Your thinking brain knows it's not scary anymore, but your feeling brain hasn't gotten the message. Actually the way traumatic memories are stored in the brain, is like they are still happening. When you are able to fully process the trauma, it will turn into a normal memory with its place in your past, and then similar situations in the present will no longer trigger the same feelings of terror.

Is that what you were asking?

Hey BLT,

Yeah, that's what I'm asking (I think!). But I don't think I get the "feeling brain" and how/why it can interrupt my thinking brain. If I know, with my thinking brain, that a situation is safe, why does it feel so not safe? How is that possible? How does that work?

Or maybe this is my question: In November, I went into therapy. I had the big AHA! that my feelings were actually wrong. I was having full trauma response to things that were not actually truly scary. They just felt scary to me. But I figured it out. I figured out that bad things happened to me when I was a kid. I figured out that I have scared/traumatized feelings from before. Why doesn't that POOF! make them disappear?

Thank you for the phrase "like they are still happening." Yes, exactly what it feels like. Yes! But why? If I know I'm safe, and know that I wasn't safe before when I was a kid, why do I still FEEL like it's still happening?

And I understand the "idea" of integration - I process this stuff, it integrates, my wounded child self diminishes, I feel better - but I don't get the how of that. Or the way of it, I guess. How it works, looks like, feels?

Meta, the best analogy I've heard is that your thinking brain is like a person riding an elephant. The elephant is your feeling brain. As long as the elephant is calm, and the rider is competent, the rider will be mostly in control. But as soon as the elephant gets upset, all the rider can do is hang on for dear life. Your feeling brain is older and stronger than your thinking brain. It's very, very hard to control your feeling brain with just thoughts. Usually to calm your feeling brain you need to speak its language, and calm yourself with sensations rather than thoughts. That's why it's more effective to listen to calming music or something than to just tell yourself you have no reason to be afraid.

From what I understand there are different ways of processing trauma, but all of them are about dual attention. In other words, you are feeling and remembering the trauma at the same time as you are keeping some of your awareness in the present where you are safe. How specifically you would do that depends on the particulat training of your T.

Thanks BLT -

Yeah, the elephant metaphor helps me hold things in perspective. I think I was seeing my thinking brain as a big strong elephant, and my feelings as tiny peanuts from the past. Why isn't my thinking brain winning over the old crusty peanut now that I know that's what it is?

And yes - all my work with my (wonderful!) T is on the dual attention. It helps me to hear you remind me of that. It's about being here, being grounded, being in my best/vast/divine self and then turning towards the child part of me (that I call 13 or 6, depending), seeing her, letting her voice her feelings, and then giving her what she needs (kinda re-parenting her).

Okay, I've got my homework for tonight. (((BLT)))

Thanks, friend. You made my night better.

Hi Meta,
I really liked the input you got from BLT ( BLT!) but wanted to add to it. What you are experiencing is the difference between your implicit and explicit learning. (For a lengthier discussion of implicit versus explicit learning, see Learning Developmental Skills Part 1 on my blog.)

If all we needed was to change our explicit, cognitive understanding, then we'd all be able to just read a book and once we understood, as you can understand the danger isn't real now, we'd all be cured (wouldn't that be a nice system? I know I'd vote for it. ) But the part of our brain that is tasked with keeping us safe, the amygdala, is not all that sophisticated. As my T is fond of saying, we have the same amygdala a hamster does. The amygdala is pretty primitive and basically asks three things when it encounters something: Do I eat it? To I flee from it? Or do I make love to it? Not a lot of nuance. It is also biased towards responding strongly to fear/danger. Think about it. If you're scared when you don't need to be, no harm done except for some increased stress (it wants you safe, doesn't care about happy) but fail to be afraid when you need to be and you can end up dead.So we have a long line of ancestors that passed on a high reactivity level to danger.

The amygdala learns implicitly, so one of the things that happen when you experience trauma, especially long term childhood trauma, is that the amygdala forms impressions of what is dangerous by tracking what is going on when you get hurt and then telling you to avoid that. In long term trauma, these are lessons learned on a VERY deep level that are reinforced over and over.

