Did you know people actually have two brains? We have a conscious brain that produces thoughts, ideas and intention and we have an automatic, unconscious brain that produces impulses. There are advantages to having two brains. The conscious thinking brain makes us smart and deliberate but the problem is it is slow. On the other hand, the unconscious automatic brain is fast, but the impulses that arise from it are sometimes undesirable. Automatic impulses do not always serve us well.
Have you ever been walking in the woods and seen something that looked like a snake out of the corner of your eye? Notice that your heart pounds and you have that alarmed feeling even before you are aware of having “seen” something. If you had to wait to fully process the image of the snake in order to react defensively, you would likely get bitten. So the mind makes you jump at a few snake-shaped sticks because that way you will be sure to avoid stepping on the real snakes.
The part of the brain that automatically senses threats is the amygdala. The amygdala receives sensory information from every sense. It “filters” this information and automatically “decides” which perceptions represent something that is a threat to safety. Notice that the amygdala is a dynamic or changing structure. If you are relaxed and happy you are less jumpy than if you are “on edge” because you just got into an argument or drank a cup of coffee.
The job of the amygdala is to take its crude sensory perceptions and to energize you to take action to protect yourself. It energizes you because it directly controls your sympathetic nervous system and stimulates the release of stress hormones. Did you know that stress hormones like adrenalin and cortisol are actually stimulants? The action of adrenalin is similar to that of cocaine. By the way, just like stimulants can be addicting, stress which releases these stimulants can also be “addicting” for some people.
The amygdala is not just a single brain structure. It actually has many parts to it. There are different classes of things we associate with threat and fear. The main two classes of feared situations are social and non-social. There are some very outgoing people who climb mountains and yet are anxious at social gatherings. Similarly there are some socially outgoing people who are easily frightened by heights or other non-social stimuli.
People get their fears two ways. The basic activity level of the amygdala is set by genetics. That is why anxiety disorders run in families. Studies show that timid people suffer from an over active amygdala. Fearfulness can also be acquired because like I said the amygdala is a dynamic structure. PTSD is a disorder where there is an enhanced threat response.
Now here is the important part that you may not have considered. What motivational systems does your amygdala interface most with? What are you likely to do in response to threat? There are people whose amygdala is over-connected to dominance motivation. When they perceive a threat they go on the attack. There are other people whose amygdala is connected to affection motivation so when they perceive a threat, they seek out social support. For others, the anxiety is free floating and they freeze up.
If you want to observe firsthand the amygdala at work, watch the dog behavior shows on Animal Planet. As you may have read, my daughter fosters dogs and so I have had the privilege of seeing threat behaviors and how they create dog dysfunction. The dogs also help us to understand how genetics and experience interact to shape threat responses. First let’s consider the grey hound. These dogs are very fearful but in general their fear system connects with their social affiliation system. As a result, they are on average low in aggression. Both of the grey hounds we fostered ran away from our dachshund. I think these dogs have been specifically bred for non-aggression and that is why they tend to cower when afraid.
This week, we had the good luck to meet the Dog Whisperer of Connecticut he explained to me why some working dogs bite people. The answer as to why some working dogs are vicious has relevance to anxiety in humans so stick with me. My new friend raises dogs who protect us by sniffing out bombs and narcotics in the airports. He showed us some terrific dogs and demonstrated their strong temperaments that make them ideal to do their jobs. The dogs with ideal temperaments have a very strong “play” drive and they like to have fun. But they also have to be sensitive to threat so that they will alert to danger. When they sense danger, they have to be energized to face it playfully. My new friend explained to me that vicious dogs are a by-product of the desire to breed dogs that have both play drive and an adequate threat response. If a dog is easily threatened but doesn’t play it only cowers if it is like a grey hound or aggresses if it is a working dog. So what our instincts tell us to do with our fear is important.
Like people dogs also have two brains, so they can be trained some. However the unconscious brain of a dog is always stronger. If a dog has an overactive amygdala and reactive aggression it will always be potentially dangerous. To help these dogs, we need to keep them in a calm environment or give them medication.
Fortunately people can, through conscious experience modify their genetics. People who are born with social anxiety can use psychological training to reduce and even eliminate their automatic responses. In people the amygdala is dynamic.
To manage anxiety we must first identify and understand it with our conscious minds. Then we must take conscious steps to face our fears while relaxing our bodies. Repeatedly facing a feared situation causes the amygdala to stop reacting to that situation as threatening. Avoiding a feared situation only reinforces the fear. The amygdala is rewarded by avoidance behavior and senses that it did it did a good job when we avoid.
