Biology of Trauma - Transformations

Transcendence: Healing Our Collective Story

Part One: The Biology of Trauma and Resilience

© Richard Bolstad

Human Beings: The Big Picture

If you’re reading this, you’re probably expecting me to be a professional who works with trauma recovery and resilience, and that is true. Since 1998, I have run trauma recovery training and resilience training around the world, and my background for that is that I’m a Registered Nurse (Psychiatric and General), a Member of the New Zealand Association of Psychotherapists, and a trainer in the field of NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming). However I have several other professional trainings, and one is that I am currently completing a degree in Archaeology. And I want to start off this series of articles by talking about a perspective on resilience from the deep history of humanity. In the psychology field this move would be called “out-framing” – looking at the situation from a much bigger frame than we usually do. In our shared humanity, in our shared experience as living beings, we will discover both great tragedy and great beauty. It is my hope in this set of articles to encourage us to remember and to choose that beauty.

Dr. Dirk Schulze-Makuch, Professor of Planetary Habitability and Astrophysics at Berlin Technical University, agrees with the growing consensus that while life (which seems to have its building blocks across interstellar space, and which has emerged maybe many times on earth so far – Sarchet, 2016) may be common, our kind of intelligent life (which seems to have emerged only once in the long history of life on our planet) may be rare. He notes (2022) “If we just look at our own planet—where microbial life has existed for roughly 4 billion years, animal life for not more than 1 billion years, and technologically advanced life for a bit more than 100 years—it seems much more likely that we will discover less evolved life on other planets.” We may not be alone, but we are probably a rare and precious experiment.

Of course, consciousness, sentience, doesn’t require our “kind” of intelligence, and may even be implicit in all life. In 2015, New Zealand was one of the first countries in the world to acknowledge, in The Animal Welfare Amendment Act, 2015, that all animals have sentience. When we look into the eyes of another animal, what is looking back is a living being, that experiences the world, that is awake. Philip Gough, author of “Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness” explains the basic idea of panpsychism, which is that proto-consciousness, like time, is fundamental to even the smallest constituents of the universe. By consciousness, of course he doesn’t mean the ability to do mathematics, or to think about what has happened and decide what to do next, but merely awareness. Bizarre as it sounds at first, this idea is increasingly popular in science. Gough simplifies (Cook, 2020) “Human beings have a very rich and complex experience; horses less so; mice less so again. As we move to simpler and simpler forms of life, we find simpler and simpler forms of experience. Perhaps, at some point, the light switches off, and consciousness disappears. But it’s at least coherent to suppose that this continuum of consciousness fading while never quite turning off carries on into inorganic matter, with fundamental particles having almost unimaginably simple forms of experience to reflect their incredibly simple nature. That’s what panpsychists believe.”

With consciousness comes the awareness of continuity and of crisis. All living beings need to identify times of danger as well as times when they can relax. All vertebrates have the same basic neuro-chemical response to stress, of course. Even small fish respond to stressful situations (being handled by humans was the stimulus used in research) by producing the same stress hormones such as cortisol, and these hormones are released into the water around them, emotionally stressing those fish who are nearby (Barcellos et alia, 2011). Emotional consciousness of trauma is a shared experience, at least in our vertebrate lineage, which stretches back half a billion years ago.

With human beings some rather interesting new results of consciousness emerge. I don’t just mean the ability to do mathematical computations, which to some extent even social insects like bees can do (Howard et alia, 2019). I mean the ability to abstract ourselves from experience, to think about thinking, to build a model of how someone else is experiencing things (a “theory of mind”) and to cooperate in grand adventures based on these. “Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding Our Origins and Rediscovering Our Common Humanity” is a 2021 book by anthropologist and neuroscientist Brian Hare and science writer Vanessa Woods, that looks at how this has occurred, from a biological standpoint. Hare and Woods say (2021, p. xix) “The evolution of our own lineage, since we split from our common ancestor with bonobos and chimpanzees around 6 to 9 million years ago, produced dozens of different species within our genus, Homo. There is fossil and DNA evidence that for most of the approximately 200,000 to 300,000 years that Homo sapiens has existed, we shared the planet with at least four other human species. Some of these humans had brains that were as big as, or bigger than, our own. If brain size was the main requirement for success, these other humans should have been able to survive and flourish as we did. Instead, their populations were relatively sparse, their technology—though impressive compared to that of nonhumans—remained limited, and at some point, all of them went extinct. What allowed us to thrive while other humans went extinct was a kind of cognitive superpower: a particular type of friendliness called cooperative communication.”

