soothing what happens? The person can get stuck in the ‘bad’. This is suffering.

It is only a small step, developmentally, for the child to start to believe that their anger (which by now may be directed at their caregiver) is also ‘bad’. From there it is only another small step for the developing conscious brain in the infant to create a belief that it is they who are also bad. It feels like the energy that began as a raw and legitimate way of signalling distress to the world, starts to become misdirected – its power starts to turn back on itself and become pre-occupied with, and even aggressively targeted at the self. We habitually become angry – both with the world, but mostly with ourselves. This can create deep and enduring levels of suffering.

So, what can we do about it?

To begin unravelling all this, to begin to redirect energy and start to regulate feelings in a more self-attuned and loving way, can be a slow and gradual process. This is often why people come to therapy.  To feel better and more energised. In therapy we can find ways to contact early and distressing feelings, including anger; to mirror, soothe and regulate perfectly natural normal important states of being. The work is through the mind/body contact between the therapist and client, and in time, hopefully internalised in new and healthy ways by the person themselves.

A is for Amygdala (and also for Anger)

As adults in difficulty we often experience ourselves through difficult sensations and feelings that don’t always make much sense. We can feel grumpy, despondent – or we can go up a notch and feel angry or anxious or even panicky. Alternatively or consequently to all this we can drop right down to the bottom and perhaps feel shut down, or even feel nothing at all.

How often do we say we are ‘stressed’? What does that mean? The point here is that it’s not always easy to identify just what we are feeling, let alone specific emotions which may or may not be following their neuro-chemical trajectories through our bodies. Regardless of this, after a while of this difficult experience, we might surprise ourselves to find that we are suddenly feeling ‘happy’ again.

What is going on here? How can we help ourselves if we experience a sequence of feelings or sensations that we just don’t have any control over?

Before we blame the world or blame ourselves (typical go to) could we pause a minute and consider what might be happening in our brain chemistry?

I am going to give a shout out here for the work of the amygdala. 

In the beginning was the amygdala…

A lot of work in therapy is around the regulation of energy and feeling that doesn’t feel supported in the body (hence depression, anxiety and trauma being frequent reasons for seeking help).The earliest mediator we have in terms of our body brain development is the amygdala which is a structure in the mid-brain, present at birth and throughout life.

One of the difficulties for both a psychotherapist and their client is that often the ‘feelings’ that can emerge and overwhelm an adult, are those mediated through this early part, the amygdala. Although we cannot ask babies this, I would suggest the amygdala is primarily concerned with expressing powerful but simple emotional responses: anger (baby rage), grief (sudden loss causing catastrophic crying in the baby) and fear (panic in the baby).  When you’re holding a crying baby there doesn’t seem to be much differentiation among these responses. We can call them feelings, they have the energy of feelings, but a baby’s crying can also be encapsulated in a single term, that of distress.

Leaving a baby in distress, to cope on their own with these powerful primary responses, is harmful to a child’s development. This is a progression in theories of child psychology in terms of how we understand and respond to a baby’s needs. Not so very long ago (and still around today), it was believed by some, that ‘leaving a baby to cry’ was a good thing.

Trauma theory tells a different story. If a baby wants loving contact and cannot find it, they will cry. If the cry isn’t responded to they will cry more. We might suppose there is frustration, even anger in the cry (if we accept that a baby’s cries contain anger). If the cry is still ignored, the distress may become more heightened, escalating into a ‘fight flight’ state of frustrated panic in the child. There are many of us who recognise this state in an infant. Still, if the baby continues to be ignored. What happens? The fight flight response gets bigger and it overwhelms the child, who cannot contain such big and powerful feelings in their tiny bodies. The end point in this distressing pattern of response is the  protective ‘cutting out’ which can happen when we are unable to regulate strong feelings. Stephen Porges has a powerful, influential theory pertaining to the structure of the vagus nerve about just this body brain phenomenon.

‘Cutting out’ is also referred to as the ‘hypo’ response – or collapsed stage of the trajectory of the autonomic nervous system (ANS). If this response becomes chronically repeated it becomes encoded in the body’s systems and therefore an embodied, default response to stress in the developing human. This has also been described as a trauma response (Heller, 2012).

So, if you’re feeling frightened or aggressive and can’t calm down, or equally if you recognise yourself as being in a state of shut down, this may be the work of the amygdala and the autonomic nervous system responding in early survival mode. Panic and anxiety ensue whenever strong feelings are activated and the person is transported back to the early developmental difficulties, to the amygdala’s raw and deeply powerful early activation of ‘distress’.

