Emotional Brain
Talk therapy did not affect the transformation from mild-mannered man to raging, destroying, out-of-control monster. It was that dramatic and it took place in shockingly brief moments. In a matter of minutes, I destroyed an entire living room set of furniture. No matter how much insight and planning, the emotional brain has a reality of its own and it is the emotional brain that reigns.
Emotional Brain
In all the years of therapy, rage was hardly discussed. Probably a lot to do with the overpowering shame at the complete lack of control and violent destructive behavior. The only therapist I shared this with was the spouse abuse counselor, and it required Valium for her to stay with me a full session.
Triggers
Rage can be triggered by most any event in the external and internal environment. Triggers send the emotional brain time-traveling back to the initial trauma. Never fully here and alive in the present, the brain is in constant battle — zapping life energy to keep the emotional brain suppressed.
Before taking Prozac, I had absolutely no control. Prozac lowered the trigger point dramatically. This opened the possibility for self-therapies: Ki Breathing Meditation, Open Focus Training, Attention Therapy, and Metacognitive Therapy, And Cognitive Therapy.
The brain is built from the bottom up. At the bottom is the reptilian brain and surrounding the top of the brain is the neocortex or as Jack Panksepp would put it, our “thinking cap.” In between is the limbic brain.
Understanding past trauma does little to help in dealing with PTSD. That is why talk therapy alone that focuses on insight and understanding to manage behavior is seldom effective. Brain scans show the problem originates deep in the emotional brain. When the emotional brain signals danger, cognitive talk therapy cannot counter.
Affective neuroscience developed by Jaak Panksepp in the 1990s deals with raw affective feelings and instinctual emotional responses deep inside our brains below the thinking-cap neocortex. Clinical psychologists rarely deal with these affective feelings and psychiatrists attempt to counter them with drugs.
Panksepp divides emotional experiences into three basic categories: primary process, secondary process, and higher mental processes. Primary-process are the psychological experiences, the evolutionary “givens.” Secondary processes are built upon the primary processes and include conditioned responses like fear conditioning. Conscious thought resides in the thin neocortex of the frontal brain.
The first two categories of processing are unconscious to us. As Panksepp puts it, many of our basic emotional feelings emanate from the “the basement of the mind.” Though unconscious, these bottom-basement emotional feelings have powerful psychological effects on the mind.
You cannot analyze dark feelings away. They mix with higher neocortical processes opening the flow of repetitive patterns of worry, rumination, and fixation on threat. In turn, these thought patterns act back on lower emotional feelings, feeding the monster and keeping the hellish fires burning.
Rather than losing yourself in an endless maze, you can shift the focus of attention to Ki Breathing Meditation, Open Focus, and Insight Meditation. You can seek out an activity that magnifies your spirit. This might be reading, writing, music, sports, art, education or any activity that elevates your spirit rather than enveloping your mind in paradoxical ruminations.
Triunal Brain
I have found knowledge of the brain important to understanding how trauma affects the mind and body. Understanding the triunal (three-part) brain helps to confront present trauma.
Reptilian Brain
Our reptilian brain, present at birth, is the brain of reptiles and includes the brainstem and hypothalamus sitting above it. The reptilian brain controls heart rate, lungs, breathing, body temperature, defecating, and balance. It coordinates the functioning of the endocrine and immune systems and ensures systems maintained within balance known as homeostasis.
Limbic Brain
Limbic brain, next to come online (so to speak), sits atop the reptilian brain. Development of the limbic brain begins right after birth. All mammals share this limbic brain. It is individually shaped by an infant’s experience together with genes, but can be affected later in life as well. Together with the reptilian brain, it is sometimes referred to as the emotional brain.
Neocortex
In the second year of life, the frontal lobes, which make up the bulk of our neocortex (outer brain) begins development at a fast pace. The frontal lobes are the executive brain enabling us to use language and to think abstractly.
Ki Breathing Therapy
Ki breathing meditation affects body and mind. It is my daily go-to self therapy. Ki Breathing Meditation and Prozac make Cognitive and Metacogitive Therapy viable. First the reptilian and limbic brain are brought under control with Ki Breathing You question the parts or selves that are a part of the problem. Anger, for example, is a self. But the anger is not your Self. Perhaps it is the accosted little girl who now is protecting you from that ever happening again. You don’t want to hate your protector. It is a part of you, an entity, a self that is attempting to protect your Self. Then can script your mind with REST, Rational-Emotive Self-Talk.
Open Focus
Open Focus is a mix of narrow and diffuse focus. If you are narrowly focused on a book you are reading, in open focus mode you take in space all around. If you are engrossed in an internal dialog, you open up and experience the world all around. You alternate attention between narrow and diffuse focus, sometimes paying attention simultaneously in both modes.
Attention Training Therapy
Attention Training Therapy is similar to Open Focus but employs sounds in place of space.
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
