Make it stand out.
A journey with your Genitals
The focus of this research exploration is on the intimate decisions we make with our genitals. The following describes what Jaak Panksepp named the emotional command systems that categorise emotional drivers that influence decision-making.
When we give focus of attention to our genitals, we might notice the influence of these primary drivers playing out in our relationship with them. As our genital expression is somatic and not symbolised, this often results in conscious communications being more subtle or elusive to recognise, or conversely, these may powerfully drive our sexual expression from motivations outside of our awareness.
Our relationship with our genitals is influenced by our needs for belonging, intimacy, exploring, adventuring, expanding consciousness, caring and being cared for, healing, repairing, loving and being loved, solitude, withdrawing, hiding, protecting what matters and revenging when what matters to us is lost. At the centre of all these drivers is the LUST system - our erotic drive for the integration of species which is rooted in and facilitated by our genitals.
When the emotional command systems are activated, they activate inner dialogue, somatic, emotional, hormonal and nervous system responses and calls to action. The intensity of this viscerally felt effect urges us to take action to satiate needs and restore equilibrium. When sensory receptivity is compromised, the recognition of needs can become disabled, but the urge to take action can continue but is disconnected from attunement. This can lead to us participating in strategies that inevitably don't satiate the need or restore equilibrium. Marc Solms, in his book 'The Springs of Consciousness' refers to these misfiring strategies as 'prediction errors.'
The Emotional Command systems
This ancient circuitry is 200 million years old. It activates biochemical hormonal and autonomic involuntary nervous system responses that we share with primates, mammals, and some older ones like grief and sadness in birds. These responses have their origins from when life began on Earth, around 3.8 billion years ago.
These emotional command systems drive all our behaviour as humans with complex cortical structures and neurotransmitters in our hearts and guts managing, regulating and making sense of them to create strategies to serve our belonging.
Jaak Panksepp used CAPITAL LETTERS to differentiate them as literal brain structures, as opposed to a metaphorical classification system.
They each have evolutionaryly determined sequences that can get interrupted, triggering biochemical and nervous system responses and activating implicit memory, which is the feeling of past times when this interruption occurred.
When Panksepp refers to emotional systems, he means to be very specific. He is speaking of neurocircuitry that can be defined precisely in terms of-
location within brain structures, and
function evoked in a "coherent pattern" by "localised electrical or chemical stimulation." Panksepp writes: "We can turn on rage, fear, separation distress, and generalised seeking patterns of behaviour." He explains that "once an electrode is in the correct neuroanatomical location, essentially identical emotional tendencies can be evoked in all mammals, including humans."
If we focus on understanding animals' emotions, we can come closer to understanding our own.
We are all the same under the skin and have a special responsibility as humans. - Jaak Panksepp.
The EMOTIONAL COMMAND systems
As defined and categorised by Jaak Panksepp
SEEKING - in service of an expansion of consciousness
PLAY - in service of win-win harmony
CARE - in service of bonding, nurture and kindness
RAGE - in service of protection and CARE
FEAR - in service of safety
PANIC - in service of CARE and belonging
LUST - Eros in service of integration
Emotions can be understood as an expression of our inner being: a visceral call to action from bodily sensations, with biochemical nervous system responses to a survival need. In a reciprocal interactive relationship, they are intrinsically interconnected with our nervous system and hormone releases. Our ancestor's emotions are epigenetically in the chords of our hearts, primed to come back into harmony from distress that wasn't healed before. Emotions have different meaning associations, and several categorisations of emotions from all over the world attempt to symbolise collections of visceral feeling states in the body to support our shared empathetic reality with each other.
Emotions are only a problem if the intensity of the visceral felt sensations and call to action charge from our hormonal and nervous system responses is too intense, and we lose our availability and receptivity to express and respond while staying attuned with each other.
The following is a series of summaries of the Emotional Command systems originally defined by Jaak Panksepp, as I currently understand them
SEEKING
The SEEKING system is our experience of "wanting" a need or desire to be satiated. All animals and birds forage or hunt for food. This seeking activates hormonal 'feel good' Dopamine, reward pleasure for foraging and hunting, and, in the bigger picture, is ultimately in service of discovering strategies to meet needs and the expansion of consciousness. The pleasure of the dopamine reward can easily become the dominant focus of attention for commodifying our bodies, our genitals and our relationships with others and things. This dopamine pleasure can be an addictive pleasure of wanting with dopamine reward, which The sympathetic nervous system switches off parasympathetic sensory receptivity, facilitating satiation awareness.
This system operates on many levels with action circuitry that remembers how to satiate allostasis body needs for thirst and hunger, our biochemical needs for certain minerals, vitamins and proteins, etc., alongside other body maintenance needs like temperature, sleep, oxygen, etc
The SEEKING system responds to messages from our interior with remembered circuitry to satiate our body's physical and emotional needs for safety and belonging, nurture, play, protection, procreation, creativity, expansion of consciousness and discovering solutions to disharmony or disease, etc
The SEEKING system is the biggest of all the emotional command systems and receives motivational hormonal feel-good rewards when it achieves its goal. The mid-prefrontal cortex, with its nine functions described by Daniel Seigal, largely unconsciously monitors these action programs.