Fast forward to adulthood, where normal relationships will place you in a situation that "feels" dangerous (because you were wounded and hurt in relationship) and your amygdala senses danger. Our brains are built such that the connections FROM the amygdala to the frontal cortex are wide and strong. So when the amydala is screaming to get out of dodge, we don't stop to question it. We get out. When your fear is strong enough, your frontal cortex is actually flooded with hormones that interfere with your cognitive ability so that you will act and not waste time thinking. You're not imagining that it literally gets harder to think when you're scared.

The connections back from the frontal cortex to the amygdala are relatively few and weak, which is why to retrain our amygdala we need to be in the presence of an attunted regulator. That way when we get triggered and our emotions shoot off the scale, they can calm and regulate our emotions enough to allow the frontal cortex to get a word in.

So while you can immediately understand in a cognitive sense that you are no longer in danger, your amygdala has to experience the "dangerous" situation time and again with a DIFFERENT outcome than you experienced during the trauma, until it "learns" that there is no danger.

It's a very different process and one that is magnitudes easier as a child when the rate of change in your brain is much higher. And it's frustrating to not have your feelings follow your understanding. The problem is that feelings follow actions, not understanding. So you have to keep experiencing the triggers but having it turn out differently, over and over, until you can offset those early lessons with more recent experience.

It sucks to have to do it this way, but on the upside, thank heaven it's possible. It may be painful, slow, confusing and frustrating but at least it can be done. So you're not being stubborn or weak or stupid or slow (just grabbing some adjectives from my own inner critic tapes ) by not being able to stop these feelings; you're busy rebuilding your brain structure, which is hard, slow work.

AG

Hey AG,

Oh, what can I say, but thank you, thank you.

It's terrible, terrible work. I know I shouldn't be scared of things, but OHMYGOD I feel scared of things. And then I feel like an ass that I'm scared when all everyone is doing is taking good care of me. No one is doing anything bad to me. My mother did bad things to me when I was a child. I feel angry that this is the way it is. I feel like screaming to myself, "JUST LEAVE ME ALONE! WE ALREADY SUFFERED THIS! I JUST WANT TO ENJOY MY GOOD LIFE THAT I HAVE NOW! IT'S NOT FAIR THAT NOW, WHEN IT IS FINALLY GOOD, IT'S GETTING RUINED BY YOU AND YOUR FEELINGS."

I know that it's *because* I'm safe that I'm able to start processing this stuff. I (think I) know that it won't be like this forever. This is healing, not the new REALITY. This is not forever.

And I know the worst thing I can do to 13 is tell her she is bad, she is ruining things because of her feelings and needs, that I want her to go away. Because that's what she learned from my childhood.

But it's hard. I want to feel safe. I want to be happy. I want to be a good wife (yes, I hear that word, good, and know that deep down, 13 things that means to be what I call translucent - no needs, no feelings, no substance) to my good wife.

And I just feel so.... overwhelmed and overwrought at the prospect of this work.

Thanks BLT and AG. It helps so much to be able to say/read this stuff.

Meta,

Ditto what AG said. The amygdala learns things through classical conditioning - and that's essentially a permanent learning process. Even if you haven't been exposed to that particular stimulus (aka trigger) for years and years, the stimulus is *charged* with emotional memories. So just one exposure, even years later, can cause "spontaneous recovery" of that stimulus/response process.

Also, the amygdala is more likely to have VERY strong emotional memories for fear. It's the easiest emotion to condition in any living thing, human and alike. And as AG said, your frontal cortex does get flooded by the hormones triggered by the reaction in the amygdala. And the *only* way we know how to control our emotions is by using our frontal cortex. It's the place where we plan everything. What we think, how we act, what we say, deciding whether our reactions to something are reasonable or unreasonable, etc. But when the frontal cortex is overwhelmed and not able to work properly, you just can't temper that reaction from the amygdala. So, if we didn't have our frontal cortex to help control our reactions, we would feel all of our emotions full bore all the time. It's been studied in cats before and the term "sham rage" was created. You could prick the cats very lightly with the end of a pin, and they'd go completely wild because they couldn't control their reactions (their cerebral cortex had been removed - poor things).

