The Mammalian Disassociation Response

Imagine if you were an animal, a mammal, with the body of an antelope and the brain of a tiger.  An omnivorous eater; physically designed to be a prey animal, mentally designed by Nature and trained by it's herd to think of itself as a predator. 

This is what a human being is.  What a ridiculously designed creature, eh?  What was Nature playing at?  No wonder a human sometimes can't figure out quite what it is or why it's thinking and emotions don't always work in line with each other.

It makes a poor carnivore; possessing a body with neither claws nor teeth sharp enough to pierce another animal's hide or to easily eat the meat below it.  It is slower, weaker and less flexible in comparison to almost all the other mammals in it's territory. 

As a herbivore it cannot digest most leaves and grasses; it has great difficulty in chewing and digesting roots.  It can easily, however, find seasonal berries and fruit - but the seasons don't last long.  So why does it survive so well?

It survives and thrives because Nature has given it the ability to create external tools.  By manipulating its external world humanity has been able to gain leverage over all other animals, plants and territories.  It has hands and fingers able to manipulate raw materials directly, turning them into tools, but it has also learned to use even more advanced tools to create and maintain extended tools that no human can directly operate.

Those creative hands are controlled by an unusual brain.  A brain with comparatively more inter-connectivity (60% white matter) than any other mammal of its kind.

Our grey matter, the matter we associate with thinking, is the same in comparison by volume as that of a chimpanzee - it's the white, interconnecting brain underneath that is much larger.  It gives greater rise to association and idea generating possibilities.

And, because we are able to associate sound and symbols so effectively and have a talking mechanism we can communicate our internal connections with others of our kind; we are super-connected both internally and externally.

Remember though, before we get carried away by how awe inspiring we are - we are still mammals.  We have the same basic biological emotional response system as the Impala, the Antelope and the Rabbit (to name a few). 

I remember the slightly perplexed look on my counsellor's face one day when I told her I'd just realised it was Nature, not me, that decided what the emotional process was and I now had to surrender my ego to the fact if I was going to heal my anxiety disorders.  You see, as a human mammal I was convinced my intellect should be running the emotional show but something much more powerful was going on and I had to accept and surrender to it.  When you suffer with an anxiety disorder of any kind you learn this lesson very deeply if you experience the Mammalian Disassociation Response.  Journeying through and out of the other side of a blocked emotional response forces you to understand. 

This is the natural experience a prey mammal sometimes goes through (if it lives long enough) when being attacked by a predator.   It is not a consciously controlled experience. 

We often hear of the 'fight or flight response' where, in a split second, an animal decides to fight or flee from it's attacker and the emotional energy driving either response is the same.  But mammals come with three responses to threatening situations, not two, and we are mammals.  The third response is the 'freeze' response - 'The Mammalian Disassociation Response' - also known as 'playing dead'. 

When you can neither fight or flee but still have all the energy powering these urges running through your body this is your only other option (unless, as humans can, you suppress it).

It is called the Disassociation Response because, in a bid to easing the pain of being eaten alive, the Conscious mind is detached from the body.  My personal experience of this, after I had been working on healing my panic attacks daily for three months (deliberately, through exposure therapy), was to have my muscles begin pulling me to the ground one night on the way home from work, forcing me to feel like laying down.

My thighs and shoulders got heavier and heavier - as though I were weight training with them at every step and at some point I was going to have to stop moving and collapse.  I looked at my hands and they, and my arms, seemed to be far, far away.  I got home from work, began searching the internet, and came to the conclusion I was suffering with the symptoms of a diabetic coma. 

I phoned my doctor who asked me to go and see her straight away - when I got through the door she told me she saw these same symptoms often with patients suffering with anxiety related issues and this was simply the ‘Freeze Response’.

I had read about the response before in Peter A. Levine's book, 'Waking the Tiger' (a book on how to heal traumatic stress disorders), but this was the first time I had experienced it.  Within thirty minutes of seeing the doctor and receiving her explanation the symptoms, which had been coming on for about three days, had lifted.  Once my thinking mind was able to label the condition and accept what Disassociation felt like for me, my Unconscious was able to let it go.

Mammals freeze or play dead with the unconscious intention of either not being noticed by the predator (moving gets you noticed) or of looking as though you're a diseased meal.  In his book Mr Levine explains how prey animals will look as though they're dead, with eyes open, while the predator stands over them. 

If the mammal is not eaten there and then, and the predator wanders off, a short period of time passes before the mammal gets up; shakes itself off and leaves the scene.

