Who Interprets Our Environment?

“I’m not actually afraid of anything, but I’m still freaking out.” I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve heard some version of that in the clinic. It’s way more normal than people think.

This is because the way our system evaluates our environment and decides whether or not to react with a defense response (releasing stress hormones, increasing heart rate, pre-tensing muscles for action, etc) is not completely under our conscious control. It belongs to a pre-verbal, pre-rational part of the brain; the part we share with all mammals and reptiles.

So when it comes to calming our automatic defense responses, we can’t use purely cognitive processes. Rather, our bodies holistic response tells us if we are safe. We can certainly evaluate our environment through conscious thought, but our unconscious physical experience will provide the majority of our sense of threat.

It matters to know this because I’ve worked with so many people who think of themselves as failures because they’ve done everything they can to understand their patterns, yet still experience symptoms of anxiety, panic, and/or PTSD. This is not because the person is a failure, it’s because the psychology of threat and the physical experience of threat have not been reconnected and resolved.

This is when a body-based approach to recovery can be revolutionary. It sounds abstract and mysterious, but it’s really just another language you learn (or more accurately, re-learn) to interpret and speak.