The Limbic is where your most intense negative emotional responses are attached to sensory stimuli.Those sensory stimuli can include images, sounds, smells and, strangely enough, the physical sensations of emotional responses themselves.
Positioned close to the middle of your brain the Limbic has evolved from what used to be the area used for detecting smell and avoiding suffocation. It sits below the Thalamus, the brain’s signal routing system.
Whenever your Thalamus sends a sensory signal straight to the Limbic, via what is called the ‘short route’, you experience an immediate full-body emotional response. Thinking doesn’t get a chance to directly intervene in the reaction - it happens and your conscious is informed afterwards.
We create and maintain anger, anxiety and other similar negative responses in the Limbic.
Other emotional brain parts, such as the pleasure/reward system (based in the medial forebrain bundle) and the disgust response (managed in the insular cortex) also affect us but, if you can learn to work with the Limbic in reducing negative response levels, you can use the same approach to improve how other emotional brain areas perform for you as well.
The main parts of the Limbic we want to focus on when thinking about emotional healing are the Hippocampus and the Amygdala (there are two of each sitting symmetrically alongside each other below the Thalamus, so they’re sometimes called the Hippocampi and the Amygdalae).
The Hippocampus
The Hippocampus is our environmental and territorial mapping system.
Shaped a bit like a runner bean pod it creates cellular maps using incoming sensory signal information. These maps are so accurate scientists using a brain scanner can identify where test subjects are in a computer maze game by looking only at the live scans of their Hippocampus.
Journeys are mapped here - real and virtual - in specific detail. The Hippocampus stores its maps in layers. When we reflect on memories of a previous journey or repeat a real-life external journey we begin accessing these layered maps.
As soon as you enter unfamiliar territory the Hippocampus starts the map-building process and another layer is created.
If you have an intense negative emotional experience in an environment the Hippocampus will map where that occurred in the territory and will also map other environmental details present at the time of the experience.
An entire map can switch from feeling ‘safe’ to feeling ‘dangerous’ instantly due to one negative event occurring when you are in that map - for example if you have an argument with a colleague or are abused in some way on the way to work by a passer-by it can take several days for the Hippocampus to retrain itself to see those places as safe again.
Anticipatory Fear
Once a negative experience has been mapped in a particular territory or situation your Hippocampus will trigger anticipatory signals preparing you for fight or flight when that territory or situation appears to be approaching. The closer you get to the specific triggering point in the map the more intense the emotional response becomes.
If your general approach to this process is to change your route to avoid the trigger (for example you change your job to avoid a colleague) the Hippocampus not only maintains the original map but goes on to trigger the same avoidant responses in new situations where the sensory signals only vaguely resemble the original.
Unfortunately it doesn’t stop there. Your entire Unconscious watches the direction you take in regards to the energised map in question and if you repeatedly avoid facing it, as well as other things vaguely reminding you of it, the map spreads, and you now start developing full-blown emotional responses to those vague reminders as well.
The whole process is designed not just to protect you when you find yourself directly in the presence of the original fear-triggering situation, but prevent you entering its presence in the first place.
A single map of this nature can affect your whole body-mind and stimulates beliefs that you cannot cope - both with the original situation and now with the steps leading up to the situation.
Secondary Emotional Response Signals
Most fear-inducing things in life can be avoided. Having these fears is not a problem because we don’t come into contact with the triggers on a regular basis. A fear of lions; a fear of bungee jumping; a fear of sitting in a bath full of venomous snakes; a fear of looking foolish in front of others at an important social gathering we have been asked to speak at; a fear of slipping on ice this year because last year we slipped over and broke our hip. These are all natural fears to have.
We could overcome them if we really wanted to - and some people do and then like to show off about it.
Difficulties arise for us when we have to come into contact with these triggering situations on a regular basis, but have not yet removed the natural fear response attached to them. Coming into contact with them means we now have an ‘emotional problem’ to deal with.
Things get even more difficult if, when we keep coming into regular contact with these things, we refuse to internally complete the emotional response process needed to adjust and become comfortable again.
We are now vulnerable to producing secondary emotional responses; particularly if we are being socially rejected by others (or believe we are) because of our fear or if we negatively criticise our own emotions.