The dopamine reward for seeking and wanting can become addictive, with the feel-good reward being the motivation. This system largely activates the sympathetic nervous system, and here lies the tension between seeking (and getting a reward for achieving the "want") and the satiation
Satiation or integration of wants requires relaxation and trust to come "off guard." People can get stuck wanting to experience the dopamine of conquering and its intensities without satiating the experience.
For example, a person can overeat, not tasting the food, leading to bigger and bigger quantities or intensity of flavours or consuming high fat, carbohydrate and sugars which give us humans so much intensity of comfort. A person may have many sexual encounters, repeatedly self-pleasure with orgasm-intensity goals, which is commonly referred to as sex addiction, taking action to achieve a narrow high-intensity biochemical feel-good range of short-lived honeymoon as a defence to feeling a wider range of emotions.
It can break our hearts to open receptivity and experience satiation, which is both physical and emotional; if we receive it, we are reminded of when our needs have not been met. This can activate a kind of chronic seeking that repeats the grief of needs not being attuned to or met.
The SEEKING system might also be activated unconsciously to rebalance the loss of harmony. We can discover ourselves acting out behaviour that baffles us as to why we are doing it, yet somehow driven to seek out these experiences. A SEEKING system that has become overactive without sufficient relaxation and satiation can lead to a separation of the self, like bouncing on the waves of dopamine intensity without relaxing in the sea currents. A sense of never getting to the bottom of it or a sense of hollowness or emptiness inside. This emptiness can ache and seek relief with hedonistic strategies for comfort or ones that include taking action to generate excitement and intensity of pain or exhilaration, which "helps me feel alive".
The seeking system can become overactive in response to hidden danger loops with fear-based seeking in search of solutions. This can be understood as the origins of psychosis, where the sense of self becomes fragmented and disconnected from a felt sense of belonging, living in a holographic world of feared or idealised projections. These projected reality planes disconnect a person from shared attuned understanding with others. Receptivity and satiation in this extreme state are radically impaired.
Busyness as a defence can be understood as an overactive SEEKING system searching for solutions and distractions from feeling.
Reflective questions in relation to your genitals
Notice the ways you take action to achieve comfort and pleasure or excitement and intensity with your genitals the ways your genitals physically express themselves, and the ways you and/or your genitals might be thriving or suffering from these strategies
CARE
We are instinctively motivated to CARE and nurture our young ones and each other. This can be understood as our resourcefulness to set aside our needs in service to others. The famous feel-good, fuzzy, loving Oxytocin feels so warmly and generously motivating when we are attuned and close and feeling close to each other. We call this loving and being loved. There's often a sense of "I will do anything for you" when we are at the effect of the CARE system, as our survival from the moment we are born is activating this in our carers. We need them to do anything and everything for us.
In his lectures, Robert Sapolsky speaks of Oxytocin also generating an "I can do this" motivating drive to care, with the courage to "do what it takes" to set personal needs aside to care for a helpless infant. CARE is the core of all our relationships, especially with ourselves and in service.
When we extend our CARE in our professional roles to the people we serve, this love is necessary to see things through. Like a baby's caregiver learns not to react to the intensity of affect they feel in response to the baby's discomfort, we as practitioners are also learning this. This is our response flexibility to bear the intensity of affect that may arise in somatic practices.
Naturally, each of us will have a unique relationship with this powerful hormonal experience when this system is activated and influenced by all our implicit and explicit memories of CARE. These are memories of being close or denied the closeness we long for, loving and being loved, idealisations, fears, disappointments, failures of resonance and understanding, ruptures, fury, and revenge where CARE has failed.
Our choice as practitioners is not the choice caregivers have with their infants. Through the Wheel of Consent, we are learning to only be in Service when we are within the range of 8-10 out of 10 with Optimal Generosity. We must be resourced to care for and serve people in the repair process where the duty of care failed.
Like any emotional command system, it can feel like torture when CARE is frustrated. Whenever we are deprived of caring for someone we love, either they are not allowing us to care for them, or we are not allowed to care for them, it can feel painfully disabling.
I have experienced, for example, and witnessed in others the intensity of pain of holding back from actively caring for a loved one who is killing themselves with substances. The counter-intuitive "hands off" approach to further "enable" and watch the loved one reach their rock bottom, which for some is death, can feel like torture.
The need to care is so indigenously built that not acting on the calls to nurture can feel disabling. For example, in extreme cases, creating boundaries to not offer shelter, food, or money when a loved one is starving and homeless is the reverse of what feels intuitively right. This is the main focus of the twelve-step process, which supports family members in creating boundaries that feel like the antithesis of CARE, which is actually CARE.