The Darker Side of Being Human

For those readers cynical enough to have considered already that maybe it is our determination to exterminate other species that was the critical factor in our survival, rather than our cooperativeness … Hare and Woods point out that the truth may be even worse, because the two factors are linked. “But our friendliness has a dark side. When we feel that the group we love is threatened by a different social group, we are capable of unplugging the threatening group from our mental network—which allows us to dehumanize them. Where empathy and compassion would have been, there is nothing. Incapable of empathizing with threatening outsiders, we can’t see them as fellow humans and become capable of the worst forms of cruelty. We are both the most tolerant and the most merciless species on the planet.” (Hare and Woods, 2021, p. xxvi)

Abigail Marsh, Professor of Neuroscience at Georgetown University (2017), studied the brains of extreme altruists and extreme psychopaths, and maintains that the answer to both lies in the learned responses of their amygdala. Our amygdalae (there are two actually, one on each side of the brain) record our emotional assessment of experiences, and Marsh notes that research on “psychopathic” people (who commit crimes of great cruelty without apparent emotional response) shows firstly that the amygdala is reduced in size, and secondly that they not only feel less fear themselves, but are also unable to correctly identify from photographs when someone feels fear (although they continue to be able to identify anger correctly). People, by contrast, who are extremely altruistic (such as people who donate kidneys to strangers to save their life) seem to be highly responsive to faces showing fear, and such faces trigger their own emotional responses in the amygdala, and stimulate release of oxytocin (a so-called “bonding hormone”) from the nearby hypothalamus (Marsh, 2017, p. 82, 150).

Our brains, then, have evolved to cooperate and also to create the in-group/out-group experience. And the amygdala may be central to both responses. Let’s step back for a moment and get clear how the amygdala fits into the larger story of being a human being, learning from experiences and responding to challenges.

In an animal such as a human being, the brain and nervous system, made up of billions of nerve cells (“neurons”), glial cells and other specialised cells, coordinate actions across the body. To do this, these cells need to react to the world differently as a result of your previous experiences. If a dog bites a child, their brain needs to react differently next time they see that dog. This “plasticity” (changeability) of nerve cells and their synapses (connection points) is what we usually call memory. Memories, then, are changes in the nervous system’s functioning which enable you to more effectively respond to current events. These changes in functioning are only incidentally related to the structure of the real previous events which they were initiated in response to. Sure the changes happened as a result of some past experiences, but the changes are not a faithful video recording of those experiences.

So what actually changes when a memory is created? Well, firstly, there are simple changes at the synapses (the gaps between nerve cells, where messages are transferred from one cell to another), and that happens everywhere that nerve cells registering an event are activated. There are increases in neurotransmitter release (neurotransmitters are the messenger chemicals that pass across the gap between nerve cells to carry the messages), and these changes may last for seconds or minutes. Secondly, long-lasting memory depends on wider scale changes such as the physical growth of new nerve cell connections (dendrites), and increases in the number of synaptic connections on those cells.

The most important early changes after a new experience happen in the amygdala and hippocampus, two brain areas in what is called the limbic system, in the centre of the brain. To be exact, the amygdala records the emotional valence (how important it is either positively or negatively – so the amygdala responds especially to things that generate fear, anger, sexual desire, hunger etc.), and the hippocampus records the spatio-temporal coordinates (where and when it happened).

Traumatic Responses explained in the Brain

Not all human experiences are as important as each other. When any new event occurs in your life, a “neural network” is set up in the brain with memories of the event, instructions about possible responses, and an “emotional significance rating” or “valence”. If the emotional significance rating is zero, the event is “boring”. If the emotional significance is highly positive (an experience of delicious food, a romantic evening, or something absolutely, fascinatingly new, for example) the memory needs to be stronger so you can recreate it or recognise it quickly in future. If the emotional significance is highly negative (something that physically hurt, or was scary, for example) the memory needs to be stronger so you can avoid it recurring in future.

