Your brain and your emotions
The problem with psychotherapy
How often are you experiencing a challenge that just does not make sense? How often are you too embarrassed to discuss your challenge with anyone because it may sound too ridiculous? How often are you unable to overcome these challenges?
How often have your gone for therapy for months, even years with the predominant feeling that it did not help? How often are you going to a therapist, session after session just to talk about your challenges, with no solution? You are attending therapy for months, even years and all your therapist does is to repeat your feelings in different words and to ask highly empathetic: how does it make you feel? This approach of therapy has its’ origin from Carl Rogers’ Person Centered Therapy (PCT), which is still considered one of the most acceptable models of psychotherapy.
There is this joke about Rogers. According to the joke, Rogers is consulting with his client in his consulting room in a tower building in New York. The client tells Rogers that he feels depressed. Rogers then reflects his feelings by saying: you feel depressed. Yes, says the client, I feel like I can kill myself. Wow, says Rogers; you feel so down that you feel you can even take your own life. Yes, says the client, I feel as if I can jump through that open window. Says Rogers: you feel so desperate that you feel like you’re going to jump through that open window.
Yes, says the client, I am juuumpiiing.
Rogers, raising his head, looking at the open window, saying:
plump!
This is a perfect example of emotional reflection. Whether it is effective or not, still remains a question. At least Rogers could close this file.
Another dominant school of thought for psychotherapy is the school of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). CBT presupposes that you are anxious or depressed because of your irrational thinking. According to CBT, you can overcome your challenge by thinking rationally about them.
Your logical brain may tell you that your challenge just does not make sense. Even when you realise that your challenge is completely irrational, it still keeps on persisting and it does not matter how you try to think differently about it, these thoughts just don’t go away. In actual fact, they just keep on escalating.
Traditional psychotherapy helps you to talk about your challenge and find solutions on a logical level. After many sessions you learn to think differently about your challenge, but it does not make you feel better about it.
Or perhaps you are highly empathetically asked:
... and how does it make you feel?
Just talking about your challenge or focusing on your feelings might make you think differently about your challenge, but it doesn’t change your challenge – it only provides you with more options to potential solutions.
These therapeutic systems address your logical brain, your so-called neo-cortex (see explanation below), but your challenge is not seated in this part of your brain, and therefore the outcome of traditional psychotherapy is erratic. The challenge is rather in your primitive brain, or your reptile brain and your limbic system, and therefore change is also situated in these two parts of your brain.
The modalities used in this practice are precisely designed to address your reptile brain and your limbic system.
Schematically, your brain looks like this:
1. Your new brain (neocortex)
This part of your brain is also called your thinking brain. Your neocortex is the analytical part of your brain. It is also the part of your brain with which you perceive, think logically, reason and form perceptions.
2. Your emotional brain (limbic system)
This part of your brain is your emotional brain or feeling brain (limbic system), which is the alarm centre of your brain.
The most important aspect of this part of your brain is the amygdala. The amygdala scans all incoming information for possible danger (as well as pleasure). If it detects any potential danger, the amygdala will immediately activate the fight, flight or freeze response situated in your reptile brain. Such a reaction has a tremendous effect on your thinking brain (or your neocortex), which can feel completely overwhelmed.
3. Your reptile brain (cerebellum, lower brain and brain stem)
This part of your brain, consisting of your cerebellum, lower brain and brain stem, is the most primitive, instinctive part of your brain (known as your primitive or reptile brain).
This is the part of your brain that is primarily responsible for survival. It controls, amongst other things, your heart rate, respiration, blood pressure etc. This is also the part of your brain that instinctively prepares you to fight, flee or freeze during situations it perceives to be potentially dangerous.
This part acts almost automatically without thinking since its’ primary aim is survival.
Suppose a taxi suddenly turns in front of you, you are definitely not going to use your thinking brain. You are not going to first evaluate the situation and think:
- will I brake; or,
- will I swerve out; or,
- do I have any other option?
There is no time for thinking. During an emergency where your survival is threatened, your reptile brain immediately takes charge and starts to produce adrenaline to enable you to do whatever is necessary to save the situation without thinking logically. Nine out of ten times you do the right thing, and thus survive.
When your thoughts and feelings turn into conflict with each other
More than often, clients will tell me that their challenges sound ridiculous – however it feels realistic to them.