We might apply this twelve-step process to ourselves with our relationship with our genitals when they are homeless and we are starved of pleasure. Stop feeding the addictive strategies of compensatory dopamine reward and start listening to feelings and learning to bear them.
Reflective questions in relation to your genitals
Describe the ways you CARE for your genitals
and the ways your genitals, if they had a voice, might CARE for your needs and wants
and the ways you might respond with CARE when listening to your genital's needs and wants
and the ways your CARE for your genitals might be frustrated while being at the affect of the SEEKING system's drive to commodify your genitals
and the ways your genitals might be suffering from lack of CARE
PLAY
Why is the PLAY emotional command system so important for developing attuned communication?
Self-regulation with attunement and empathy is learned through the PLAY system. If you watch wild cats and domestic dogs rolling around and chasing each other, playing "I'm going to kill you" while checking into each other's eyes that it's safe, you will see that they learn not to bite too hard if you watch animals playing with each other their playing power over and power under. They are socially engaged with each other, attacking, chasing or dominating the other. They're taking turns winning and losing. Taking it in turns is very important because without it being in balance, both will be affected by the unsafe FEAR, PANIC and RAGE system responses. They learn that each other's survival is necessary. Without belonging to a community, tribe, pack or family, our survival is jeopardised. Mammals in play practice sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system flexibility. Learning that excitement, fear, and deep states of surrender can be safe with social engagement.
The PLAY system has the most dopamine reward out of all the emotional command systems. It helps us learn not to play "too hard," to exercise our own power safely, and to learn safety while surrendering to someone else's power.
When we haven't learned this with attunement and compassion, our relationship with making decisions for personal gain will likely be negligent of the consequences—a blind spot in our capacity for compassion.
Play is necessary for our survival because it exercises our attuned communication with each other and our resilience, which affects all of our other emotional command systems: fear, rage, panic, care, and lust.
"It is joyful and pleasurable because it is the most heavily dopamine rewarded out of all the emotional command systems" - Mark Solmes.
If win-lose repeatedly tips out of balance, it immediately stops feeling joyful and pleasurable. If a person loses too many times, they might not have the confidence to play anymore, withdraw, and experience the PANIC response, feeling the low-level shame and depression that comes with the loss of agency.
If a person wins too much, the others won't play with them, and a person might find other playmates to have fun with, but eventually, they might experience loneliness and be excluded. This might happen repeatedly in ever-widening circles or relationships, creating "power over" dependencies that can be miserable. If winning causes too much misery through overtaking, this might activate the PANIC system and the consequential shame of being cast out and not belonging.
So there is shame in being a victim who has lost power and shame in being the perpetrator who has won power.
PLAY helps us to be in our power safely and in our immobilised relaxation safely.
PLAY intrinsically facilitates attuned communication, empathy and compassion, with affective mirror neurons, to know how the other feels so I don't hurt them too much.
PLAY is essential for survival as it exercises up-regulated states of excitement when it is safe. It can also activate up-regulated states of fear, rage or panic with a blend of excitement. Play in the sympathetic nervous system ranges of excitement activates the LUST emotional command system, which has an evolutionary function for integration - integrating exiled parts into a shared witness, with attuned and empathetic communication with the exiled memories of when PLAY "went wrong".
These exiled memories of when our connection with agency, love, security and belonging was lost, a natural disaster, death or violent or emotional abuse, can take away our connections with safety. We will be more resilient to these acts of nature if we have an aerobic PLAY system.
Reflective questions in relation to your genitals
Describe the ways you play with your genitals for your pleasure, excitement and soothing and the ways your genitals signal their limits in allowing. Notice any ways you play with other people's genitals. Playing involves the Take/allow quadrants requiring win-win attunement with your intentions and noticing the impact. The PLAY system moderates the SEEKING system, which is goal orientated towards the commodification of self, others and the environment.
Laughter
"If you can't play with it, it's got you."
When a person loses their sense of humour, it can signal that they don't know how safe they are. When I am not ready to laugh, this can be understood as a sign that I am learning acceptance.
Laughing means "I didn't die."
V. S. Ramachandran shares in his book "The Tell-Tale Brain" that laughter originates in a sympathetic nervous system grimace, bearing teeth as something comes close to us that we don't understand yet, followed by the relief that the thing that we were afraid of didn't kill us.
Laughing together excites a bonded sense of safety rescued from danger.
Laughing brings us together, enhancing our shared experience of feeling safe. Sharing socially engaged, attuned, and receptive laughing eyes.
Laughing lights up our minds and opens our receptivity to relaxation, with our minds open to receiving the communications of the other. This is why learning with play and humour is the most effective way to acquire new data. Laughing lights up many different parts of the brain and opens communication networks between our emotional command system neural networks.
The PLAY emotional command system interacts with all the other emotional command systems and all parts of the nervous system. Play exercises our aerobic capacities to safely enter parasympathetic states and up-regulated sympathetic nervous system states.