This is not a dangerous state for humans to be in unless it happens regularly – but it is alarming when it happens for the first time. If you ever have these kinds of symptoms I suggest you speak to a doctor just to make sure that is what it is. Their reassurance alone is sometimes enough to help the state pass.

Shortly after this time my panic attacks completely disappeared (they never returned) and I learned a very important lesson:  to stop trying to figure out and outwit the reality of my emotional system using my intellect.

To let the process of feeling do what it was designed to do: discharge.

Sometimes in external life we find ourselves in situations over which we have no control and we are so terrified we want to run away to avoid it or so enraged we want to attack it or undo it but still can have no effect on the situation.  Then, when our emotional reaction keeps being produced and it's obvious there's nothing to be done (sometimes because the emotionally intense reaction is in regard to an imagined scenario) we may turn on the emotional response itself, criticising ourselves, fighting it.  We hate the emotional response and the way it affects us when it comes.

We even end up producing a Secondary Response to try and keep it in check and that just makes it worse.  Now we are overwhelmed but at the same time suppressing the whole thing just so we can get through the day.

But if you were to give in to it ... lay down, let it 'eat you alive' for as long as it needs to ... what do you suppose the Unconscious eventually sees?

It sees the experience from beginning to end for what it really is - all the symptoms, the different intensities, their strange effects, and yet you're still alive despite enduring the worst.  And it stops producing the response.  You get up, you shake yourself off, and you get on with living.

No matter what the emotional type, the emotional healing process works in the same way.

We may hate being mammals sometimes, but that's what we are.

Regards - Carl

Three Reasons You May Feel Like Falling Down When Intensely Emotional

Quite a few people who talk to me about their extreme emotional states will talk about their fear of collapsing or fainting – especially about doing this publicly and being labelled an ‘attention-seeking drama queen/king’.

There are a number of reasons we may feel like falling down when highly emotional; here are three:

• The Mammalian Freeze Response


• Enraged Helplessness (depression)


• Physical reasons.

The Mammalian Freeze Response

Human beings have mammalian bodies – these are the bodies of prey animals.  We do not come equipped with fangs and claws.  Our brains, however, are the brains of super-predators because they can design predatory tools that far outweigh the power of those missing fangs and claws.

This omnivorous mixture sometimes creates a confused and conflicted human animal.

When we become intensely emotional our prey-animal mammalian bodies react like those of other prey mammals while our super-predatory brains fight this unwanted intrusion.  This in-fighting delays the body in going through this natural process (it can actually delay it for a lifetime).

Most people have heard of the fight-or-flight response, but there is a third response mammals have – the Mammalian Freeze Response.  Also called the Disassociation Response.  When a mammal is being captured by its natural predator it has the ability to ‘play dead’.  This is not a consciously controlled decision – it is an automatic function of mammalian biology.

It simply lays down and becomes still.

It is also called the Disassociation Response because the brain of the mammal temporarily disconnects from the body in order to reduce pain when being eaten.

If the mammal is not eaten there and then, and the predator wanders off, a short period of time passes before the mammal gets up; shakes itself off and leaves the scene.

When people experience intense emotional responses, particularly if they are anxious, their mammalian bodies sometimes react as if being ‘eaten alive’ and go through the play dead process.

At best they may want to lie down to allow the emotional response to pass through them.  At ‘worst’ they may feel as if six pairs of hands are dragging them to the floor against their will – their body feels heavier and heavier and the muscles become harder and harder to move.

Another common symptom is when they look at their hands they appear to be disconnected from their body (hence the ‘disassociation’ part).

This is not a dangerous state to be in unless it happens regularly – but it is alarming when it happens for the first time.  I suggest you speak to a doctor just to make sure that is what it is.  Their reassurance alone is sometimes enough to help this state pass.

Enraged Helplessness

Sometimes people experience environments they have no immediate control over and feel suppressed and ‘crushed’ in them but for some personal reason are compelled to remain in those environments.  Or they lose an environment (eg a loving relationship) they felt they needed in order to be happy and the environment is taken away from them.

They become sensitised to the situation and extremely emotional and enraged at life.  There may be a specific target or cause, but basically it is ‘at life’.  They feel a desperate urge to get back something lost (rage) alongside a state of not being able to get the lost thing back (helplessness).

When children do this we call it a tantrum; when adults do this we call it dangerous, unacceptable and attention seeking ‘drama queen/king’ behaviour.  This response is very strong – so strong people sometimes attempt suicide to demonstrate how strong it is for them.