If the negative rating is high enough then at least for some time a panic-style response will occur each time the person thinks about the experience, and the person may have severe difficulty performing normal daily functions. The aim of this “alarm” response is to ensure that if the emergency recurs, the “panic” reaction will override conscious thinking and cause the person to act quickly to save their life. You can understand that in a physical disaster, this is a very sensible body response. While this panic response mostly saves lives, occasionally it results in panic being triggered accidentally by sensory stimuli that are themselves not dangerous (like reading the morning newspaper). Even in that case most people will gradually edit the neural network over the next couple of months so that it no longer interferes with everyday functioning, a pattern called Recovery. Some people have a pre-existing thinking style which makes recovery difficult (e.g. a pattern of constantly checking in case something bad is about to happen again) and they will then continue to have problems long term, a pattern called Chronicity.

Which of the 3 patterns will occur is determined by the pre-existing thinking style and model of the world, previous experience of similar trauma, the severity of the current “traumatic” events, and the social support available at the time of the current trauma.

The amygdala not only gives emotional significance to a memory, it also signals the brain about the required strength of the memory structure (telling the brain to store more important memories more vividly) and it determines whether an emotional response is strong enough to overide the brain’s frontal (conscious) decision-making. With a damaged amygdala, a person tends to engage in more unsafe behaviour and to be unable to assess the seriousness of danger, hunger etc. Damage to the amygdala due to drugs such as alcohol leads to faulty decision-making by heavy users of those drugs, and, by contrast, the stress of PTSD (Post traumatic stress disorder) and other over-activations of the panic system lead to physical reduction in size of the amygdala.

Reconsolidation of Memories from Temporary to Long Term Storage

Remember that the hippocampus stores the data about where and when an event happened. The hippocampus is so central to the initial storage of each new memory that if the hippocampus is damaged, new memories are unable to be laid down, even though memories in the distant past may well be intact (Squire and Paller, 2000). Initially, as a person stores a new memory, the hippocampus is the site at which most of the brain changes occur. Over the first 7 or so days after the event, the memory is primarily stored in changes in the hippocampus, but over the next few weeks it is “reconsolidated”, and “storage” of these changes is transferred more widely to other brain areas such as the sensory cortex (the outside of the brain) and even to the cerebellum (the lower brain, which eventually stores behavioural sequences such as walking and dancing, so that these remain intact even if the original sites of these memories in the sensory cortex are damaged by Alzheimers or another condition). Sleep and times of stillness (like meditation or relaxation) seem to be crucial to this process as it is only when the Hippocampus is not getting new memory inputs that it can effectively reconsolidate memories.

The changes in the memory do not stop once it is transferred to permanent storage areas however. Each time you “think about” a memory, what you do is activate the same neural network as when you first experienced it, or the network of neurons to which that memory has been transferred in the process of reconsolidating it. That means that you “reconsolidate” it again – i.e. by activating the memory, you bring it back into a state of activation, and so over the following 15 minutes or so, the memory has new changes added to it (after all, the principle that “neurons which fire together wire together” still operates, so if you remember an event, your current experiences and thoughts are now connected to the memory of the original event). As we will see, reconsolidation can significantly and permanently alter a “memory” changing the entire emotional valence of the memory (making a memory that was fear inducing become desire-inducing, for example). There is no “undo” function in the brain by which you can go back and reverse previous edits to get to the “original” memory. Memory, then is an active and synthetic process, and memories are changed irreversibly at every re-membering of them.

Reconsolidation of memories eventually organises them into very different places in the brain. At one time in my life, I needed to use my conscious mind to tie my shoelaces. Now days, my “unconscious mind” performs that function. What do I mean when I say that last sentence? I mean that another area of the brain now runs my shoelace tying strategy automatically when it is triggered by the sight of my shoes untied. Even a person severely affected by the memory loss of Alzheimer’s disease may continue for some time to be able to tie their shoelaces, because such strategies are stored in areas of the brain less affected by that condition (Schacter, 1996, p 134-137). Such memories are called “procedural memories”. Memories that were disturbing are reorganized into the “Precuneus”, an area on the inner-facing parts of the cortex (Iriye and St Jacques, 2020), where they are stored using “observer memory” (if you think of the event after that, you see yourself in the movie rather than experiencing the movie from inside as if you were back there with all the bad feelings).