In the collective and body memory are neural networks of implicit memory associated with parasympathetic immobilised states, where we might have lost power, agency, and belonging, and with up-regulated sympathetic nervous system states, when we are frightened, angry, and unable to protect ourselves.
LUST
The LUST system can be understood to be eros in service to the integration of species with erotic-fueled attractions for reproduction in service of the continuation of life.
I hypothesise that where there is an erotic charge, there are aspects of nature in the process of integration - whether it is the integration of genes through mating or the integration of exiled parts of the self back into life where agency and life were once lost
The intensity of orgasm liberates identity-maintaining defences in service of becoming one with everything. Literally, some brain structures and circuitry come offline from their pattern, namely the "Default mode network", which liberates. Parts of the mind communicate with each other or be censored. Hence, the occurrence of epiphanies in orgasmic states.
In altered states of arousal, the default mode network is suspended from its suppressing function, allowing neural networks to fire and connect with each other, which was unavailable before. We call these moments somatic openings or 'ah Haas.'
When the left side of the DFN is liberated, it opens the human experience of the deep presence of each moment emerging out of each moment.
When the right side of this circuitry is liberated, it gives rise to the experience of a sense of resonant connection with the universe, similar to when DMT is released in the brain. This connection opens us up when we die. No wonder the French name orgasms a "little death”
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La petite mort, the little death, is an expression which means "the brief loss or weakening of consciousness" and, in modern usage, refers specifically to "the sensation of post orgasm as likened to death." - Wickededia
There is often an erotic attraction in service of integrating exiled aspects of the self, as in "troublesome turn-ons". The LUST emotional command system is activated with the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems in states of arousal.
Parasympathetic nervous system arousal is necessary for engorgement and flowing lubrication. Relaxation and feeling safe primes us to enter into the intimacy of intercourse. Here, we experience the eros of integration.
Eros integrates the biomes of two human beings. Integration and coming together occur on every level, from microorganisms to the sensational coming together of bodies.
The integration of memory, and potentially the integration of exiled species of micro-organisms, and exiled implicit memories, epigenetic pleasure-integrating memory from all generations of aspects of this living planet that are in limbo seeking integration.
Eros is the LUST for life. LUST for life is eros in service to all life from the microscopic to the macro of human beings as a collective of microorganisms.
PLAY and LUST can mobilise and integrate implicit memories, which would usually be held in exile under the PANIC system's dorsal vagus shame response. For example, there are times when PLAY went wrong, or when we were overwhelmed by something or someone more powerful than us.
Only when we accept all of our parts can natural intelligence bring us back into harmony and integration. Working with sexuality and harnessing eros is fire medicine (as the Phoenix Fire people of the Deer Tribe say). Fire only burns where it has never burned before, burning us to feel with eros what we haven't felt before. We might have been there before, but without eros and life, we have not felt it.
Playing with fire can burn us, too. If we are not equipped with enough support to brave the heat while burning, we can get burnt all over again without care. We all need care while burning our grief.
Healing with sex can be like going to a funeral and weeping in a fusion of grief and joy for all the times we were afraid. Healing with sex and eros can be simultaneously ecstatic and excruciatingly painful as we transform grief into joy. This is life as a human being when we can feel it all laying to rest what burnt us before. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,
Our core erotic themes will be core motivators for all our lives until what has been exiled is brought deeply home with acceptance. These erotic themes will project into all aspects of our lives until they are understood. Accessing the direct routes to pleasure through opening sensory receptivity can support us to be less driven and dependent on association routes to pleasure, especially the "Troublesome turn-ons". Acceptance is the key ingredient of successful integration, and Daniel Seigel says that kindness is the manifestation of integration.
With this kindness with ourselves and what we have courageously integrated, we are in very useful positions to help others find their ways back home to open their senses to pleasure and presence. Therefore, understanding our core erotic themes is central to understanding where we can potentially be useful in service. When we are in service, connected with our core with kindness, our generosity, life, health, and eros will flourish. This brings the gratitude we are all searching for as humans with all the many strategies for feeling it!
Eros (the LUST system) can painfully attract scenarios in our lives with implicit memories being relived repeatedly where a duty of CARE failed. We can experience ourselves excruciatingly exposed, out of hiding, in another attempt to be witnessed and cared for, to heal this breach in nature. These breaches in CARE invariably resonate with the generations of shame, hiding pain and revenging with the pain of shame. If CARE has failed, it may read in the psyche as "I am not lovable enough to take care of". If I am not loved, I do not belong; if I do not belong, the PANIC system's dorsal vagus nerve response "hide me" is in service to safety while at the same time activating the pain of the loss of belonging.
LUST is the erotic charge that energises the cycles of chaos and pattern. Chaos is undifferentiated streams of emergent raw data. When these are identified, categorised, and named, this facilitates our versions of reality's emerging recognisable patterns. When a pattern of living becomes an outdated map and loses its useful life, we are driven back to the melting pots of chaos to learn new ways of being in the emergence of living.