Now stop a moment to consider how anxiety operates in you personally. Are you like a vicious dog who snaps at everyone when you get wound up? Are you like a grey hound who tries to cope by cozying up to a friend? Or do you just avoid everything and everyone? My friend who is a Buddhist says, “A human life represents a great opportunity because only humans have such a great capacity for choice.” Although the pull of anxious impulses is very strong we humans luckily do not have to be ruled by them. We can use our large intentional brains to make choices. The choices we make will then shape the structure of our unconscious minds.
Next week psychopathic anxiety.
Welcome, Jane…glad you are on the road to healing and I hope that Donna’s website has been as much comfort to you as it has been to me.
Free,
Being “emotional” isn’t a bad thing at all, it is when we let our “emotions” rule us, like a runaway horse that can’t see to the left or right, but just plunges blindly on and “over the cliff,” that emotions become problematic.
Do you remember the old question when we were kids, about what happens when the “immovable object is pushed by the irresistable force?” Well, something has to give! LOL
I’m still “very emotional”—I cry at Lassie movies, weddings, funerals, and at happy times too—but not the gut wrenching sobs of continual grief any more. I also laugh spontaneously, and get gushy at a litter of new kittens or the pasture full of calves and foals. I wouldn’t trade that for the “sterile” inner life of the P or the negativity of others I know. Viva la emotions!
“Hah! Just realised the wicked witch was a sociopath!!!”
OMG, your right!!!! free and her her flying monkeys are her minions.
Run Dorothy! Run!!!
All That I can say is what a different its been without my ex sociopath.
If you knew me during my time spent with my ex sociopath.
You would have ask yourself “what wrong with this guy”
If you knew me during the break up with my ex sociopath
You would have ask yourself “Man, stay away from this guy, he is weird!”
If you knew me today, you might ask yourself, “he is a honest person, I might want to get to know him better”.
I went from denial……
to despair……
then to the bright warm feeling of hope!
All I want to say is thank you all and each one of you for being there for me and Thank you Lord for never leaving my side, not once! Even when I only saw One set of footprints in the sand….
FOOTPRINTS IN THE SAND
~One night I dreamed I was walking along the beach with the Lord.
~ Many scenes from my life flashed across the sky. ~
~In each scene I noticed footprints in the sand. ~
~ Sometimes there were two sets of footprints, other times there were one set of footprints. ~
~ This bothered me because I noticed that during the low periods of my life, when I was suffering from anguish, sorrow or defeat, I could see only one set of footprints. ~
~So I said to the Lord, “You promised me Lord, that if I followed you, you would walk with me always.~
~But I have noticed that during the most trying periods of my life there have only been one set of footprints in the sand. Why, when I needed you most, you have not been there for me?”~
~The Lord replied, “The times when you have seen only one set of footprints in the sand, is when I carried you.”~
Mary Stevenson
Welcome Jane,
Yes. I agree that LoveFraud is the best web site That I have ever found. Were else can a person go to get information, education and help in the healing process. LoveFraud is a God send for me. Insomuch that I come here to
Cry
learn
listen
understand
heal
and grow….
With that stated thank you all that allows LoveFraud to be all that it can be!
Free:
I’m with you on the emotional person thing. To the point where my therapist suggested I look up Williams Syndrome because he thinks maybe I have it. It’s a genetic anomaly where part of chromosome seven is broken off and a person ends up with certain distinctive facial features and a real disparity in learning ability – great with words, awful with math and spatial stuff – or other learning disabilities.
With Williams, a person is characterized by being over-friendly, overly emotive, overly empathetic and filled with anxiety. There are other things, too, both physical and emotional, that fit me.
I cry at everything too. The girls used to make fun of me for it, when they were growing up, because I’d cry over Santa at the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade, cry at all their own musical events (so cute and growing up so much each year), cry at sad things…
Have never really been ashamed of it, although it is a wee bit embarrassing from time to time because people not like that just don’t GET IT. My closest friend – who is rapidly becoming not my closest friend by her actions and statements -is pretty hard-nosed. So are the only two men I’ve ever had real long term r’ships with – both of them very cold people.
Why?? That’s what needs figuring out. Why on earth would someone like that be attracted to men who are completely out of touch with their own emotions?
Watching House last night I was really struck by House telling the really emotional, caring Cameron that she has a need to “fix” things, that she cannot accept situations that are lacking in hope, and that is why she is attracted to House, because he is “damaged” and that it is not love that propels her, but her own “need.”