The person feels they are repeatedly hitting a brick wall in an important area of their life and may demonstrate this publicly by throwing themselves at the floor – they may do this publicly because they feel others hold the solution to their problem.

If you feel ‘enraged helplessness’ you may act in this desperate way.  You could eventually have to accept that in the particular situation concerned you are in fact both helpless and enraged.

You may now need to take steps to get the emotional reaction out in a safe, non-public way while at the same time negotiating a different route towards getting the things you value so much (but it may have to be a different goal if the initial goal is unobtainable).

Again, this is perfectly normal behaviour – but if you do not want to listen to the opinions of others you need to take the inner turmoil to a professional counsellor trained in helping with this kind of thing.

It is a painful condition to deal with and heal but it can be done and the process can be accepted and cleared.

Physical Reasons

Physical illness can be masked by emotional issues.

Feeling faint can be caused by things like low blood pressure or having the flu or a lack of sleep.  Quite often with anxiety problems we get palpitations in our chest and panic as a result can lead to a feeling of light-headedness.

You may feel like doubling up and laying down with stomach cramps (prolonged anxiety can cause a change in stomach acid balance and lead to digestive problems).

Intense emotional states can make us feel like we are a bit of a hypochondriac and this fear of being labelled as such can cause us not to seek medical advice.  Do not do this – there may be a genuine physical problem developing.

Get it checked out and you will stop worrying about it.

Overall Solutions

When we feel intensely emotional we need to acknowledge the urge to fall down as a normal human condition – undesirable to our ego, but normal.

We should not ignore these signals – something is going on with us.  We need to get help to find out what the cause is.  A physical illness, such as a thyroid problem, can be masked when we just label it ‘emotional’.

Do not be too concerned about the opinions of others when going through this kind of thing unless their opinion is supportive.  I have found those who are negatively critical of others going through this experience tend to follow a similar path when they go through similar situations.  It is a case of ‘there but for the grace of God go I’.

Humans are built in a certain way and there is no way of getting round this.  The urge to fall down every now and again comes with the package.

Regards - Carl

What Shape Do You Give Your Emotional Responses?

A man in his early twenties is talking to me about how he can feel his depression coming on again and he is dreading it.  I ask him to explain to me what happens - does this experience stay permanently or does it arrive, make him feel terrible for a while, then leave?

He tells me it passes eventually but he hates the experience and dreads it returning all the time.  'So, as it approaches, would I be right to assume it looks like you are about to be dragged down into a dark bottomless pit of despair and this time you might never come out as you have the other times - do you see something like that as it approaches?'.  He says yes, he does.  'Does it feel like you are being eaten alive?'.  He nods and smiles at the same time.  I can see he is picturing this imagery in his mind.  'I am being eaten alive'.

'So as it approaches you sense it overwhelming you; eating you alive; do you get a sense of being suffocated by it?'.  He nods.  'What if you were to change the way you see it.  Let us look at it as though it were a hill of energy that needs to be eaten and what is really happening is it comes to you to be eaten and then when you have eaten enough of it the hill lowers a bit; but it keeps building up because rather than eat the smaller amounts of this energy as they come to you to be eaten during the day you keep backing away from it and the hill builds up again; then this hill seems to overwhelm you.  What if you decided to go eat the whole hill, over a period of time, until it was all gone?'.

'What if you see yourself as a Pac-Man, for example, and you decide to deliberately go eat the hill before it comes to you?  What if you got into the habit of deliberately going to find it'.  That gets a smile as he pictures the scene.  'That is weird' he says.  'No-one has ever spoken to me like this before'.

Next I explain to him the way we see our intense emotional experiences is crucial to whether or not we get rid of them.  I learned this the hard way - by starting with lots of mostly ineffective verbal self-talk for several years then accidentally discovering the power of imagery to change the way I worked with my emotions.  I played with changing how I saw various aspects of what I was going through and started to get results.  When I say 'accidentally' though, that is not quite right.

For some time, as I kept telling my Unconscious 'we are going in' again as I followed my exposure therapy plan, I had strange imagery coming up such as pictures of rooms in the countryside and hills.  These images had no emotion attached to them so I tended to ignore them - then one day I realised my Unconscious was providing these images as tools.   I had been telling it repeatedly what I wanted to do and it was saying 'try this' to me.  Once I started playing with the imagery while in the centre of my emotional responses I started to see a change in whether or not the emotional responses cleared from my body.

If you apply certain types of imagery when either approaching or in the centre of an emotional response you can introduce a 'way of seeing' that will convince the various minds in your brain to release the response.  See the response as an approaching predator and your Reptilian Brain will gear your whole body up for fighting it and your upper brains do likewise.  See it as something you want to move towards and eventually release occurs.