The song "I Love You Just the Way You Are" may have its roots both in acceptance and in CARE's expectation that the "who you are" pattern will stay the same. When CARE fails, PANIC, FEAR, and RAGE are activated. Possibly, we humans get stuck in identity constructs in relationships with each other and with our own self-created identity because it updates patterns of expectations for safety and belonging.
Symbols become the bridges that support shared reality. Naming our feelings differentiates us from hiding. Symbolism supports the co-creation of win-win negotiations with needs. Symbols help us self-regulate, and when we can share feeling states in words or other symbolic expressions, they calm down with GABA, the parts of the brain activating fight (RAGE) and flight (FEAR) responses. When we can communicate with attuned understanding, there is no need to run away or fight. We have no other option than to run away (FEAR system) or fight (RAGE system) if another is not receptive with attuned compassion with our expression.
Eros is a poetic, artistic and creative expression birthed from chaos in service of integration and surrender to the collective self-organising intelligence of all aspects of life, death and re-birth.
Reflective practice
Journal with your genitals reflecting on the altered states you have experienced together and somatic openings you have experienced. Notice habits of self-pleasuring that are reliable for pleasure, comfort and orgasm. Notice habits that have died a death in a pattern that no longer works anymore.
Role PLAY
If we understand that PLAY teaches us to exercise balance within the range of 60 - 40 win-lose, 40 - 60 lose-win. When in our life experiences we have repeatedly experienced higher ratios than this, e.g. 80 - 20 lose-win or the other way round, as adults, the PLAY system will be continually activated to redress this imbalance. I propose that BDSM practices are an expression of this PLAY system seeking balance. BDSM often exercises 70 - 30, 80 - 20, 90 - 10 scenarios and in extreme power play exercises 100 - zero - the ultimate surrender of death with deathlike experiences of dorsal vagus immobilisation.
Playing with dorsal vagus mobilisation with and without safety simultaneously can potentially integrate the gravest of exiled implicit memory when the dorsal vagus is immobilised after receiving the data of a terrifying experience. This is sometimes understood under the heading of shadowplay. Activating the play emotional command system, often with the interplay of the LUST system, to repair and bring into recovery exiled memories in the excruciating birthing from shame into the kindest witness, with weeping release of toxic hormones and laughing relief that "I didn't die again".
Kindness, acceptance, and care are crucial when these terrified and helpless aspects of the self are risking life again, risking love again, coming out of hiding, and being seen.
It is a double tragedy when people play in rituals of BDSM without care and kindness. It can become another trauma, deepening the neural networks of the old one, or power over / power under PLAY can create new trauma.
New adult trauma is different from developmental trauma, but it can hitch onto memory channels of developmental trauma, compounding them.
Hidden danger ganglion loops
Betrayals cause damage to our autonomic nervous system and can alert our "hidden danger circuitry" into chronic activation. The "hidden danger circuit" is a ganglion loop in the subcortical structures of the brain responsible for its title.
Once an unexpected danger has been remembered, this circuitry will ever be on the lookout for this happening again. Once betrayed, we are always sensitive and easily alerted to this happening again. The job of this part of the brain is to look out for hidden, unexpected dangers. There is a biochemical "feel good" reward for discovering the danger in service to our survival. That's why it feels so pleasurable to "see" the "tiger in the grass" and to play "peek-a-boo".
PANIC
Understanding trauma involves understanding our human and animal needs to belong. Our needs to belong are supported by all of our emotional command systems, and our loss of belonging is painful, activating the PANIC, FEAR and RAGE emotional command systems.
The PANIC system is activated when a creature experiences
Loss of safe connection and belonging might drive seeking security, safety, and low stimulation—the abandonment response—which gives rise to feelings of vulnerability and anxiety when 'the pace is too fast, too stimulating, as too much change is happening.'
Feelings of being stuck, trapped, and helpless and the drive to take action and seek stimulation and excitement—the Suffocation response—give rise to irritation and frustration when 'the pace is too slow and there's not enough change, action, and stimulation happening.'
The PANIC system and the two evolutionary stages activate two types of nervous system and hormonal responses that intensify the affect, which feels like terror or 'I might die'.
The first reactive stage is a call for help. It is the grief response to loss with sympathetic nervous system arousal. We might feel anxious and frightened or irritated and angry. In the face of this affect, it's natural to produce tears. These tears are the body's release valve for stress, sadness, grief, anxiety, and frustration.
Like the ocean, tears are salt water. Tears bring us back into connection with ourselves like the ocean connects continents and people. Tears connect our hearts with each other.
Reflex tears allow your eyes to clear out noxious particles, washing away irritation from smoke. Continuous tears are produced regularly for lubrication and contain a chemical called lysozyme, which has antibacterial properties that protect our eyes from infection.