So what can we do about it?

By implication the ‘distress’ if we can call it this, the difficult perhaps indescribable states or moods we can drop into, isn’t always alleviated by talking. This is because the regulation of the distress was part of an early developmental stage when we were babies – that is before language and also before conscious memory. We need to respond to it as such. It’s a complex issue, as we’re really talking about relearning a very early process, but it can be done. We can seek help and we can stop talking about this distress as something that is a fixed and intractable part of our emotional make-up. And we can be kind to ourselves.

In the next blog, I will talk about anger and how therapy can help the feeling of being out of control or shut down whenever a person comes into contact with a sense of this challenging feeling.

Shake it up - a short note on Self-regulation

It would be great to be a really calm person, wouldn’t it? To trust that whatever disturbance is going on in your mind and body, that this is temporary, and give yourself a few minutes you will return to calm – like the proverbial snow shaker. We give it a shake, place it down, and wait. Within a few seconds or minutes, the pieces have fallen together on the ground. Everything has come to rest.

Falling apart?

Or falling together?

If we’ve been really busy, or energised, or just pushed ourselves a little bit more than usual, this will affect our system. It might take longer to bring the body back into homeostasis – a process which we are biologically developed to do. ‘But my body isn’t doing that’, I hear you say. ‘I can’t slow down. I don’t understand why I’m feeling so overwhelmed and anxious’. With this kind of thinking, before we know it we’ve intensified further the sense of being out of control – fragmenting even, at its furthest point.

We might even find ourselves shaking the snow shaker again, and again – maybe this time it will work. ‘I will work sufficiently hard or please such and such a person that I will receive the endorsement I need and then I will be able to calm down’.

The trouble is that shaking your system up again and and again, isn’t going to help anything.

Self-regulation is really hard!

Really, after each cycle of energetic activity we should allow our systems to wind down and pause a little until we’re ready to start with the next round. But life rarely works like that.

So I was thinking about what could be one piece of helpful thinking I could offer in this short blog (enough of all the self-help over-sharing!)

And I think that one thing is:  Don’t keep shaking the snow shaker. Don’t keep over-riding your system. Life isn’t for that. There is a part of us that experiences the shaking up and  snowflakes falling with child-eyed pleasure; and there is another part that watches with calm recognition. We have the capacity to contact ourselves and hold the over-excitement. To enjoy the over-excitement even but then to watch over ourselves as we come down to rest.

Feelings and the Story

It seems obvious that feelings are in the body rather than in the head but you wouldn’t think so to hear people. 

‘I feel excluded and that I’m not enough for people. Everyone seems to be getting on with their lives successfully apart from me.’

‘I feel I should be working harder. I keep failing to keep up with my goals and let myself down.’

When we unpick these statements in therapy we often realise that on balance the underlying reality is different to how the person experiences themselves; that in fact they have more friends than they realise, are actually working at over-capacity and need to slow down; that their goals might need readjusting.

So, if the truth is different and when a person can see that, what are we left with? What is true? The feelings are true. We experience them. It can be very hard to get to that point, however. Often when I talk to people who make these statements, when we strip away the narrative and I ask them ‘what is the feeling?’, they don’t know. They actually can’t feel anything. Or maybe they feel a glimpse of something – something painful in their chest, or a stirring in their belly. We give it a little longer and then there’ll be a slight opening: ‘I feel sad and alone’. I ask them where they feel this, they reply: ‘here in my heart space’.

Recently I had to cancel an entire week of work because I was ill. After struggling for a few days, I woke at four in the morning, worrying about how I would say to clients who were themselves struggling with anxiety and challenging feelings, that I couldn’t be there for them. I tried unsuccessfully to calm myself with consoling thoughts such as ‘you can’t help being ill’, and ‘you are only one person’, and ‘things will change. You will get better’. After struggling with this for a while, to no good effect, I finally gave up and found myself also giving in; giving into feeling. And what came up through the whole of my body was an overwhelming feeling of guilt. It was so powerful and it underlined for me the lengths we as humans will go to suppress difficult, negative emotions. Once I was able to give into the sense of the feeling in my body, I started to feel a little better: even though it was a deeply uncomfortable feeling, it was moving and I felt less frozen and stuck in my head.

