Nevertheless, there is a more primeval nervous system; it is autonomous, and it is also referred to as autonomic which is represented throughout the body with ganglia, which look like beads along the spinal column (for instance, in the solar plexus) and even in some organs like our heart. One could observe the following principle: the lower we move down our body, the older the structures we encounter there.
There are several elements of our body which we share with annelid worms and even with hydras.
Our tender cortex
The cerebral cortex requires very delicate conditions to do its work. It is a well-known fact that it has little resistance to various injurious effects such as oxygen deficiency or the poisoning influence of ethanol. If the brain remains without oxygen for 57 minutes, its cells begin to die. In case of alcohol intoxication, the cortex starts deteriorating. However, the subcortex is much more resistant to harmful influence. The spinal medulla can remain up to 24 minutes without oxygen, while ganglia of the autonomous nervous system continue functioning without nutrition for many hours.
Emergency situations disturb the fine-tuning of the mind and take it to the realm of ancient survival instincts. When our intellect finds itself in a critical situation and it cannot find any optimal way of reacting to it, it forwards this task to the older structures of our mind. It is the place where our mind stores survival experience gathered from millions of years of evolution and this is what may lead to the altered state of mind.
Fright and primitive instincts
It also happens in the cases when the control of the situation is lost due to intoxication. A typical example in such case would be alcoholic intoxication: functioning of the cortex is temporarily slowed down, and a person is overwhelmed with primitive emotions, with aggressive, sexual or other desires which he or she can hardly control. Theres a reason why people say Wine is in, truth is out. Theres a similar reaction when a person is under anaesthetic. As you can see, if our cortex analyser fails to complete the task, the amygdala (the brains alarm dispatcher) redirects the task to the more stress-resistant structures. Our subcortex and autonomous nervous system step in. In these cases, the following behaviours are activated:
a) Bursting with energy and fighting for life;
b) Running away;
c) Preserving energy, going into the sleep mode, hiding.
There are not many options to choose from. Something happens that we are not ready for. The signal is sent to the higher divisions of the brain. Our intellect cannot find the solution. A person feels confused.
Theres a shift towards the primitive survival strategies; the autonomic nervous system is activated: reactions like shock affection or apparent death take place.
Fig. 5. Signal routing when an emergency situation takes place.
Like a bee against the window
It is a good moment to remind you about the observation of Ernst Kretschmer (18881964), an outstanding German clinical therapist. In his work Hysteria, Reflex, and Instinct first published in 1923 Kretschmer describes the way a bird or a bee behaves when it accidentally flies into a room. In its striving towards light it becomes hectic: The creature is flapping and fluttering, moving chaotically from side to side; these movements repeat as convulsions until it finds its way through the window to freedom. Then normal flying movements are immediately restored (Kretschmer, 1996, p.15)
Kretschmer saw the analogy between the above-mentioned behaviour and the way people behave in extreme situations. Thus, during an earthquake the crowd typically behaves irrationally and chaotically. But even these chaotic movements can be life-saving.
Two soldiers in the command unit
Kretschmer also gives another very bright example: Two soldiers are incapable of dealing with the horrors of war. The first would think about his neat handwriting, his technical skills, and connections at home; he would consider the pros and cons, make several clever steps and would finally find himself working in a quiet office. The other is found in the trenches after heavy artillery shelling; his eyes are shifty. He is taken away, he begins to shiver, then he is taken to the psych ward and after that he is sent to work the garrison service where he meets the other soldier in the quiet office busy writing.
There are two ways: one is exclusively typical for human beings only, while the other is an exemplary biological reaction which the whole animal sequence goes through: from unicellular creatures to a human being. (Ibid., 1415). Then Kretschmer draws the following conclusion:
A movement storm is a typical reaction of living bodies to life-endangering situations. A movement storm is self-help of relative biological use
(Ibid.)It is quite interesting when this reaction is compared to the behaviour of children; he notes that as a reaction to unpleasant situations theres screaming, pushing and lashing out instead of adults balanced words and movements (Ibid., p.17). More than that, he also points out the fact that adult people manifest the tendency to approach a new situation with a calculated action, and only in some extreme situations an adult would react with a movement storm (Ibid., p.16).
Freezing
Kretschmer reminds us about another widespread response to danger which is typical for many living beings, which is: apparent death. Some kinds of fish are capable of freezing up to 15 minutes and sometimes even longer while lying on one side. This is a defence mechanism which helps the animal hide from and look unattractive to the predator.
According to Kretschmer, such responses are something frozen, as a formula, squeezed into the fixed template without any flexibility in each particular case (Ibid.)
Psychological emergency mechanisms
A driver uses the steering wheel, brake and gas in order to adapt to the motion of his or her car to the situation on the road and get to the destination successfully. This is how our rational mind helps us adapt to new situations and overcomes challenges in the course of our lives. This is an adaptation of repeated use, which is activated in normal conditions.
However, theres also an airbag installed in the car. It is activated in case of an accident and does not require a drivers specific actions. This is how our bodily mind or our autonomic nervous system reacts to the situations which our body identifies as an emergency. When our latest instrument doesnt respond, the primitive one steps in, and in this case we are talking about a single-use escape plan with a limited number of strategies (attack, escape or hide), as we have already noted earlier.
Once having been put into use, an airbag will require a replacement because it just wont return back to where it was before. The psychological emergency mechanisms work similarly: once activated, they have a tendency to repeat non-stop. Time doesnt really heal anything in this case. Such conditions become chronic or, as psychiatrists say, processual. Thus one would need to take conscious action in order to turn these mechanisms off and bring the body back to normal functioning.