These oceanic tears also travel into the nose and sinuses, lubricating the passageways for our receptivity through smell and protecting us with what we breathe into our lives. Dr. William Frey, a tear expert, says that emotional tears shed stress hormones and other toxins that accumulate with stress. Crying stimulates the production of endorphins, relieving our pain and awakening us to receptivity and pleasure.
So why is all that pain so often shrouded in shame when it feels so good to cry and let go of it? The shame of tears can be understood as part of an evolutionary defence against being seen as helpless. If we understand the nervous system's responses to the PANIC emotional command system, we can learn why being seen as helpless and crying might be something to hide.
The first response of the PANIC system as an evolutionary behavioural response is an expression of distress and anxiety. Very often, it is vocal with the build-up of the physical pain of separation distress. It is also known as the grief or loss system and is activated when an animal has lost its connection with safety and belonging. If the animal's cries are not met with the relief of re-connection and belonging with safety, it is in the interest of safety that this animal is not seen or heard by predators.
This PANIC system has an inbuilt switch in its circuitry from a sympathetic nervous system distress call to a parasympathetic nervous system dorsal vagus immobilisation.
This is where brain structures that allow us to speak, think, and take action go offline and in extreme cases, the animal faints, collapses and can even die.
This response might save the animal's life if it is not seen or heard, as life might be preserved with no movement or voice. Or, if life is in danger and it is lost to death, the death will not be felt since all sensory receptivity has been disconnected. That is why extreme physical trauma can be painless at the time.
A human being emerging from this evolutionary life-saving response might feel confused and still under the effect of this mechanism designed to help us hide from danger. This emotional effect is translated into what we humans understand to be the excruciating, complex feeling state we call shame.
When we don't feel safe enough to keep our hearts open and share our pain, the pull to hide it can feel the most irresistible option. Our helplessness at the effect of this powerful evolutionary response of the dorsal vagus drowns our pain into the depths where tears are cried in the dark, out of sight and sometimes out of mind.
Our bodies continue weeping with the stress of this abandonment, and toxins build as the exhausted, helpless parts of us continue to seek connection out of sight and out of mind. They only become visible again with physical pain and illness. Physical illness can be more easily attended to and nursed than a broken heart. Every day, hundreds of people visit their Doctors with broken hearts hidden under the cloak of shame, sharing the inflammation of it with their bodies.
Pain, once removed, somehow can be rationalised and treated with medication or operations to take away the pain rather than feel it again, which is the only way for it to be alleviated from its loneliness and exile.
Reflective practice
Notice the ways your genitals participate with you in your drives for slow-paced intimacy, safety, closeness and belonging
and the drive for fast-paced adventure, stimulation and excitement
FEAR
The FEAR emotional command system is in service to our safety and helps us get away from danger. The sympathetic nervous system is activated in response to perceived danger, creating a felt sense of anxiety, fear, worry, terror, nervousness, etc. It is commonly known as the flight part of the fight-or-flight response. The fight response is from the RAGE system.
The FEAR system is mediated by the lateral central amygdala. It is a fear-anxiety system that causes feelings of trepidation. Its evolutionary response is to freeze or flee. It is expressed with rapid breathing. Blood supply goes to the musculoskeletal system. The enteric nervous system is shut down, which can cause bowel evacuation or long-term constipation. The evolutionary-determined stereotypical facial expression is a startled look with a loss of heart-connected empathetic expression.
Some fear responses are learned in our life experiences, and some are "inherited" with the neurons in our bodies like antennae receiving communications through time and space from what might be understood in Carl Jung's reference to the "collective unconscious" and/or what Rupert Sheldrake refers to as "Morphic Resonance" e.g. fear of heights, insects, spiders and dark places supports our evolutionary survival and we somehow know about this before we are taught by our lives being threatened.
During Somatic Practices - The FEAR system can potentially be activated and expressed in dissociation from feelings and a sense of safety with memories of wanting to run away may be unearthed along with aspects of the body frozen in time with numbness or lack of feeling. Listening with non-hierarchical compassionate witness using clean language during embodiment practices can bring integration of these frozen aspects of the self back into socially attuned safety and agency and choice can be regained
Reflective practice
Journal with your genitals noticing the ways they signal withdrawal from engaging and interacting
Repression
is an unconscious process where experiences are stored in implicit memory out of conscious recallable awareness, bypassing being stored in explicit memory.
The AMYGDALAE register communications from all the senses via the Thalamus faster than we can think about them before we consciously recognise what we are seeing, hearing, sensing, smelling or tasting. Words embodied with sensory associations can also influence emotional balance. This can be useful to understand when holding space for a person in a trauma response to stimuli that trigger associations. The amygdala also influences where implicit and explicit memory is stored.
If we do not have words to share how we are feeling with someone who also understands the symbolic language we are using, we have no other option than to run away, hide, or fight.