The Mice Who Conquered Fear With Love and Curiosity

In 2014, Dr. Susumu Tonegawa and his team at RIKEN-MIT Center for Neural Circuit Genetics conducted an extraordinary experiment which revealed how the “emotional valence” (whether it feels good or bad) on a memory can be changed in a few minutes of “reconsolidation”. (Redondo et alia 2014)

“Both the hippocampus and the amygdala are considered critical for memory formation. We wanted to know whether the memory engram [network] was free to associate with positive or negative valences or whether it was fixed with respect to emotion,” said Roger Redondo, who along with Joshua Kim is co-first author of this study, in a press release. “We also wanted to know at what point in the circuit the valence is assigned to the engram, in the hippocampus or the amygdala.”

Their experiment takes a few sentences to explain, but it is worth it! The first part is a kind of preparation. The experiments were conducted on male mice, who were placed in a room they had never seen before, and divided into two groups. One group received a mild electric shock on their foot while the other group was allowed to socialize with a female mouse. So the two groups of mice both formed memories of the room, but some formed memories of fear and some formed memories of pleasure. Using a biomarker (a chemical called released into the mice brains to mark out the areas of the brain where new connections were growing), the scientists genetically labelled neurons that were active during the formation of either memory. The team then used “optogenetics” to activate the same set of neurons. This involves shining a light from an LED or laser source outside, through the mouse head – if you hold your hand up in front of a strong light you can see that it shines through the tissue, so this is not surprising. When this light strikes the chemically marked out area in the mouse brain, it triggers the neurons in that area to fire, basically activating the memory network from outside. When the neurons were activated, the mice showed the same response as they did when they originally experienced the event. The mice that had been shocked avoided the room where it had happened, and the mice that had met female mice moved towards the room. the researchers could see the activated circuits inside the mice brains and actually identify the memory of the event, in the hippocampus, and (in mice where this was marked) its connection to the emotional response in the amygdala (to different parts of the amygdala depending on whether the experience was positive or negative).

Next, the researchers gave the mice a new experience, in a new place. The (male) mice who got the mild shock the first time were introduced to some female mice. As they were showing interest in these female mice, the researchers activated the old memory “engram” in the “dorsal dentate gyrus” of the hippocampus. This old memory of being shocked in the room was now connected to the new experience of being interested in the opportunity of meeting the female mice. To the observers’ fascination, they could see the memory network changing. The old connections into the fear area of the amygdala were eliminated, physically dissolved, and new connections were made into the curiosity/desire area of the amygdala. Finally the mice were placed back in the room where they had originally been shocked, but this time they immediately showed interest and looked around with positive curiosity. Their memory of the room had changed. Observing the process, the scientists could see that the old memory (or the negative “valence” of the old memory) was simply deleted. The record of being in the room was now associated with positive feelings, essentially creating a new memory.

The effective sequence is to have the mice create a powerful enough positive emotional state, and then, while they are feeling that positive state, to reactivate the place memory of the original event which had been fear-associated. the researchers commented that to transfer this technique to humans, we would only need a way of reactivating the place memory in the hippocampus. In traditional Cognitive Behavioural Therapy this “extinction” of the unpleasant response is done using prolonged “gradual exposure” techniques. In NLP we do this with the much faster process known as “anchoring” (a precise application of classical conditioning as done by Ivan Pavlov with dogs).

Reconsolidation of Social Trauma

For now, the part I want to draw your attention to is the reconsolidation of temporary memories into the cortex (outer brain) permanent storage areas. This happens during sleep, and has two steps. In the first step, which happens in deep sleep, the temporary memory is activated and transferred to the new cells. In the second step, which happens in REM sleep (rapid eye movement or dreaming sleep) the new memory is cross-referenced with all other relevant memories, so it can be used. “Generally, earlier dreams in the night include memory fragments from recent experiences, whereas later dreams incorporate memory fragments from increasingly farther back in the past…. dreaming exposes a mechanism whereby emotional issues can be worked through and behavioral strategies can be developed and adjusted with reference to experiences from the preceding days as well as older experiences.” (Paller and Voss, 2004, p.667).