I recognized that in me, as he said it. All my life, conflating love and need, bringing my neediness down on the people I love by being a rescuer. And that doing this, while trained into me, was not really part of love — just part of what I learned, growing up. My role in the family, the singular way I have of controlling situations – by care-taking. And it is a form of being controlling, even though it doesn’t appear that way to the outside world.
To take the blame. To be the rescuer. To care-take on everyone, rather than letting them just BE. My way of trying to make things the way I want them – fixed.
Then having kids of my own, I did it to them in a way, too: always taking up the slack, always trying to hold up the relationship at all costs, always active rather than just appreciating them for who they are completely and letting them flounder – not jumping in to rescue.
And while I think it stems from certain really good characteristics, caring, having empathy, it also comes with its shadow, as Jung would say.
My “shadow” self is desperately afraid of expressing anger, of not doing enough. My shadow believes she is not lovable or enough just by existing, so I do these overt good deeds out of both a sense of love and caring but with a subconscious desire to have someone return them.
Expectations, and those that cannot ever be met because even if they were, I’d be liable to think someone were just “paying back” rather than showing love.
I can’t expect everyone to act like I do. In fact, that’s not really honoring who they are as individuals, by trying to “fix” every situation or issue, mine, ours or theirs, or to catch them whenever they fall.
Accepting them as they are really requires me to accept even the parts of myself that make me uncomfortable – anger, bad treatment, being overly relied-upon to pick up the slack, even the controlling nature of being a “fixer.”
I also suspect this is why I am attracted to certain types of men, because they are not fixers, not rescuers, and they have the ability to let things exist without trying to know all the answers or the outcomes ahead of time.
If you look at the “plot” of any great play, movie, story, fairy tale, etc. there is ALWAYS a psychopath in every story. Some of these stories are 100s of years old—there are stories of psychopaths in the Bible and stories of enablers—there are stories of how victims tested their persecutors to see if the persecutors had changed their behavior and repented.
Joseph, who was sold into slavery by his brothers, when he found them years later when he was second to the pharaoh, he didn’t immediately say “Oh, brothers, it’s me!” He first tested them to see if they were the same men who had sold him off–to see if they had learned and changed. He had already forgiven them in his heart, but he wanted to see what kind of men they had become before he resumed any relationship with them.
Then King David with his psychopathic son Absalom. David enabled this man for years, and didn’t stop his narcissistic behavior or his plots against the throne–even when Absalom went to war against him, David told his generals to be “gentle with the young man”—-
Jezebel was obviously a psychopath. Delilah, and various kings and others. The Bible is filled with stories of people who messed up their personal lives as well as spiritual lives because they were either psychopaths or enabled them.
The amazing thing about King David to me is that though he had many faults–murder, adultery etc. when his sins were pointed out to him HE DID NOT BLAME THEM ON SOMEONE ELSE, but repented and CHANGED HIS WAYS. Even with the horrible things he had done (though typical of a king of his time) God still said “he is a man after my own heart”—
No matter what we have done, we can change our ways, improve and grow if we are willing to accept responsibility for our behavior.
We can quit being fixers without losing our compassion for someone.
What for example, would you think of a mother who was so upset every time her toddler fell and bumped its head that she decided she just couldn’t take seeing these bruises, so she would CARRY that child where ever it wanted to go so it would NEVER experience the pain of falling and bumping its head?
Well, when the child was 100 pounds and she was still carrying it on her back so it wouldn’t bump its head learning to walk—of course we can easily see that i s outrageous, but yet in smaller ways we try to take away the pain that goes with growth, and when we do we take away the growth as well.
There comes a point too, that when someone (any role) in the family becomes so counter productive to the family or relationship that it is like they are chopping holes in the bottom of the family “canoe”—you can bail and bail but if they are allowed to sit there with their ax and continue to chop holes in the bottom of the canoe, you can’t paddle, you can’t bail, and you can’t repair the “canoe” fast enough to keep it afloat. The ONLY option you have at that time is to toss them overboard or sink with them.
Can you look at families you know where one “bad” child (a psychopath) is continually enabled for years by a parent who keeps putting up bail money, paying for rehab after rehab, etc. to the point that the parents are pauper-ed and emotionally destroyed? I only have to look as far as my mirror, though I never went bail or rehab, I did continue to emotionally pauper myself for my psychopathic son. His only appreciation was to try to have me killed for my trouble because I cut him out of my will when I saw the truth finally.
Making a conscious decision that I will not enable others ever again—and then “monitoring myself” to see that I don’t fall back into this pattern which “seems natural” to me was one of the first steps toward healing. “I’m gonna let the kid learn to walk–even if he bumps his head over and over.” I can’t help him by carrying him everywhere.
