You may not have thought about it this way, but your brain screens things out constantly. We really couldn’t function well at all if it didn’t have the capacity to do that. If your conscious mind (what’s “open on your desktop” at any given moment) had to pay attention to all the stimuli in your environment right now, you’d be a mess. Shift your attention away from reading for a moment and notice every sound you can hear. Those sounds were there five seconds ago but a screening function in your brain categorized them as irrelevant. The little almond-shaped amygdala structure in the brain is chief of your security system and it is constantly scanning your environment for cues of danger because survival is all that matters to it. The only options are SAFE and “NOT SAFE.” It processes data coming in from the environment –interpersonal as well as physical environment—and data coming in from your bodily systems like your heartrate, muscle tension, and your gut. The amygdala calculates; it works with another brain structure in a microsecond comparison of this data with previously acquired data. It does all this before “thought” can take place. And since it’s always safer to see danger where there is none than to miscalculate a danger cue as ‘no problem’, the amygdala’s bias is toward “not safe.” If previously acquired data carries a hint of “not ok”, your nervous system will shift a little or a lot out of “life is good” mode into a preparedness for self-protection. (For more on this, go to my client resources page and listen to or watch Deb Dana’s explanations of the nervous system—or see part 4 for my brief description.)
So—our brains are continually scanning, letting some stimuli in and screening other stimuli out. My previous experience of the sound of my humidifier “tells” my security system the sound is not connected with any threat so my brain usually filters out that sound, leaving more neurons available to do other tasks. If previous experience of that sound or a sound like it had become associated by my brain with danger (remember classical conditioning from Part 1 of this series), my amygdala would probably not filter it out. Quite the opposite. The sound would signal DANGER, activating/triggering/launching a higher degree of vigilance, my brain would release cortisol, my heart would race, my muscles would tense, etc. In case you have a hard time imagining how the sound of a humidifier could trigger that, consider if my parents had set up a window fan in my bedroom in the hot Virginia summer nights of my childhood and a brother had routinely molested me under cover of that white noise. (Let me be clear this did not happen to me—but I have clients who can relate.)
So whether you’ve realized it or not, your brain is continually screening the data coming from the world around you (and from within your body, too, for that matter) and it’s instantly categorizing it on the basis of both physical and emotional safety. Now “safety” can mean different things to different people. We might agree fairly readily that the sound of gunshots would register as a physical threat, but emotional threats differ from person to person, often related to behaviors we expect to unsettle an important relationship. In one family it might be acceptable to clear the snow off the driveway several hours after a storm ends while in another, a parent insists on clearing the pavement immediately. In this latter family, not jumping immediately to the snowblower and shovels brings anger and punishment when the parent gets home from work. Consequently, while a snowstorm might signal a fun-filled snow day from school (hurray!) to children in another family, in this family it signals hard work and emotional jeopardy if the job’s not done well. Therefore in adulthood, a snowstorm might make that person excessively anxious and grumpy completely apart from any concerns about travel safety, etc.
Many people are now familiar with the diagnosis of PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) as it’s come to be applied to veterans of war, whether soldiers or civilians, and assault victims. Its hallmark is flashbacks, the experience of going about your business when something you see or hear (a stimulus of some kind related through classical conditioning with the traumatizing events) triggers the compartmentalized memory network so vividly that you are instantly reliving the experience and behaving as you would have “back then and there.” A veteran dives under a table at the sudden sound of a door slamming. A survivor of 9-11 panics at the sound of a siren. A rape victim freezes at the sight of a man wearing a particular kind of jacket.
Less dramatically, if a stimulus in the present (for instance, the smell of Old Spice aftershave) launches a neuronal pattern and your heart starts to race and your breath quickens, your amygdala might very well calculate NOT SAFE as a result of those body cues. Your thinking brain looks for the danger and then, depending on many other factors, you interpret your situation and react. Maybe the sensory cue links to an uncle who wore Old Spice when you were a kid and you felt uncomfortable around him, but you’re not badly triggered and can easily distinguish this man on the elevator is probably not a threat. But if that uncle molested you, you may be badly triggered and your brain releases stress chemicals that make it hard or impossible to think clearly about this particular person in the present. When the body is instantly prepared for danger, the thinking part of the brain gets compromised, making it hard to see that there is no danger in the here and now.
It is relatively easy for my clients to see how combat, a rape or assault, immediate experience of the 9-11 attacks, or a bad traffic accident could lead to the symptoms of PTSD. But many resist the idea that because the hippocampus can get overwhelmed and stop functioning properly under less extreme but still powerful experiences, their own brains compartmentalized memories and fragments that are now like hidden landmines, sensitive to conditioned stimuli in the present. So many clients say to me some version of “my childhood wasn’t that bad,” comparing their histories to horror stories they have heard. But a child’s nervous system needs to experience emotional as well as physical safety in order for that child to thrive. The provision of food, clothing and shelter and the absence of blatant physical abuse do not equal “safety” to the nervous system. The security system in a child’s brain tunes in to tone of voice, facial expression, and body language to assess whether she is welcome and safe or not. To a child, messages from those around her of “Welcoming and available for connection” vs indifference or neglect carry more weight than many people realize.
For now, I simply want to help you understand that automatically firing memory networks have the capacity to strongly influence how you respond to current experiences. That may seem perfectly obvious to you, but it’s an important piece of the “parts of self” puzzle, so I want it out here on the table where we can see it. And I want to invite you to picture this scanning amygdala as a part of self -- who looks like the younger you to whom certain things meant “something’s not right” or “trouble” or outright danger—a part of self who is off-stage but constantly aware of what’s happening on center stage of your life. Programmed by past wounds and threats, its sole agenda is to protect you. And it operates out of a “safer to shoot first and ask questions later” rule. Assuming that we are not actually “under fire” –life threat—in our present circumstances and relationships, it’s essential that we develop the ability to use the “pause button” when an alarm (cue, trigger, app) goes off. Is it a fire---or is the smoke detector reacting to steam from the shower? Is it a burglar –or is a racoon snooping around the dooryard activating the light? Is it a weapon—or has my joint replacement set off the metal detector?
Next we need to learn a little more about the nervous system so we can develop that “pause” and buy ourselves the time to recognize “it’s now, not then; it’s here, not there; it’s a safe person, not the person who hurt me”.
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