Our entire body is an inner guidance system.. we receive signals all of the time that we respond to.. and we may learn to shut down some of the signals or we may come to fear threat and connection which then can further limit our lives and sense of a fully engaged sense of vital aliveness. According to Dan Seigel we also develop what he calls windows of tolerance which limit and prescribe what we feel we can and cannot cope with in terms of emotions and interaction as well as whether or not we come to see certain emotions as a threat.. As he explains in his book Mindsight : Change Your Brain And Your LIfe some have a windows of tolerance for sadness and anger while others may shut down, block of or run away in fear when these arise or are expressed to them..
We may also, when faced with an emotion go into sympathetic arousal and engage our fear flight fight reflex which may appear as outbursts of anger, it is simply in this case that what others are asking of us or presenting us with becomes too much for us to regulate safely or process
I was very moved yesterday to read in that book of the work Dan Seigel did with a woman who had been sexually abused by her step father by being pushed hard up against a pool table.. She came to him only suffering with back pain and had no conscious memories of the abuse which was stored in implicit memory but blocked from neocortical memory.. Over time as Dan got her to engage with sensations the memories of her trauma came online along with all of the emotional distress.. in the next chapter on Vietnam Veteran PTSD trauma Seigel explains how flashback of past trauma can invade and make it seem like the threat is present due to the shutting down of the hippocampus.. Trauma in the brain manifests in real ways or it may lie hidden beneath symptoms.
In the first example of his work with the sexual abuse survivor it took years for the woman’s sense of safety to return with her sense of vitality was well as ability to engage in the world. When we block off the traumatic memory we also shut down to new experiences as so many of us know and then our sense of being alive rapidly diminishes. Knowing how our brains and nervous systems are wired may help us to move out of the activation states and shut down states that operated to block awareness of the trauma and keep us safe, but in the end only made our lives shrink to a very very very limited window of tolerance.
Emerging From The Dark Night 