Part 5: A Primer on the Nervous System

For the last thirty years or so, a new understanding of the autonomic nervous system has increasingly been informing many therapists, especially those working with people who have experienced traumatic events in adulthood or childhood. [ “Trauma” simply means an experience that overwhelmed a person’s resources to deal with it. Many adults look back on difficult childhoods and tell me—from their adult perspective which knows of far worse hardships—that “it wasn’t so bad.”  This adult retrospective mistakenly attributes to the  2 or 5 or 10 or 13 year old self many psychological, emotional, and spiritual resources that weren’t in place at the time.] 

Neuroscientist Stephen Porges’s Polyvagal Theory of the nervous system, as translated by therapist Deb Dana, helps us understand the nervous system’s responses to the triggered memory networks. It helps us understand that when a stimulus activates the amygdala’s “NOT SAFE” button, the able-to-reason-well part of our brain becomes largely ineffective.  The sympathetic ( mobilize for action)  branch of the nervous system is what keeps us alive; it gives us energy to fight or run from predators and energy to do the things necessary to stay alive.  If there is extra time and energy, that subsystem is where the energy to play or be creative comes from.  The parasympathetic branch of the nervous system is the immobilize or slow down option.  (I keep them straight by reminding myself “peaceful” starts with a P). What Porges added to our understanding is that there are two very different ways for the nervous system to slow down.  The more ancient one in terms of evolution and in terms of fetal development in the womb is more like an emergency shut down system that’s activated in response to danger.   Think of a submarine’s interior doors closing automatically when the sub is in danger of flooding due to a breach in the hull.

The more recent and more sophisticated Slow Down system came with mammals and is most fully developed in human beings and Porges calls it the Social Engagement System.  It involves sophisticated communication of our emotional state by facial muscles around the eyes, the vocal cords, and the inner ear muscles. From early in life we human beings are wired to “read” these signs of each other’s emotional states to calculate SAFE or NOT SAFE.

Remember that the nervous system is scanning the physical environment, the people around us, and our own internal body data for cues of danger.  When the security system picks up no such cues, the rest of the brain and body remain available for social connection, problem solving, creativity, recreation, or just rest.  But if the amygdala calculates NOT SAFE, the brain activates one or the other of the two threat-management branches of our nervous system: mobilize for action  (fight back or flee) or immobilize (Slow Down or Shut Down) to reduce anticipated pain (sink into depression, numb out, even disconnect and disappear).

I recommend listening to and/or watching Deb Dana’s explanations of how to apply the  insights of polyvagal theory to daily life; the links are available on the “Client Resources” tab of my website.  But for my purposes here, I want to zero in on applying its insights to my metaphors for what happens when parts of self (habitual ways of thinking, feeling, acting) get activated.

Recall my image that parts of self are waiting around offstage primarily because they have unfinished business from when those patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting became so habitual. And typically the unfinished business involves either needs (physical or emotional) that went unmet or harmful things that were done the person and couldn’t be stopped. Both of those types of unfinished business constituted NOT SAFE at the time and consequently, when cues today “wake up” those memory networks (parts), the nervous system instantly goes into either “mobilize to fight or flee” or “shut down to reduce pain”, whichever was/is that part’s history.

Consequently, when the energy of that part gets activated in today’s interaction with someone, there’s a small or great increase of aggression or fear (if the part is characterized by fight or flight) or a collapse of energy that looks like depression or withdrawal (if the part is characterized by defeat, hopelessness, rejection, etc.) When either of these ways of being from the past are imposed onto the present, the reality of now gets distorted and relationships suffer.

Obviously, real dangers do exist today, and sometimes the warnings are right and true.  But I’m focusing on what happens when we genuinely mistake the present for the past.  This is precisely what The Enemy thrives on: the lie that “this is just like that; you are just like her or just like him.”  And this is what makes it so important for us to learn to recognize our unfinished business and find healthy, faithful ways to let it go.  By increasing our awareness of “a part hearing its cue” or “an app being launched” we can prayerfully seek God’s help in stopping the automatic shift of our nervous system that leads to experiencing the other person as a bad guy today.  Sometimes the person today really was unsafe or neglectful in the past but if they have grown and changed, your new experiences with them haven’t been effective yet in taking precedence over the old ones.  In this situation, finding “a pause button” for the thinking mind to make the distinction is what’s needed.

I’ll close this series on Parts of Self in healing work by repeating what I said in my  Preface:

Most of us are not neuroscientists and the fact that everything we experience or do involves brain neurons firing is far too complicated for most of us to understand. But I hope these few puzzle pieces I’m going to share can help us grow in our ability to understand some of our reactions, to find pause buttons that allow better choices, and thereby help us love better.

Some ego state theories talk of parts of self as if they are “real and have a life of their own.”  Some understandings of dissociated parts of the personality talk of them as having their own biographies.  We don’t have to go that far.  We can simply allow ourselves to use our imaginations to visit the same dimension where memories exist and retain unresolved experiences.  Doing so can open up conversation with the unfinished business and allow God to bring healing and enough resolution to free us from the unfortunate intrusions that undermine love today.