The Shapes and Movements You See are Important in Emotional Self Management

You see a high wave of dark emotional energy coming at you and you know it is going to leave you all washed up at the end.  To your Reptilian brain, the brain part build around your brain stem and responsible for managing your bodily reactions and rhythms, this identifies the emotion approaching as something of a gaping jaw which, at the very least, will leave you in pain and wounded.  If you feel as though the emotion is suffocating you this triggers a specific response in an organ in your brain called the amygdala. The amygdala is part of your Limbic brain (your specific emotional response brain sitting over your Reptilian Brain).  Scientists tell us the amygdala is like a 'suffocation alert system' and mimics the moment when a predator has you by the throat.

The amygdala creates a specific image of the trigger (your emotion) and produces a strong fight or flight response whenever the potential suffocating experience approaches.  Your hippocampus, an arched structure at the rear of the amygdala, memorises the territory surrounding the threat - it is the trigger of 'anticipatory fear'.  In a real life threatening situation it improves our survival odds by producing emotional responses to such things as predator footprints - but when it triggers in relation to our own emotions it is a real nuisance - for example you may start having emotional responses in regards to your bedroom door which you sit behind for days when in the middle of your emotional misery.

All of this kind of thing happens because of the way we 'see' our emotional responses.  It causes us to do our best to avoid and fight them off - and this freezes them inside of us.

So How Might You Change How You See that Trapped Response So You Can Eventually Get it to Go Away?

Quite often when I start talking to people about this way of changing how we see they start talking to me about their own application of this method - it is the first time they have come across someone else who talks about this kind of thing.  A lady recently told me about her ‘Special Room' approach.  That got me quite excited as I've got 'A Room' as well!  I did not tell her about my room though, everybody has a right to their own room.  My point here is this is a universal technique that people rarely talk about (I guess NLP practitioners use this kind of thing a lot?).  Once our Unconscious knows we definitely intend to go in and heal the inner turmoil it may well start providing the imaging tools for doing so - but will you recognise when these imaging tools appear?

Anyway, my favourite technique is 'the Hill' (it is all done in the imagination, by the way, no actual hills are used in the writing of this article).

The Hill – an exercise to try if you have an obsession or phobia

To begin, move yourself consciously towards your emotional response, but do not go into it yet.  You are standing next to your hill.  Feel the tension between you and the hill - if you feel fear, feel that - but remember the truly intense stuff is at the centre of the hill.  The Hill is a perfect hill shape with sloping sides and it is a hill of pure emotional energy.

If you can see what you think the 'issue' is at the centre of the emotional response imagine the issue sits in the centre of the Hill.   Stay there a while, to one side of the hill, picturing the scene and sensing the emotion nearby.  While you are waiting here I will talk to you about 'tone'.

Tone

Imagine you are an adult trying to talk a small child into believing their new bedroom does not have ghosts and is not dangerous, but the small child is very frightened of the new room.  You decide, in your ultimate wisdom as an adult, the best way to get the child to accept going into this room is to frighten them into it.  You turn to the child and with all the love and best intentions in the world you scream 'get in that room right now! Of course there are no ghosts in your room there are no such thing as ghosts you stupid child; get in there and stop being so ridiculous!'  Question: does it work, this method?  Or does it make the child not just frightened of the room but of the whole house and you included?

I used to have a phobia of public speaking which I did not know I had until I spoke to my very first class - I would freeze up completely.  I discovered if I told a joke here and there and got a laugh it changed my emotional experience.  After a few months I no longer needed humour to get me through - I actually lost my negative experience through the process of repeatedly standing in front of the group and changing the tone of how I saw what I was doing.  Eventually the new tone became permanently fixed and now I get really excited when I get to talk to groups.

So here you are standing next to  your hill of energy, possibly full of fear.  Let us change the tone of that energy so that when you enter it you have a different experience to the one you had before.  You know that lemony sweet yellow powdery sherbet dab (I ate these as a child).  Make it a hill of that, or some other powdery substance you like.  This changes the tone from experiencing, for example, the pain of a horrible panic attack to 'releasing the energy of the sherbet dab'.  It still hurts - but your underlying Unconscious brain notices the change in tone and becomes more willing to allow the release process to happen.