Unlike your thinking brain (neocortex), the language of your limbic system and your reptile brain are feelings, sensations, emotions, and survival.
The latter two parts of your brain are primitive and do not understand language or logic, yet it is the most powerful part of your brain, and your quest for survival is stronger than any logical thinking.
Incidentally, your thinking brain causes anxiety since it is producing the so-called irrational thoughts or fears that you literally devise but will most probably never happen anyway. I am calling anxiety the what if disease. Anxiety is the result of your thoughts and fears about what might happen, and only see a catastrophic outcome (see my article on General Anxiety Disorder on this site).
This so-called irrational thought sends a message of danger from your neocortex to your limbic system and reptile brain. The message of danger now travels from your neocortex to your limbic system and reptile brain. As you already know, these two parts of your brain do not understand language nor logic. It registers your thinking as a literal, physical danger such as life threatening, and in its primitive thinking, your survival instinct gets activated; adrenaline and cortisol for the so-called fight-or-flight-or-freeze reaction gets activated. You now experience anxiety and panic, as this part does not realise that it is not a real danger, but merely a product of your thinking.
Therefore, you feel permanently stressed and always on the alert to defend yourself in order to survive against a danger that does not even exist.
The role that amygdala plays in anxiety
Amygdala are the panic buttons of the brain that reside in your reptile brain. The amygdala’s emotional impulses can completely overwhelm, hijack and take over your neo-cortex (your thinking brain). You may tend to overreact during a situation, and people may wonder how you could overreact to such a small incident.
Your reaction to any incident is now more emotional than rational. You are responding to impulses of survival instinct in your primal brain. When your neocortex starts to relax and is functioning normally again, you may later feel ashamed, guilty or sorry about your reaction.
This practice focuses primarily on your reptile brain and your limbic system and the role these two parts of your brain play to cause your behaviour.
We can now take a closer look at the role of your amygdala, as it may explain your reaction to your feelings.
However, we remember trauma less in words and more with our feelings and our body, such as certain sensations we may experience. The body is more likely to remember what the mind is more likely to forget.
What is amygdala hijacking?
Amygdala hijacking is an immediate, overwhelming emotional response, just to realise later on that it was an inappropriately, strong overreaction to the trigger. Daniel Coleman coined the term amygdala hijacking following the work of neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux. LeDoux proved that emotional information is sometimes transmitted directly from the thalamus (the emotional part of your brain) to the amygdala, without involving the neocortex – your thinking brain. The thalamus responds like a traffic controller who has to decide where to send the emotional impulses. In emergency situations, the thinking brain is skipped, and a shortcut is taken from the thalamus directly to the amygdala. This path is 80 000 times faster than the original, longer path through the thinking brain. It causes an immediate strong emotional response without thinking – thus without rational or logical thinking beforehand. The thinking brain is now hijacked, off-line, or switched off.
Please have a look at the following presentation:
Amygdala
The amygdala are the panic buttons of the brain causing the fight, flight or freeze response
Quick facts:
- the alarm system of the brain;
- location: part of limbic system, or emotional brain; at the end of the hippocampus (memory);
- function: responsible for the response and memory of emotions, especially fear, and results in the fight, flight or freeze response.
The amygdala, almost looking like an almond, is responsible for the fight, flight or freeze reaction. It also controls the way we react to certain stimuli, or an event or events that causes an emotion, that we see as potentially threatening or dangerous. Anger (fight), fear (flight) and anxiety (freeze) are the typical emotional responses of the amygdala.
Anxiety and prolonged stress can later turn into depression due to cortisol and adrenaline stress hormones in the body.
Interesting research finding
A rat is crawling over ʼn cat’s back without fear. If you look very closely, you can see the rat in the background on the cat’s back between the cat’s tail and head.
Numerous studies were conducted where researchers removed the amygdala from rats (or manipulated it so that it could not function). These rats lost all fear, and especially also their fear of cats altogether. The rats were not afraid of anything, and even crawled over the cats without any sign of fear.
Therefore, we need the correct amount of anxiety for survival. If we had no anxiety, we would not even look left or right before we cross a street. If we had too much anxiety, we would never have the courage to cross the street at all, and getting nowhere in life, or never taking the risks to do whatever is needed to make a success of your life.