And now lets have a look at what a person feels when he or she is going through this. This is very important because the key to cure phobias and other psychotraumas is all about addressing ones feelings.
Phenomenology of fear
Out of the blue: how one perceives a danger alert
When describing an episode that led to a disorder, many describe it as something that hit me mildly on the head, its like hot water was poured on me or like something went through my body. Shocking information is perceived as something appearing out of the blue.
However unusual and even sometimes strange these descriptions may be, they all share the same features. Hundreds of people whom I have worked with in the course of my research claim that at the moment when they got scared, they felt like their bodies swallowed something which has been poisoning their lives ever since. Theres a feeling that this substance moved down to their stomach where one starts feeling an unpleasant sensation whenever the terrible situation which caused this is merely mentioned. In some particularly difficult cases this substance is clearly associated with a poison that infects every cell of the body.
Theres an expression my heart leaps into my boots where heart is actually your vital energy which moves down to your stomach when you feel frightened. As a result, the top of your head and the surface of your body feel cold. A rapid transfer of energy from the periphery to the centre is taking place.
Vacuum unit
Imagine a vacuum tank that suddenly depressurises. Everything that is around is sucked into it. If this machine was close to the gold bearing river full of golden nuggets, it would suck in all that too, including the sand, and the pebbles. Something similar happens to a person at the moment of confusion: interior space of the body drags down information, including everything that seems to be terrifying.
Fig. 6. When we are faced with something unknown, we often feel at a loss. Such reaction can be seen in the self-portrait titled Frightened by Zinaida Serebriakova (circa 1917). The Girls eyes are open wide, and her mouth is open too. When there are no reasonable solutions to be found, there is a sensation of emptiness inside. When the emergency signal is sucked into the area of the solar plexus, the process of sensibilization takes place.
When frightened, people open their mouths and eyes widely, make signs of dismay and then sharply inhale.
At the level of our sensations, this is exactly the moment when information is sucked into the head, chest and the solar plexus, which could later cause a phobia.
Rely on sensations
I treat these descriptions of the sensations as useful clues which could prove very helpful in the course of healing. They should be taken into consideration within the constraints of their own logic, that is: as they exist. You can hear the following description: It hit me like a ton of bricks, and the dust from them got under my skin, because this is actual feedback on the processes that are taking place in the body.
Evidence from spatial perception lays the foundation for further work.
Your bodily energy and wisdom is where your attention goes!
In order to restore the process, you need to establish a back-and-forth connection with it. As soon as this connection is established, you get the access to control the processes which earlier seemed uncontrollable. This includes the processes at the level of the autonomic nervous system.
An important discovery of Psychocatalysis is that when attention is paid to the sensations in the interior space of the body, one is able to establish the necessary connection with the processes that take place at the autonomic energetic level, and thus one gets to control them successfully. More than that, this is pretty much the only actual way to access these processes.
One of the principles of our method says: Energy and reactivation of regulation is where your attention goes. As soon as a person starts noticing something in his or her interior space, an influx of energy is directed to it, and the process reactivates. However, there is a second factor that also plays an important role, and it is comparing the actual state with the ideal condition. It is our attention that contains information about our ideal state and to what extent our current state differs from it. Any process in the body, once it finds its reflection in the mirror of our attention, begins to turn itself around. That is why we would like to add the second principle to the first one about attention and energy: Your attention guides you to the wisdom of the body.
The two components
In the descriptions given by the people who suffer from phobias two components can be singled out:
Head (or cognitive) component: images, thoughts, fantasies about the traumatic incident;
Bodily (or sensory) component: sensations in the body connected with the danger signal and the reaction to it.
Healing from phobias through Psychocatalysis presupposes careful attention to both levels of our consciousness. Psychocatalysis as a cognitive-sensory therapy differs from other psychotherapeutic schools in the way that it appeals to the processes at the level of the atomistic nervous system and to the sensations and energy as it actively works at the levels of both the central nervous system and the intellect.
What one should strive for and what one should avoid
In our body, the solar plexus has a priority for storing information. As a rule, this is where the information about what to strive for and what to avoid is kept.
Useful information usually makes its way to the solar plexus gradually: it is absorbed from the exterior, concentrates in the forehead, then it moves from the head to the chest, and then finally goes down to the stomach. This is how a person enriches him or herself and becomes more competent. At the moment when a person feels lost and confused, unchecked information makes a meteoric decent within the space of our mind. Such unbalanced competence turns into a curse for a person.
Imagine there is a man who is going on holiday in a weeks time. He watches the news about a plane crash on TV. This is a tragic event; however, it has a very remote connection to his trip. Anyone would feel sorry for those who lost their lives in this plane crash and for those who would bear the burden of the guilt for this happening; this is a moment to pray and to sympathize with the relatives of the victims. Nevertheless, life goes on, and one needs to move on, too. Every trip has its risk but an adult person usually feels ready to take it.
What happens to a person if he or she is made unstable by such of information? This person will feel confused and with that vacuum feeling inside. Fragments of the burning plane will get sucked into the solar plexus. The state of shock passes, but the person seems completely different: a black substance remains in the mind. The topic of air travelling becomes a sore spot, and reason, having lost its ground, cannot restore its power. Arguments like planes are the safest kind of transportation, and millions of passengers land safely in their destination points are no longer convincing. Moreover, its doubtful if this person with the plane debris stuck inside can really enjoy his or her holidays when theres a plane home to keep thinking about.