I’m “gonna set boundaries” for people in my life–close friends and family as well as those not so close. If I don’t, I might as well have my first tattoo—right across my forehead that says j “walk on me.” Or on my back that says “door mat.”
Yet, I don’t want to go overboard in the opposite direction and start being like the psychopaths–everything’s all about me. I need to find that balance between caring and self preservation.
Miss Manners (Judith Martin) says “one of the major mistakes people make is that they think manners are only for the expression of happy ideas. There’s a while range of behavior that can be expressed in a mannerly way. That’s what civilization is all about, doing it in a mannerly and not an antagonistic way. One of the places we went wrong was the naturalist Rousseauean movement of the Sixties in which people said “Why can’t you just say what’s on your mind?” In civilization there have to be some restraints. If we followed every impulse, we’d be killing each other.”
I think we all know “what good manners are”—and when anyone treats us in a way that isn’t “good manners” then we shouldn’t endure it. There seems to be some “rule” in our society that we treat people outside our family with “good manners” but those inside our intimate relationships are fair game for being treated with poor manners.
Also, if we tolerate this behavior we can be sure that it will continue. Just as if a two year old that starts to bite to get their way is never shown that “biting is not okay” they have no incentive to quit.
The common denominator in “us” (victims) seems to be that most of us are/were fixers and tolerated “poor manners” in others, while trying to maintain good manners in ourselves, until we reached the point we were quivering blobs of pain.
I have to join in this discussion, because good manners are high on my list of values. ‘Manners maketh Man’. My exN pretended to have the high qualities he knew I held in esteem. But because I had the good manner NOT to comment or react when I knew he was twisting me round corners, he thought I was a fool. People with poor manners and values take advantage of people who are good hearted and thoughtful – I find. People who have compassion and good manners are thoughtful and value my qualities in a beautiful sort of way.
I think if you get to the BASIC concept of manners, and look at how our families of origin (FOO) treated manners WITHIN the family vs with OUTSIDE the family if there is a big difference, then there is “something not right.”
Were you expected to always exhibit good manners no matter what someone else did, but not expect good manners in return?
Who in your family was allowed to behave badly (no manners) and who was expected to behave “always politely.?”
It took me a while to realize that my mother was ALWAYS the “soul of Ms Manners” EXCEPT to me! She would not set boundaries with anyone except me–and the main boundary she set for me was that I could not set boundaries with the “bad actors” in the family. She didn’t like me setting boundaries with anyone, but she tolerated that after a while, but absolutely NOT within the family–especially with her and her designees.
Yet, behind their backs, she bitched about their “bad behavior” (mainly to me) but never to their faces, and never set any boundaries at all that she would enforce.
It was ONLY after I went NC with her that I could “see the forest for the trees” and pull myself out of the “role” she had designated for me in the family…to see the “big picture.”
As long as I stayed too close to the situation, it felt “natural” and “normal” and I couldn’t see just how dysfunctional I HAD BEEN in participating in that “play” that was the “family script.”
It never even really occured to me that I had a CHOICE but to participate, that I COULD OPT OUT of my assigned role. NC wasn’t a real consideration of a possibility for living. I felt TRAPPED with no way out, when right in front of my very nose was the WAY OUT. I felt like James’ catipillar encircled with a wall of fire and it was getting very hot. I even felt like there was a “roof” of fire above me as well. When I finally realized that there was NOT a roof above me of fire (I finally looked UP and saw God’s escape hatch) I took that route, via NC. Only when I was outside the painful ring of fire could I see what had gone on for so long. How I was buying into the things that made me a perfect patsy for dysfunctional behavior in MYSELF allowing others to abuse me.
The way out was to STOP! HAULT! ALTO! QUIT! what I was doing, and the pain would go away, the abuse would cease.
But until I learned what I was doing to fuel the ring of fire I couldn’t put it out, and I couldn’t get out.
Looking back at how “helpless” and “hopeless” I felt—and actually was, because I didn’t realize that I was the root cause by allowing it. It doesn’t mean I think I deserved what the Ps did, I didn’t, but I ALLOWED it. By owning that, I can stop the pain, and stop falling repeatedly into the same trap.
A troop of Baboons is smart enough that if you use a trap on them to catch one, you won’t catch the second one in that troop with the same kind of trap. They are baboons for goodness sake and they learn from each other’s failures, I wasn’t even learning from my own failures. Now, I am I think, AT LEAST as smart as a baboon! LOL