One of the most important things that resilient people understand is that the brain itself is already evolved to be a resilient system. It has great flexibility, and is not stuck in its original way of remembering any event. Learning a little about how the brain adapts helps us to allow that natural process to occur better when we meet a crisis. On September 11, 2001, terrorists flew planes into the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in New York. Watching this event on television would become a defining experience of a generation of Americans. It was a crisis. NLP Practitioners across the USA suddenly found they had thousands more clients. This is the kind of event that people often believe they can remember vividly, exactly as it happened. But not so ….

Neuroscientists, who study how the brain processes events, were immediately doing research on the response to the event. “Within about a week, memory scientists from New York to Michigan to California (now known as the 9/11 Memory Consortium) were querying people on what they remembered. The resulting set of data contained responses from more than 3,000 people in seven cities. Following up with those same people one year and three years later, the researchers found a rapid decline in memory accuracy. After the first year, people’s memories of the event were consistent with their initial description only 63 percent of the time.” (Pappas, 2011).

The Memory Consortium found that people’s confidence that they were remembering accurately was increased by the level of emotion occurring as they remembered, and not by the level of information storage (that is to say, the stronger the emotion, the more convinced the person was that their memory was accurate, but the actual strength of the factual memories did not increase their confidence). Secondly, the memory of this very significant event changed over time in certain standard ways. It was “tidied up” by people’s brains. People were asked what they had seen on television that morning. Most people, a year later, could remember watching in shock as first one plane and then another flew into the buildings and then the buildings collapsed. Except … they never saw that on television that morning. By the time people got out their cameras to film the event, the first building had already been hit and was burning, and that is what was available for TV. It was three days before a video taken by a person who happened to be filming at the time of the first incident was found. “In the case of 9/11, people will sometimes claim to have seen live video of the first plane hitting the North Tower of the World Trade Center, Talarico said, despite the fact that such video was not broadcast until days after the attack.” Their memory has (completely unconsciously) spliced in images actually seen days later and re-sequenced them to make sense. Recognising the logical sequence, their brain edited the memory so that the video of the first plane was stored immediately before the video of the second plane in sequencing.

Over the next year, they thought about the events of that morning again and again, and each time the memory was re-edited, until a year later only 63% of the facts they “recalled” (e.g. where they were standing when they first heard the news, what they said, who was there at the time) were the same as they were in that first week. For those who were resilient, the re-organised memory served them well, and if anything was probably less emotionally charged than it had been at first. But for those who had chronic (long term) problems, the event became more and more distressing, as they imagined, for example, what it was like to be trapped in these falling buildings; until many of them could now be diagnosed with “PTSD” (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). In later chapters we will be learning HOW to intentionally choose which response your brain makes to crisis.

What Happens In A Crisis

The 911 attack was experienced as a “crisis” by most Americans. A crisis is a break in the stability of a system. In a person it may be a health problem; in a community it may be an economic recession, in a machine it may be a part that wears down to the extent that the machine doesn’t work anymore. Things are going along “normally”, and then something happens that negatively affects the person, the community or the physical system. Of course, there are no people who never have health problems, no economies that never have recessions, no machines that never wear down. In that sense, crisis is normal. It doesn’t mean something is wrong, let alone that something is “broken”. It just doesn’t always feel good to us as human beings.

If anyone needs to understand crisis it is those people who are called “first responders” – fire services, civil defence people, armed forces and medical emergency staff who go to the scene of a physical disaster before anyone else. I have worked training first responders for a number of major crisis events around the world, including the wars in Bosnia and Chechnya, the Tsunamis in north Japan and Samoa, the Christchurch earthquake, and the war in Ukraine.

Research on human response to other major crises has important lessons about how some people survive better. Almost half the United States population has at some time faced what psychologists describe as a traumatic event so severe it is outside the normal range of human experience, but only one in twenty develop chronic PTSD problems (Bonanno, 2004, p. 54). Psychologists list the three main types of response to disaster as:

Resilience. People feel bad for a while, but they still manage to get good sleep, to eat healthily, and to plan successfully. They quickly get back to high level functioning in the new situation. This is the response we want to encourage most, and luckily in almost all research on natural and human-caused disasters, it is the most common.
Recovery. For a couple of months, people may be so distressed that they cannot function in their job, and cannot relax. Then, they bounce back, as their system reassesses the challenge they have been through. This is the second most common response. Even most soldiers who experience severe traumatic events in war will bounce back once they return to a safer environment.
Chronicity. People are so distressed that they cannot relax, cannot function in their job, and do not bounce back. The important thing to understand about chronicity is that it results from a failure of the normal “bounce-back” mechanisms, and mostly people with chronic problems do not only not recover … they get gradually worse.