Complex Feelings

One of the difficulties people have when they’re trying to connect with their feelings, is that they are complex: we might be feeling a mix of emotions all at the same time. Work with development in infancy tells us that little children cannot cope with complex feelings. They need an attuned caregiver to be with them, to meet them in this confusing and powerful place, to soothe them so that they know these feelings will pass. The neuroscientist, Allan Schore (1994) also tells us when we are first born we are at the mercy of the part of the brain called the amygdala which processes base feelings such as fear and a sense that things are not OK. We might postulate that infant’s feelings are not as refined as older children’s and often babies will swing in and out of primary feelings such as love, excitement, fear,  grief;  later they will learn shame, disappointment and sadness but things generally become more complex.

Guilt is a complex feeling born out of shame. We could perhaps talk about guilt as being shame but with thoughts attached.

We could imagine complex feelings as a box of different coloured woollen threads all tangled up together. I have used this as an exercise – eliciting from a client what perhaps they feel in their body at a given moment, and then asking them to choose a colour and to try to disentangle a thread from the others. What are they feeling? As they draw the thread away from the others, they often experience the named feeling moving through their bodies. And then…and then, another feeling emerges. We do the same process again and another feeling emerges. So we may move from anger to sadness to disappointment – all present in the body. The client notices how these feelings move:  we generally say in body psychotherapy that feelings begin as stirrings in the belly, move upwards to be amplified in the chest (heart space), and get expressed through the eyes or mouth. In this exercise the client notices that this can happen all by itself without them having to ‘do’ anything. 

Reaching a feeling

When people realise that it’s the feeling, not the story that matters in starting to feel better they can often become frustrated (another feeling!). What can I do with this feeling? How can I stay in touch with it, rather than going into my head and writing another narrative? Or rushing back into life to repeat the same old avoidance strategies I always get into? When they do start to actually ‘feel’ their feelings they realise they are huge. Often the sense of the feeling extends out from their bodies and fills the space around them. Containing the feeling in the body can seem initially impossible.

The answer is time. It takes time to slow down, notice what you’re feeling in your body and use the breath to regulate the cycle of the feeling. We also need another person – at least to begin with. If early on we realise no-one is there to support us in this we’ll learn strategies to inhibit and control our emotions.

It takes time and the help of others to learn to do things differently.

Sleeplessness – what if no-one’s to blame?

Here’s a new one. How about the idea that there is nothing we can do about insomnia? When I say that I don’t mean it literally, and my intention is not to sound defeatist, but the reality is that, in spite of all the discussion, marketing and wisdom about insomnia, some of us still can’t sleep!

Sleep problems are generally presented as something we should be able to fix. The latest (https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/feb/16/i-look-at-the-clock-its-3am-why-women-cant-sleep) is Mariella Frostrup’s evidently from-the-heart plea to change society for women so they don’t lie awake at night thinking about all the things they have to do. Frostrup presents sleep as a cognitive issue. Change your thought patterns and your insomnia will loosen its grip.

The other thing that’s often said about sleep is that there is an on-off switch. That sounds obviously wrong – but again there is a pervasive notion that if we can switch off our thoughts, then we relax. How about the possibility that even after switching off our thoughts we can’t wind down? Energetically we may still be buzzing: streamings, over-heating, muscle tension, visceral sensations, so much inner activity animating and agitating us in the middle of the night, all refusing the calm of our conscious control. In fact, it could be that it is our embodied, energetic charge that provokes us into conscious ruminations, rather than the other way round.

We could consider the idea that not sleeping is nothing to do with the thinking part of the brain, but the result of deeper, mind-body connections. These can become established in early childhood development. Modern neuroscience (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0sKY86Qmzo) tells us that the frontal lobes, while firing, only come on-line gradually through the first two years of life. Our energetic self-regulation develops in these early years through neural connectivity between the emotional structures in the mid-brain and the body. And that regulation is very much dependent on our how we interact as babies with our parents.

As human beings we work though energetic cycles. An impulse starts, building a charge in us which reaches the top of the curve where it is fully expressed. We follow the curve downwards through the winding down phase to a point of rest at the bottom. Where there is a pause. It is towards the bottom of the curve, that we move towards sleep. If you miss out on the winding down phase you are more likely to bounce up again into activity in the middle of the night.

Parents instinctively understand this about babies – that holding and rocking a child can support the winding down necessary for sleep. Babies need ‘holding’ through all kinds of cycles both energetic and emotional. We cannot regulate our energy and feelings when we are very young. We need the eyes and the central nervous system of another person, to support us in this, so that our own neural pathways can grow and eventually we can do it for ourselves.

