Our nervous system's #1 job is to keep us safe
You are fundamentally driven by an attempt to survey your environment and determine how safe it is. God has designed your nervous system to continually survey your relational environment and say, "How safe am I?" or "Am I safe?"
Lions don't come around the corner often. But people do! Your spouse, partner, coworkers. And people can be a bigger problem.
Your nervous system can detect how safe it feels at any moment. This ability is called NEUROCEPTION. It is an ability that you have. God has equipped your brain with this ability. But NEUROCEPTION is different that PERCEPTION. When you look at a beautiful sunset, you are aware that you are looking at a beautiful sunset. That's perception. It is the way that your nervous system takes in information and responds to that information without your awareness.
But Neuroception is detection without awareness.
We are not conscious that this is occurring. But this is driving your interpersonal relationships. Many things can make you me feel unsafe: a fight in a parking lot or a funky look on our partner's face. When your body scans your relational environment and feels there is a threat, it triggers your nervous system to do one of the three things:
1. Socially engage (Talk!)
2. Fight, flight, freeze reaction (Yell! Run away or freeze in paralysis!)
3. Shut down
Each of these three responses is driven by a different part of your nervous system.
This is summarized as polyvagal theory. (Many and vagas nerve). This is only a theory. Adam is teaching it because it is helpful to understand why we are responding the way we do. But there is still so much we don't understand about the brain so this may not be completely accurate. Understanding these three points will really help you understand why you respond the way you do. It's going to try super hard to restore safety again.
A. Socially engage: The first thing you will do in a conflict is to try and use your tone of voice, facial expressions, and your words to try and reduce the conflict and restore connection with the other person so that you feel safe again. These nerves actually regulate your facial muscles. Your nervous system will automatically and unconsciously decide if social engagement will work in re-establishing relationship with the other person. Does talking work? Will talking help restore safety.
If any angry person starts yelling at you on the street, your nervous system will judge and decide whether discussing the event with them might restore safety. It is always the first thing you will do, unless your nervous system tells you, "That ain't gonna work!" In which case, you will move onto ....
B. Fight, flight, freeze reaction: And you decided this lightning fast and all unconsciously. This is the second response that you will begun executing if your nervous system decides that option A won't work. Your voice level goes up. You start getting a more serious look on your face. You start shooting darts at the other person. Which you may think of as "carefully constructed sentences to get your point across."
If you feel that the fight isn't working, then you will try to leave the room or leave the house. Or you may feel the bodily urge to leave the room. Your body is mobilized to flee. In fight or flight, you are amped up inside. Your heart rate is increased. You are in a state of hyper arousal. You are energized to fight or flee but you are energized.
So what about FREEZE? Sometimes when someone is frozen, they may look calm on the outside, but on the inside, they are amped up and hyper-aroused. You walk around the corner and a mountain lion is staring right at you. He looked very relaxed on the outside. But on the inside? Not so much! Do you think this man doesn't care about mountain lion? But when our partner or our friend or our child freezes and gets that blank look on their face, we tend to think that they don't care at all about us. In reality, it may be that they are frozen because they care so much about us.
What about when that doesn't work either?
C. Shut down: If fighting isn't going to make things better ... if fleeing to another room won't help .... your body may realize that nothing is going to change things. In this moment, your body shifts into the third possible response which is the shut down response.
When you have conflict with another person, your nervous system goes on alert. It believes that disconnection from someone equals danger. Relational rupture with someone that matters to you means you are in danger! This is because we are a mammal. All mammals need reciprocal interaction with those closest to them to feel safe.
Relational DIFFICULTY activates your social engagement system. Relationship DANGER activities fight/flight/freeze. But the prospect of Relational DEATH activates the shut-down response.
So how is shutting down different from freezing? Imagine a gazelle. It sees a lion. And so, it completely shuts down and freezes in terror. Despite the gazelle's outward stillness, it is not SHUT DOWN at all. It is frozen! Tight at the moment when it is frozen in terror, another gazelle darts out on the prairie. The lion will begin chasing the gazelle that is darting out. The freeze response makes the meat less desirous to eat. The freeze response has saved this mammal's life.
Do you see the response of the first gazelle? The freeze response saved its life.
The same thing happens with you and a partner, in-law, boss ... anyone. When you freeze during an argument, it is because your neuroception told you that you are more likely to have success if you freeze than if you flight back or flee. Your nervous system tells you that THIS response is the most likely way for the lion to attack you.
