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.