Attention Therapies reach places in the mind and body where words cannot go. Attention Therapies have the power to restore the balance trauma took away from us. Attention Therapies and Affective Neuroscience combine to form a comprehensive self-therapy. But it is not a quick fix. It takes dedication and “sticktoitiveness.”
Whether you are a clinician, client, educator, or researcher, affective neuroscience offers in-depth insight relating to core emotions and depression, anxiety, grief, fear, PTSD, and all aspects of personal and social life. This knowledge can be used to improve empathic understanding and therapeutic intervention. Jack Panksepp mapped all the regions of the brain for medication research.
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Jaak Panksepp’s research goes deep into wordless territory of affects or feelings where few psychologists, psychiatrists, or other researchers have gone. After years of work with lab animals he came up with seven primary affect systems:
Seven Primary Affect Systems
Our most powerful emotional feelings ––the primal emotional affects–– arise from ancient neural networks situated in brain regions buried deep beneath the neocortex, the exective brain.
We are always on the lookout for something that we might need or want, or something that might just interest us or satisfy our curiosity. Our SEEKING systems keep us in a state of engagement with the world. “Beginning at birth, it is “a goad without a goal.”
Jaak Panksepp discovered that the lower brain seems to be organized in such a way that one primal affective state prevails at any one time. He calls this monomania and it causes the upper thinking neocortex to follow the lower brain and also focus obsessively or ruminate on one thing at a time. And so Panksepp considers a goal of therapy to facilitate taking control of one’s passions by understanding the “low-minded” ways.
Self-help books that help:
Total Self-Renewal through Attention Therapies and Open Focus
The Open-Focus Brain: Harnessing the Power of Attention to Heal Mind and Body
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