Secondary emotional responses are produced with the intention of removing or reducing the affects of primary emotional responses when we believe our own primary response is wrong or abnormal.
Produced with the intention of removing the symptoms of fear, or whatever other negative emotion is involved, the actual result is to trap the emotional response and then magnify and pressure-cook it.
And, because Secondary responses are usually applied using the same type of emotional response as the Primary, we cannot ‘see’ what we have just done. There’s no visible join - we’re left mystified as to why the response has become so unbelievably, overwhelmingly intense. We create an ever-repeating emotional loop with both the Primary and Secondary responses triggering and fighting each other.
Panic attacks are the result of a fear of fear; phobias are a fear of feeling fear in the presence of an object or situation; rage attacks and depression are caused by anger at having to feel anger or grief, sadness or shame; obsessions are caused by a fear of an intense disgust response.
The Hippocampus Maps Primary Emotional Responses When a Secondary Response is Produced
When we produce a Secondary emotional response the Hippocampus identifies the ‘symptoms’ of emotional responses themselves as dangerous. The strange thoughts and not-usually-felt feelings are themselves identified as things to be avoided or fought.
The Hippocampus now starts building organic maps in regards to your own, allegedly dangerous, responses. You create layers designed to defend against these internal emotional layers and their behavioural affects, building what I call ‘lands of the mind’; in the same way it builds maps of the external world.
Your own emotional system becomes the threat your emotional system wants to avoid.
When you decide to compel yourself to start accepting your own feelings again you have to take an actual journey inwards, in just the same way you would if the threat were mapped as an external threat. The journey is long; fraught with multiple emotional responses designed to warn you of the hidden dangers - and every physical sensation looks like a potential killer.
The Argument Between Reality versus Imagination
One of the arguments you may come up against, if you have an emotional disorder and want to remove it, is that this inner journey is an imaginary thing and so therefore not ‘real’.
We have a tendency to think of things outside of ourselves as being ‘real’; therefore genuinely existing and worthy of attention; but things happening mentally and emotionally inside of us as somehow ‘false’, so not as valid. We tell ourselves we should maybe ignore these inner parts of ourselves most of the time. This is, to a great extent, a socially programmed illusion designed to make us more useful to others.
The truth is, whether you think you are managing external or internal reality, it is all the same internal process. You are not, in reality, capable of fully experiencing or controlling external reality. Internal reality is your only reality.
Everything is an internal adjustment process. Whether you approach an apparently ‘external reality’, as mapped by your Hippocampus, or what you see as an ‘internal unreality’, it is the same internal mapping system you are travelling through and reacting to - not the actual environment. You are consciously approaching a place in your own brain. It is all real; it all operates by the same rules.
We project this internal, emotionally charged map onto the external world and react to it as if it were ‘real’, until we learn to retrain those internal maps telling us the threat does not really exist -and all of this happens only inside of us.
This is why you can remove a phobia or an obsession, or any other trapped emotional response, without having to revisit the actual original external fear-creating situation that caused you to map it in the first place.
The whole thing is real, and valid, fully mapped, inside your own Limbic brain.
Projection
Ever had others project their currently stuck internal maps on to you when they react to you as if you did or said something you did not actually do or say? I’ve had this kind of thing happen to me about 4 or 5 times where the consequences seemed to go on for long periods before dying a natural social death.
If you’re aware of the nature of ‘projection’; and care about how it affects you and others, you can reduce how much you do it to others and avoid the affects it has on you when others project their trapped emotional maps in your direction.
It’s not just individuals that do it to each other either - whole groups, even nations, can remain stuck in frozen prejudice - treating others as if something that happened once, decades ago, is still happening today.
The responsibility for changing these internal maps lies solely with the person or group doing the projecting. The reason we project is because we have not fully travelled the journey mapped in our own Hippocampus - we have not completed the emotional information cycle and trained our Limbic to see the original threat no longer exists - perhaps it never did.
Now let’s take a look at the almond-sized brain part that sits at the end of the Hippocampus. The part of us where the most intense, most painful emotions we are capable of producing are generated.