How many people fit in each category? Well, let’s take the example of the 911 event. A population-based survey conducted one month after the September 11th terrorist attacks in New York City estimated that 7.5% of Manhattan residents would meet criteria for PTSD and that another 17.4% would meet the criteria for subsyndromal PTSD (high symptom levels that do not meet full diagnostic criteria; Galea, Ahern, et al., 2002). However, most respondents evidenced a rapid decline in symptoms over time: PTSD prevalence related to 9/11 dropped to only 1.7% at four months and 0.6% at six months, whereas subsyndromal PTSD dropped to 4.0% and 4.7%, respectively, at these times (Galea et al., 2003 quoted in Bonanno, 2004, p 24). That means that while the “Recovery” pattern was seen in perhaps 30% of people, “Chronicity” levels were around 2%. “Resilience”, of course, was the result for 70%.

In disaster situations, these different responses do not depend only on the severity of the problem, but on the survivor’s personal coping style and past experiences. In the research by Schnurr et alia (2004), a past history of being a survivor of violence almost doubles the risk of PTSD (177%). Good relationships buffer us from harm, bad ones signal a need for extra support.

Resilience is pretty much the core successful human response to disaster that coaching and solution-focused counselling seeks to create. Research also shows that personal resilience is not a set personality trait so much as a set of actions you can choose to take.

Patterns of Chronicity

So what individual factors make some 2% of the population have chronic and even deepening problems after these crisis events? The thinking styles that obstruct change and recovery after a traumatic event are of course ones that were learned earlier in a person’s life, and with the best of intentions. They are thinking patterns that may even have worked well in the small challenges of the person’s childhood, but they do not handle the big challenges of a crisis. The simplest way to deal with them is to show the person how they are operating and have them practice an alternative. It’s not very glamorous compared to ten years of psychotherapy, but it’s a lot cheaper. Andy Austin (2010) lists several of these “patterns of chronicity” and here we have adapted descriptions of seven of his categories.