But yeah, the process of therapy is all about retraining the amygdala to not react to those triggers anymore. In conditioning terms it's the process of extinction. So, when you expose yourself to something that used to be dangerous (like a sound or smell) but you don't have the negative consequence, you slowly - very, very slowly - are able to learn that that horrible consequence won't be there anymore.

Hope that makes sense.

Kashley, that was awesome.

Meta,
I'm really glad it helped. And as far as your 13, it may help to think of that part of you as one of YOUR children and how would you treat them if they were feeling that way. Our feelings of shame and being too much are part of the injury that was done to us, but those feelings are not there when we think of other people, so it's a good mental trick to clearly perceive how we should have been and should be treated now.



AG

Kashley -

Thank you so much for your post (and your blog, hurray!).

I'm having what I call a "new understanding" - I'm grasping the idea of exposure, the idea that I am going to have to keep experiencing the trigger AND the UNexpected result so that I can slowly retrain my brain. On the one hand, that's terrible work. On the other hand, it's already working and I'm grateful for the plasticity of the mind.

I'm also grateful for your help.

Thanks, Kashley.

AG - Yes, it's so helpful to think of my kids, to think of what I want for them, for what kind of spouses I want them to be, how I would want them to advocate for themselves in any relationship, etc.

I should say that my other new understanding is a blinking idea that seems to fade in and out - the idea that this is me. An acceptance, of sorts. I think that I've been stuck in a "I don't like this, I don't want to be this way, this sucks for me and everyone around me, ack!" sort of place. And while I can feel a sort of anger around the edges of that, and I think that anger is going to be important to process (in a "I'm mad you did this to me" and not a "I hate myself for being this way"), this new blinking idea says, for seconds at a time, that I am who I am (my T's words). If I could picture someone else, who had been through similar things, I would be able to hold simultaneously the ideas that 1) they would absolutely by impacted, imprinted, by what happened and 2) their immutable, undeniable worth. And so, that must be me.

What did I think? That horrible things could happen without any sort of imprint? And what did I think - that an imprint, a change in myself because of what I have been through, was bad? Made me bad? The imprint is me - I am me. I am who I am. The imprint has given me gifts and challenges. But there isn't any bad there. I have an imprint. This is how it is.

(Ugh. On re-read, I hate this, but I'll let it stand.)

But this knowing, this acceptance (though blinking) is directly related to these forums and to the blogs I read.

My T has been saying it - "You are who you are. There doesn't need to be judgement there." But it took seeing that you guys are who you are, and feeling admiration, not shame, that helps me to know it for me.

Thanks guys!

Meta,
I'm glad you let it stand, because you are acceptable and worthwhile just as you are, and with all of your feelings and all of the effects of what happened to you. No, you're not perfect, but no one is, we are human and it's ok to accept the stuff you don't like along with the stuff that makes you proud of yourself. And yes, at first it's a blink, but those brief episodes will continue to stretch out until the blinks are the times where you DON'T feel ok. It's happening, you're healing, it's just hard to see in the midst of doing so. Really glad that being able to share here and read other people's experiences is helping your healing.

AG

PS It took me a VERY long time, but I have come to recognize that some of my greatest strengths have grown out of needing to heal from my childhood injuries. I am not grateful for the abuse, but I am grateful for the person it helped to make me. (I really hope that makes sense, it's hard to articulate, more of a felt thing.)

AG -

I totally understand the gratitude thing. A concrete example would be - I'm grateful, every time that a student comes to me with despair, devastation, disconnection, numbing, fear, self-doubt and self-loathing, that I can say to them - yes, yes. I see you. I understand that feeling. And this is how I'm working on that.

I'm not grateful for what happened. I'm grateful that I am who I am, that I have the (increasing) skills/abilities to manage being me.

You understand exactly what I meant.

Yes, and you saying it makes me feel less alone, and more okay to be me.

MMM,
This thread you started and the responses you received...BLT, AG and Kashley helped me finally understand also so Thanks...and MMM for starting it.

Hopeful