As I personally listened to this, I thought to myself: I don't freeze. Like ever. I am the lion. And then, Adam said this:
- If you are ambivalently/anxiously attached, you are more likely to be the LION.
- If you are avoidantly attached, you are more likely to be the GAZELLE.
We will get to this more later, but for curiosity sake, here is a little more information on the types of attachment disorders:
1. Anxious/ambivalent/preoccupied attachment
2. Avoidant attachment
3. Disorganized/Fearful-Avoidant attachment
or
4. SECURE
To the lion (Wendi) ... your partner perceives you as a lion. Your partner freezes because you are the lion. They don't want to make the conflict worse. If the other person talks back, that will make the disconnection or rupture worse. And so they freeze, just like to gazelle, inwardly panicked and searching for the next right move. They are hoping that the lion will back away and take the pressure off and help you regroup.
Your partner may have zero conscious control over the decision to freeze. (John, actually, is able to sort of outsmart the system and doesn't usually go into a freeze with me.) Those people that freeze are doing so trying to make it better but not knowing how. Connection to YOU is important to them because YOU are important to them.
Your physiological state is a major determinent in what you say or during conflict.
Your nervous system has three states it can be in:
3. SHUT-DOWN: your body is HYPO-aroused.
2. FIGHT/FLIGHT/FREEZE: When it is the fight/flight/freeze your body is HYPER-aroused.
1. SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT: And when you are in the social engagement state, your body is regulated.
All this discussion matters because your state determines what you say or do during conflict.
Can you manage some compassion for yourself right now?
You cannot choose to talk into a nice, calm voice when you are in a fight/flight/freeze response. HOLY COW! THIS REALLY JUMPED OUT AT ME!!
Why?
Because your body's physiological state prevents access to your calm voice. When your sympathetic nervous system is in high gear (fight/flight/freeze), you no longer have access to the nice calm voice of your social engagement system. This is because the state of your nervous system determines the range of the possible behaviors you can possibly engage in.
The state of your nervous system determines the range of the possible behaviors you can possibly engage in!
You need to understand why you behave the way you do in relational conflict. "The neural circuits that support social behavior and emotional regulation are available only when the nervous system deems the environment safe." When your nervous system detects danger, you shift into a different physiological state and this bodily state dictates what behavior responses you can make.
If you are running on a treadmill and your spouse is running on a treadmill next to you, in that state, do you think husband and wife can have a meaningful conversation in which they express meaningful conversations during that state? Of course not.
And the same thing happens when you are in a fight with someone you think about and your body shifts into a fight/flight/freeze state. You lose access to certain abilities that you formally had. You lose access to the ability to give empathy and compassion. Your bodily state can't support the regulation of facial expressions. In other words, your non-verbal communication abilities are severely limited.
Your ventral vagal system, which allows you to empathize with others, is only available to you when you feel safe.
Hopefully that will give you increased compassion about WHY your body feels the way it feels and WHY it enters into the state that it enters into.
Post-Conference Notes:
At the same time that our bodies are doing things, non-consciously, we humans have a capacity to become increasingly aware of things that we were previously not aware of. This is the biggest thing I am taking from this lecture. I had NO idea how many things were happening in my body that I was not aware of at all. I kept thinking to myself: Why can't I get control of my emotions? Why am I losing it like I am? And now I understand that this is beyond my ability. My body is operating non-consciously, and now that I understand it, I can move on accordingly.
As we are aware of these physiological realities and we begin to practice reflecting them and attuning to them, awareness makes a big difference in understanding this. Paying attention to this is one of the initial steps that creates greatest agency for us to begin to work differently and to see how our awareness of how these three systems are contributing to the story that we are telling.
We should also talk about Myelin. It is a protein that wraps itself around neural networks. For those circuits that are involved with social engagement, the beauty is that myelinated circuits is that they are flexible. We can adapt to the comings and goings.
If we have grown up with a secure attachment, our Myelin circuits are thick and we can move through these things very easily and move up and down very smoothly. We can have a range of different flexibilities.
Networks that are not myelinated are much less flexible. There is a good reason to suspect that the neural physiology of shame and trauma runs on non-myelinated circuits.
How can we become more compassionate for ourselves and others? How many of us have found ourselves in a way we don't like? It can take awhile to come back from that? And do we condemn ourselves for that? And condemn ourselves for how long it takes for us to get back from that place? Our healing may take awhile! I mean why didn't God send Jesus right after Cain killed Abel? God, why is it taking so long?
Have compassion. Hang on.