“What If…” Questions. Even when things start to feel safe again after the crisis, the person running chronicity patterns asks themselves “Yes, but, what if something really bad happens again?” The positive intention of negative “What if?” questions is to attempt to anticipate and find solutions to future challenges, but by running it on impossible-to-manage scenarios (For example by asking “What if I die horribly?”), the person is locked in panic. Resilient people don’t spend all day asking “What if I die horribly?” They focus on planning what they CAN do something about. “Given the situation I’m actually in right now, what is my best immediate goal?”
“Why…?” Question. The second internal question that the person asks is “Why did this happen to me?” The positive intention of past-related “Why?” questions is to find new meanings, but the person rejects each possible future-oriented meaning and keeps searching as if trying to find a meaning which can change the traumatic event or recreate the past. Resilient people search for future oriented meanings, essentially asking “What can I learn for the future from this?”
Focusing on Problems. Asking these unhelpful questions focuses the person with chronicity on what was bad in the past and what might be bad in future. One of the ways that resilient people bounce back from crisis is to focus their attention on even small positive events. When they feel even slightly more comfortable, they notice and acknowledge it. By contrast, even though 99% improvement might be made, if the person with chronicity is able to locate just 1% of the problem existing, this will generally be seen as representative of 100% of the problem existing. This means that if you make them a cup of tea and ask them if that feels better, they will tell you that although they like a cup of tea, right now their stomach feels uncomfortable so that they know their feeling is still just as bad. If you ask them to imagine a future time when they feel better, they will explain that they could do that, but they are still able to think about the bad events and feel bad, so what is the point? The positive intention of “Can I still experience the problem?” responses is to detect and respond to danger effectively, but by failing to notice improvement the person continuously reinstalls the entire problem. Resilient people do not keep checking if they can still get the bad feeling. They pay attention to “What feels better?”
The “Maybe” Response. Because they are habitually focusing on negative parts of their experience, people with chronicity are reluctant to acknowledge any positive results at all. They fear that they may be just fooling themselves and may soon discover that the tragedy is still just as bad, so when you ask them if something makes them feel better, they often say they are not sure, or preface their answer with “Maybe”. The positive intention of “Maybe” responses is to avoid mistakes such as false hope, but by refusing to commit to any specific data, the person can never measure change and can never experience success. “Maybe” seems such a gentle comment, but it is a lock that traps them eternally. The resilient person is able to acknowledge how they feel right now; and is thus able to identify what makes them feel better and do more of that.
Negative Labels. As the person with chronicity pays attention to their problem continuously, it begins to seem eternally present – to be a thing in itself. Anxiety is not a thing: it is the action of worrying. Trauma is not a thing.: it is the process of remembering an unpleasant event in a specific way. The person with chronicity talks about their traumatic responses as if the responses are “things” rather than actions. “I have Trauma”, “I have PTSD”, “I have a Wounded Inner Child”, “I have a Clinical Depression.” The positive intention of Negative labels is to explain what is happening by labelling it, but the result is that the processes being discussed seem permanent, damaged and even become personified as malevolent, and so are unable to be simply changed. The resilient person is more likely to say “I have been feeling …” or “I have been experiencing …” rather than “I have a ….” Or “I am a .…”
Being “At Effect” rather than “Being At Cause”. By being “at effect”, I mean that the person with chronicity experiences emotional problems as external things that are happening to them, rather than being something that happens by way of the things they do. They feel like other things cause what is happening in their internal experience, rather than that they participate in creating their internal emotions and thoughts. A person “at effect” will seek treatment rather than seek change. They will look for explanations for their problems such as genetics, that suggest the challenges are unsolvable. Questions such as “Will this process work for me?” or statements such as “Your process didn’t work for me.” And “The process worked for a day and then the problem came back.” also presuppose that the problem and the outside process are 100% responsible for how they feel, and the person themselves is 0% responsible for their own results. It’s as if a person wanted to learn a new language and I showed them a process for studying. They ask “Can you promise me that the process will work for me?” I would say, of course, “I believe it will, but only if you actually use it”. The positive intention of “At Effect” responses is to explain what is happening without being at fault, without feeling blamed for their problems, but by not allowing for the possibility of their responses affecting their internal experience, the person makes it impossible to change their experience. Because resilient people are focused on what they CAN change, they feel as if they are far more in charge of their positive results. Resilient people thus have what Positive Psychology researcher Martin Seligman (1997) called “an optimistic explanatory style”.
Nocebo Responses to Help. As a result of this cognitive style, the person with chronicity has a “nocebo” (the original meaning is “I will not please”; the opposite of placebo) response to helping processes. Any therapeutic process designed to get them to change actually triggers a cascade of unconscious “Why?” and “What-if?” questions followed by focusing on the problem and thinking of it as an eternal and uncontrollable external element of their life. Consequently, they have an “uncontrollable” negative response to all interventions designed to actually help them change, although they permit interventions which maintain their problem. A small percentage of all medical clients in clinical research trials will complain that they get headaches etc. due to an inert “pill”. This nocebo response also occurs with psychological interventions. The positive intention of “nocebo” responses may be to protect the person from feared results of the change process, but they block all change. Like any reflex response, nocebo cannot be easily controlled in the immediate situation but can be changed by earlier interventions into the thinking style that generates it.

One way to understand chronicity is that it is a response of “learned helplessness”. Steven Maier and Mark Laudenslager exposed two groups of rats to electric shocks (not a very nice experiment, but we can still learn from the consistent results). One group of rats could control the shock with a lever; the other group had no way to control it. In a short time, the immune system of the rats with no control was in collapse while the others stayed healthy (Ornstein and Sobel, 1989, p 151). In another study, Maier and Martin Seligman found that dogs who had been put through this experience (of being unable to control the shocks) developed a style of behaviour they called “Learned Helplessness”. In subsequent experiments, the dogs would not even jump out of an area which gave them shocks; they had given up on being able to prevent the problem. Seligman followed up these experiments by studying human beings. He found that humans with this “learned helplessness” approach respond to stressful events (such as failing a university exam) by becoming depressed (Seligman, 1997).