As a body psychotherapist, I see the difficulties when there was struggle at this early stage of development. Some clients can’t get up the curve in order to come down again. Others spend all their time at the top, crash down when they’re exhausted only to bounce up again after barely a moment’s rest. As a society we see this as a stress issue but it’s actually a difficulty in self-regulation. I think we all struggle with this to some extent. The point is that it isn’t something we can easily change. It’s very hard-wired in because it developed at a time when there was little connectivity with the frontal lobes. In other words, we can’t ‘think’ our way out of the problem.

It also isn’t our fault.

As a society we eschew sleeping with our children, helping them (and us) to relax through contact. We think that by suppressing babies into sleep, often leaving them alone, we will somehow instil good sleep habits. I’m not sure that works as we are not helping our children to move through their energetic cycles. Young children have to rely on themselves at a time when they’re just not neurologically equipped to do it.  It can also lead to problems later on. A lot of us who were shut down in early life, start to open up in middle age, for instance. We then don’t know how to regulate ourselves as we missed a whole phase of brain development. (that sounds terrifying and I’m over-generalising, but it can particularly affect us around sleep).

There is good news – and that is since the brain is plastic and new neural pathways can be formed all through life, we can gradually attune to our own energetic cycles more successfully. But it does take time.

So, if you’ve tried everything and can’t sleep, relax. It’s probably not your fault. Yes, it’s helpful to wind down if you can. Don’t drink in late evening, use screens or over-stimulate yourself if you can help it. But at the same time, having done all this, you might still not be able to sleep, or still wake up at 3 am and know it’s going to one of those nights. Letting go of the blame, in fact realising this is not something you can control, might even be helpful. Be kind to your bouncing/ needy/frightened/angry infant self. Maybe you don’t need to do anything.  Other than just realise that you’re both in this together.

What do we mean by 'grounding'?

Like Mindfulness, Grounding is the other mental health buzz word we hear an awful lot about at the moment. My therapist’s instincts want to protect the term ‘grounding’ from becoming just another cliché, so I’d like to explore this a little with you:

For me, grounding conjures up:

Rootedness –  as in trees.

Connectedness – as in nature, connecting to our ‘ground’, the earth etc.

Calming down (coming down to earth) – pausing in this place –

Before livening up again and becoming energetic.

Letting this new energy flow upwards inside of us (from the ground).

There is something cyclical about grounding. If we were to talk about it in other terms ie neurological, we could talk about grounding as energy moving in a circuit.

We know how it feels to be ungrounded. When we see it in other people, we tend to view them as not being very well attached to reality, or not living in the real world. When we sense it in ourselves it is slightly different. It is a felt sense of ungroundedness – the words that come to mind are overanxious, spacey, heady, not in our bodies, rushed, frenetic, speedy, dissociated. So, energy is going all over the place – not coming up from the ground and moving in a contained way through our bodies.

How can we stay grounded?

Well, mindfulness can help us stay grounded – this can be very helpful. People have also spoken to me about their own form of grounding: ‘solid and purposeful walking in the woods or through fields; a mindful shower to wash away unwanted energies'….then back in my head to ponder/create/be inspired but in a grounded way’ .

Sometimes these methods help and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes life can just carry us away.

Children are not very grounded. When we’re young we need our parents to help us stay grounded. Babies are completely ungrounded. When we’re babies it is crucial our parents connect with us so that our feelings don’t make us feel out of control (cue screaming baby!). Babies can’t regulate their own feelings, and they need to feel ‘held’ in order to calm down. My sense is that the parent, in ‘holding’ the baby, is completing the circuit, as I’ve described. They are helping the infant calm down, pause, and begin another cycle of expression. They are grounding the baby.

So we can also think about grounding as ‘holding’ .

How can we feel ‘held’ in order to ground ourselves?

If I can’t ‘hold’ myself, I often find others can hold me – partners, friends, even my children (though some people make me feel more ungrounded!).

I also, importantly, see grounding as a form of compassionate holding of ourselves. Can we be our best internal caregiver? Can we ‘hold’ ourselves as we might an over-stimulated child, or even a screaming baby? This takes a lot of internal work – not always to be done alone. Often, working with a therapist can be very helpful here.

But this relationship we have with ourselves is, I believe, the most important thing. Usually we don’t need to do anything. The child, or the infant in us is present as a ‘felt sense’. It is the agitated part of us that we feel can be neither heard nor soothed. Can we just be with this very young part, doing nothing? Hanging out together, getting to know each other a little better. Holding the baby until you both feel calmer? Taking the young child’s hand? There is a part of us that needs calming, but there is also a part of us that calms. There are two of us; there is always more than one thing going on.

Then, when you feel a little more held, you could go for a walk together.

Slowly slowly something shifts. You are back in your body, feeling your ground.