The Amygdala
While the Hippocampus maps environments surrounding specific threats, the Amygdala stores imagery and other sensory stimuli of the specific threats at the centre of the overall reaction. The most intense emotional responses you are capable of producing are attached to the sensory constructs mapped here.
It’s as if you travel along a corridor-like map in the Hippocampus in order to reach the fear inducing signals stored in the Amygdala at journey’s end.
The Amygdala operates as a ‘negative sensory signal register’. It stores sensory lists of all the things you have an intense negative response to.
People; objects; sensations; shapes; sounds. Anything can be registered here. These things will normally appear perfectly harmless to you - unless they are being managed in the Amygdala.
As you move consciously towards the sensory stimuli being managed here you may get a sense of your being suffocated by the intensity of the emotional response attached. Latest scientific research tells us this is exactly what the amygdala responds most strongly to - a sense of suffocation. The reaction is designed to kick in when a predator has you by the throat.
When you feel overwhelmed by an emotional response, as it closes down your ability to think clearly while filling your mind with imagery attached to intense unwanted physical symptoms, it can be easy to see how this experience itself can mimic suffocation, convincing the Amygdala to list the emotions themselves as a suffocating, life-threatening experience.
Completing Emotional Information Cycles in the Limbic
Apart from the emotional cycles related to bonding and reproduction, which can keep recharging and discharging for a lifetime, the emotional process in the Limbic is designed to produce singular negative responses which can be permanently discharged and removed.
All of your negative emotional responses; primary or secondary, are designed to be discharged after serving their purpose.
If you have an emotional blocking problem, in which you are producing a Secondary emotional response to a Primary, it will take some time and effort to achieve emotional freedom, but it can be done.
When your Limbic is given the job of managing a specific set of sensory signals it acts like a spark plug to the rest of the body and brain, causing the release of hormones containing those molecules known as ‘ligands’ throughout the body-mind. These molecules attach to your various body and brain parts causing them to become vibrationally activated - that is, producing energy intended to drive physical action - the fight, flight or freeze responses.
If you have not yet faced up to the threat (the original stimulating trigger at which the emotional charge is targeted) your body remains in a state of charged alertness - full of high energy emotional information signals. Ready for action - tense.
Full discharge only occurs when you have made the journey through the Hippocampus maps towards the Amygdala registry where the image and other related sensory signals are stored. You will know when you’re getting closer to full discharge because the painful negative emotional affects get stronger and stronger. When your conscious mind arrives at the triggering sensory signal - perceived as being external or internal - that’s when you are at full emotional discharge.
This is how it works when you use the systematic desensitisation approach (exposure therapy) method, anyway. This is the method I used and which some other therapies use. There are other methods, such as the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), which can be used to remove the feelings in a more gently way.
Emotional Acceptance
I’ve written elsewhere on the blog about the process of emotional acceptance and I’ve put a link to an article about it at the end of this post. Achieving emotional acceptance is concerned with training your thinking brain to surrender to the full emotional process by bringing a stop to how you think your emotional process should work and learning how it actually does work - and accepting just how overwhelmingly powerful it can seem at times - yet still be safe.
When you mentally deny an emotional response the right to discharge the signals keep driving up from the body as though to say ‘eh, we’re still here! You’ve got to do something!’. If the Prefrontal Cortex - the part of you watching you, decides to block release of these energy signals they stay active. Your body remains tensed and ready and emotionally energised and it keeps telling your upper brain about it.
If your thinking decides to try and block the signals using Secondary emotional responses it intensifies the situation even further.
So the answer to how we allow the Limbic to complete its information cycle so we can get rid of our emotional problems is really simple. We reverse what we are currently doing and start to discharge the energy attached to the sensory signals through the process of feeling our feelings.
Feelings attached to individual sensory constructs, not thoughts, and whether or not you move consciously towards or away from them, is the language of your Limbic and the rest of your Unconscious below it.
You accept an emotional response by moving towards it. This allows the Limbic to complete its responsibility in regards to the information it contains - and from there, following discharge of the emotional energy, the energy-stripped informational content of the experience is passed up as imagery into the Right Neo-Cortex then transferred into thoughts in the Left Neo-Cortex.
Regards - Carl
Article: The Three Elements of Emotional Acceptance
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