Without shared understanding, we are inevitably on our own, and this activates not only the FEAR and RAGE emotional command systems but also the PANIC emotional command system. This is the most distressing experience of all the emotional command systems for us as humans and animals. It is activated when we experience a connection loss when CARE is absent. This occurs when we are feeling unsafe, on our own in FEAR, in grief, in terror and overwhelmed. It activates sympathetic nervous system anxiety responses and states which can feel heartbreaking, gut-wrenching, muscles tightening, nauseating, dizzy and render us lost for words as the dorsal vagus system takes us offline. We can lose our capacity to make decisions; once this has occurred, we have lost our usefulness. This compounds our loss of belonging and can perpetuate feelings of failure and distress.
If we are further not met with understanding, then these feeling states can become chronic, resulting in depression, which can be understood as low-level PANIC system activation that will continue until we are understood and we feel the warmth of belonging and regain our usefulness and agency in service with generosity with gifts to give and share.
Explicit and implicit memories with their associations are etched into our neural networks with their corresponding nervous system responses. These are activated whenever these associations are recognised unconsciously in our environment. These prime the original nervous system and hormonal, emotional command system responses and can take us into disconnection from each other as the perception apparatus shifts into perceiving reality through a projection of a prediction that may not match what is happening. This incongruence can feel very distressing for us and the people we are with, as connection is inevitably lost here.
There have been times in our lives when our entitlement to life and CARE for that were not met. Our neural networks are waiting for it to happen again, and we are primed with vigilance, projecting it is happening again with the hope that someday someone will understand our loss and say they are sorry in response to our sorrow.
This can be seen in any relationship where there is a duty of care to serve in some manner. When life’s spontaneity has been interrupted, needs have been interrupted from being satiated, and agency and expression have been interrupted...
When we have been taken from, there is a debt that somebody has to pay.
The soul searches for the sorry for this breach throughout life in limbo until conscious awareness of the harm has been done. Without sufficient remorse for this pain, the pain continues to cause dis-ease. The hurt parts that have been exiled search to be returned to the harmonious connection to which we were born entitled.
Old circuitry can be activated by environmental cues, reminding us unconsciously of past breaches of nature’s agreement to provide us with life and nurture.
This vigilance can keep us in a projecting operating mode, preparing us to guard against painful loss and distress. This activated state can in itself be distressing.
RAGE
RAGE and shame in response to the failure of duty of CARE sit at the heart of all therapy. RAGE always feels justified, entitled and charged with evidence with a drive to overcome and revenge grief. We have built into each and every one of us evolutional instinctual drives and brain structures with predetermined neural networks in the service of win-win collaboration and CARE for each other. When this fails, we have built evolutionary neural networks, brain structures, nervous systems, and hormonal responses to protect what matters.
When we witness another's outrage, let’s remember with our minds and hearts that anyone else with the same life experiences and epigenetically inherited grief as this person we are witnessing would be experiencing this outrage, too. Grief from the failure of duty of care is in all of us.
‘We have all been touched against our will without asking for it’. - Betty Martin.
Rage from the failure of duty of care is a collective wound often bound in the silence of shame. When there is no remorse, revenge opens like lava in an ethical rage coming through the cracks of the earth that resemble the cause. Our collective morality might be like an all-seeing eye guiding us towards revenge or acceptance. Justice is our capacity to be with the just.
Only when we can be with what is can we open our hearts again to compassion and understanding, but before that, the justice of revenge is in the driver's seat, seeking agency from the loss of it.
"Therapy's failure is always a failure of empathy, the loving distance-amid union. Failures of empathy, at least of a momentary kind, are inevitable in every therapeutic process - and indeed in every erotic relationship"- John Ryan Haule
He continues saying that "humble, honest, and emotionally vulnerable acknowledgement of the injury" and the responsibility of being part of this is the:
"only response that is truly empathetic and appropriate. An empathetic response turns failure into opportunity, an 'optimal frustration'"
"Every success is ours and every failure is ours" - John Ryan Haule
Revenge
Revenge for the failure of the perceived duty of CARE can sometimes be expressed in the attempt to attack the belonging needs of the therapist or the chef who cooked a meal that we didn't like or, worse, poisoned us or the company that didn't meet our expectations. This RAGE can gather evidence and support, causing the provider to lose public face and their usefulness in the world. This activates the PANIC system and the shame response to a loss of belonging. It's natural to get defensive when being policed for failures of duty of care, but understanding the bigger picture is important.
(When I ran a restaurant/cafe, I was advised never to open on Mother's Day or Valentine's Day and never open for Christmas as these are the days when failures of duty of CARE are most prevalent in people’s minds and commonly, they get projected on these occasions)
We naturally expect to be cared for as we are birthed into the world. This expectation is in our evolutionary right. We share this anatomical evolutionary programming with all other mammals. When this fails, our other programs in service of protection and safety are activated, creating distress and conflict.