Time to Enter the Hill

Having waited next to the Hill for a while now what you have demonstrated to your Unconscious is that you have a degree of control over the experience.  It is not coming at you - you are acknowledging there are feelings to be released; you have moved towards it; and you have paused on the edge.  As you enter the Hill now just think about how you can change the negative tone of this experience (sherbet dab time) and move towards the very centre of the hill.  If there is an issue at the centre of the hill just be with that as well.

Now imagine that by simply being at the centre of the hill you are absorbing the energy of the hill.  Your body strips the energy from the yellow powder and a faint yellow gas starts to radiate out of the top of your head.  This now shows your Unconscious you believe you are radiating the energy away.  Believe it or not, if you do this right, this is what actually ends up happening (did for me, anyway).  Your Unconscious will allow the trapped emotional response to flow.

It is very unlikely you will achieve full release in one go.  When you have had enough, move out the other side, feeling the lowering in emotional energy levels as you do so.  Sit on the other side of the Hill for a while and then go in again or, if you have had enough, go off and do something else.  But before you do - just recap with your Unconscious to strengthen your understanding of what just happened.

You went into the very centre of the response, at its very worst, then came out the other side.  You survived.  Now to finish off tell your Unconscious not only did you survive - the  hill has reduced in size.

Do this with enough focus for long enough and you will see real shifts both in the movement of emotional energy and in the way your Unconscious sees the emotional response.

Using this method I removed severe panic attacks and 27 obsessions.

Not Realistic?

What you learn when you do this kind of self-work is that seeing, and changing how you see, is everything.  External reality has very little to do with what goes on inside our heads and that is the true reality of emotional self-management.

Regards - Carl

Bad Stress to Eustress Article ..

A while back I was on the way to the gym when a group of youths decided to give me some verbal abuse as I cycled by ... one of the best workouts I've ever had ... thanks guys!

Do you have a favourite way of turning bad stress into eustress? Please leave a comment below.

Regards - Carl

Good Stress is Not an Oxymoron: Don't Take Stress Management Too Far Or You'll Die of Boredom

By Elisabeth Kuhn

We know all about the negative effects of stress, including everything from heart disease to diabetes to divorce to insomnia to suicide. Given all the bad press stress gets, it's easy to believe that stress is an evil that must be purged from our lives at all cost.


We continually seek out the latest in stress management techniques to achieve a less stressful life. To some degree, this is a good idea - constant negative stress should be reduced whenever possible. However, there's another side to stress - a positive side that's frequently overlooked.


Mental health professionals and doctors even have a name for positive stress: "eustress". Eustress refers to the constructive stress that helps keep you motivated and driven in all aspects of your life. For example, an athlete may find a big game stressful, but the nerves and excitement of this eustress encourages him or her to push harder and play better.


In this case, stress is a temporary response that brings about positive changes - such as the drive to play better. This is a very different phenomena than a long-term type of stress that eats away at the athlete's health and well-being.


So maybe you're not a world-class athlete - that doesn't mean you don't experience eustress in your own life. Maybe you get the same rush from performing in a community theater presentation or use the boost of stress to help inject energy into an important presentation at work. Perhaps you're someone who turns the stress of gaining weight into an impetus to spend more time at the gym.


Having a small amount of stress in our lives drives us to excel in everything we do and it enables us to feel content with life and the choices we've made. Therefore, getting rid of stress entirely is not only impossible - it wouldn't be healthy to do anyways!


We also need small amounts of stress in our lives to respond to the various threats and dangers we occasionally encounter. In this case, stress is part of the fight-or-flight response - a holdover from our primitive ancestors. When we detect the presence of danger, our bodies kick into high gear.


They release the hormone cortisol which increases the level of sugar in our blood. Our breathing rate increases and oxygen fills our muscles in preparation to either fight the threat or flee from it. Without this physiological response, we wouldn't be able to defend ourselves nearly as well against all sorts of dangers and intrusions.


While it's clear that too much stress can wreak havoc with your overall health, doctors and mental health specialists have found that too little stress can also be harmful. Negative stress causes a wide range of emotional and physical problems that can inhibit your energy and drive.


On the other hand, as long as it's reasonable and not excessive, a certain amount of stress plays a positive role in helping us fulfill our dreams and in enabling us to protect ourselves in times of danger. This eustress can give you the determination that's needed to work long and hard to accomplish your goals and will better equip you to handle the negative stress in your life.


About the Author: And if you want to achieve a little bit more balance between good and bad stress, you are invited to get Elisabeth Kuhn's FREE report with seven stress-reducing strategies. If you want Elisabeth's full-sized version instead, with lots more strategies (including an introduction to EFT or Emotional Freedom Technique), here's instant stress relief.


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