We might experience our emotions swinging between RAGE in service of protection and care and shame and despair in response to grief and loss. When we understand our evolutionary biology—the logic of the biome —we can understand our responses to failures in our projected expectations of care.
Unlike other mammals, humans suffer the price of disconnection from the natural wisdom of the biome. The evolutionary development of our human brain's upper cortical structures has essentially created a projected "believed in" hologram.
If we lose connection with our body-knowing, we lose the ability to care for ourselves, our children, and the planet. The debt continues to mount inside the volcanoes of the earth's crust and in our collective "me too" RAGE over this care failure.
When there is a failure of duty of care, debt begins to mount up, and if this debt is not cleared, interest charges create more charges in the emotional viscera and pockets of disease, and RAGE at injustices builds up.
RAGE at the failure of duty of care can mount visceral debts through generations until the fears of exposure and shame are outbalanced by the pressure to rid these blocks of inhibition and seek the justice of rebalancing.
The mobilisation of RAGE often happens when we feel safe enough to open the cracks of our broken hearts and allow the lava under the earth's crust to pour out. This is, of course, very hot, and it often hurts us all in its revenge, indiscriminately destroying all in its path down the mountainside.
This RAGE in the service of care may find its way into projections towards others who fail in some way with the duty of care. Somebody has to feel the wrath of the original injustice if we cannot bear it. It does not go away. Someone, somewhere down the line, has to say "sorry" and mean it.
Sexual abuse is the cause of the deepest distress humans can experience. This can be understood as the LUST erotic charge attempting to integrate lost natural expressions of innocence, bliss and spontaneity. It is an act of revenge in RAGE and a SEEKING strategy to integrate by taking without regard for the other's limits and simultaneously devouring. Our sexual expression is in its deepest roots, innocent, raw and pure, and when this is stepped on, the revenge can be generational until the shame of the silenced voices can brave being heard and put an end to this happening again.
I am hypothesising that the LUST emotional command system, whose main function is in service of integration, is the substance with which therapeutic interventions swim and come to the shore.
Eros is essential for CARE, but it is essential to be differentiated from our needs for sexual and loving expression and gratification of these needs.
We are playing with primary drivers of survival
It’s no wonder all the healing strategies can awaken the tiger or activate the RAGE volcano if we are disconnected from our embodied awareness of our needs and feelings.
Lost embodiment is a dilemma of our entire race. Until we can feel safe enough to feel the sensations from our interoceptive and exteroception awareness and to know how to attune to ourselves and each other with CARE, we are doomed to the inevitable lava of RAGE destruction or the crippling inhibitions of shame.
How often have we tolerated and put up with experiences for the short-term gain in adaption in service of belonging?
It can be anticipated as more painful not to belong than to endure the adaption.
The gain is belonging but at a price. How often do we listen to the voice that ultra-endurance athlete David Goggins calls:
“The soft voice” inside says, “Keep on sleeping; it's too much to wake up.”
We can understand this as a short-term gain with long-term pain. The gain could be the relief of confrontation avoidance, setting limits, hiding, valuing and voicing what matters in case we are rejected. The David Goggins approach is short-term pain for long-term gain the way he does it, but taken moderately, exercise and healthy eating can initially be short-term pain for longevity and health.
The price of this short-term relief of pain using compensations will have long-term costs if these habitual adaptations to belonging become part of our protected identity. RAGE will find its expression.
If these adaptations become necessary as part of identity maintenance in service of belonging, then changing habits will possibly activate the PANIC system, which feels gut-wrenching, heart-palpitating, painful, and frightening as this ancient part of our body-brain's nervous system perceives we might die if we are alone. “Better the devil we know!”
However, this pain does not go away in this avoidance, even if we get good at going along with adaptions.
Somebody has to pay back someday, whether it is doctors and nurses taking care of our diseased bodies crying out in the pain we feared expressing or the RAGE in the service of self-care turning inwards, depressing our will to live.
Disease and illness can be understood as RAGE in service of care in conjunction with our immune systems becoming depressed from sympathetic nervous system shallow breathing attempt not to feel. The dis-ease can build up more easily when we can not feel what is happening.
Exploring and experimenting with new ways of being outside of habitual adaptations can feel painful. Hope, faith, and determination for care and health are required for this short-term pain to be worth the long-term gain.
With so much to overcome, it's no wonder old habitual ways of being are hard to change, even if we know of the long-term consequences of not doing and the long-term pleasure of doing. Only by harnessing our beliefs that our RAGE system is in service to protection can we trust in our power to change and make a difference without the destruction or pain we have felt before consuming us or others.
A challenge to bring awareness and expansion of consciousness could be to ask the question when deciding what to eat, say or do
“Is this short-term gain for long-term pain or short-term pain for long-term gain?”
Trust in RAGE in service of CARE, trust in CARE in service of safety, nourishment and belonging and learn to PLAY fairly! Only when we can be with the JUST IS that Body Poem and Dream Poem facilitate can we experience JUSTICE.