So what do resilient people do instead of these patterns of chronicity? The American Psychological Association says research suggests that research supports several “Ways to Build Resilience”, in order to cope with traumatic events. You’ll notice that these are essentially the mirror image of chronicity. How to actually put these recommendations into practice is the subject

Patterns of Resilience

I will restate the APA recommendations in the terminology of NLP:

1. Set Goals The Way experts do: Researcher Richard Wiseman tracked 5,000 people who had some significant goal they wanted to achieve (everything from starting a new relationship to beginning a new career, from stopping smoking to gaining a qualification). Dramatic and consistent differences in goal-setting made the mere 10% who were successful stand out from the other 90% (Wiseman, 2009). In a crisis, resilient people set small, simple, specific, measurable goals each day – like being able to organise a meal. In a sense they ask themselves the following series of focusing questions.

Sensory Specific – “Put yourself in the situation of having achieved your goal. Step into your body at that time and check when exactly the date is. What do you see, what do you hear, what do you feel in the real world, when you have achieved it?”
Positive – This question need only be asked if the person says “I DON’T want…” or “I want it NOT to be like…” at any time. In that case, ask: “If you don’t have that [ie the thing they don’t want], what is it that you will have instead?”
Ecological – “What will you gain once you have reached this goal?” and “What will you lose from you life once you have this goal?” (If there are things they will lose and which they would regret losing, ask “How can you create new ways to get what is important to you AND reach this goal?”)
Choice Increasing – “How can this goal increase your life choices?”
Initiated by Self – “What do you personally need to do to achieve this?”
First Step Identified – “What is a first small step which you could take in the next 24 hours?”
Your Resources Identified – “What previous experiences of success can help you create the state of mind you want to achieve this outcome now?”

2. Use Reframing: Reframing is based on the awareness that events in themselves don’t have one specific meaning. Human beings give them meanings. The question behind reframing is “What else could this situation mean, that would be useful?” For example, in a war zone, anxious people who hear the sirens think “This sound means I might die.” Resilient people are also aware “This sound means someone cares about me and wants me to be safe.” After an earthquake, anxious people who try to relax find themselves thinking “If I relax I won’t be vigilant enough to keep myself safe in an aftershock, and I might die.” Resilient people are aware “If I relax, I can get the energy and the focus to make the safest decisions when any crisis happens.”

3. Use Anchors for Relaxation and Confidence: Everyone has had the experience of listening to a song on the radio, a song that you haven’t heard for years and years… and then suddenly getting back the whole feeling of what it was like all those years ago, suddenly remembering the sound of friends voices, the images of the places where you first heard the music and so on. Just as an anchor holds a ship steady in place, so the music is an “anchor” that re-members (joins together again) all the sensory components of that earlier experience. The music becomes a natural way to recreate the state of mind you were in when you first heard it. Anchoring is a way of associating a powerful positive feeling state (such as relaxation) with a way of reminding your body of it such as:

a hand gesture you don’t usually use
a mental image (perhaps of a place you felt really relaxed)
a word you don’t usually use.

Then you can “trigger” the state whenever you want it just by using the gesture, word or image. Resilient people have positive images, sounds and “touchstones” that remind them of the good times in their life and the things they hope will happen in future. This is essentially what happened to the mice in the research story we told previously (Redondo et alia, 2014).

4. Maintain good family relationships and friendships. (This is the subject of a separate training we run called Transforming Communication). Good relationships depend on what NLP calls “Rapport”, which is the feeling of being synchronised with others.

5. Take a long term / big picture perspective. Different perspectives change the meaning of an event (reframe it). People who have a response of chronicity are often locked into focusing their memory on the time when the worst events were happening and they felt “out of control”. More resilient responders are aware that this is part of a larger story and they will eventually create some new sense of equilibrium.

The Importance of Social Background and Conditioning

It is important to emphasise that, from the research listed by the American Psychological Association, the way people respond to a crisis depends more than any other factor, on their sense of social support and connection. As with fish, who respond to stress in the fish around them (Barcellos et alia, 2011) our human experience of crisis is not an isolated event, but affects and responds to those who are around us.

Furthermore, the percentage of people who respond to a traumatic event by being disabled with chronic PTSD varies from culture to culture (partially because different cultures respond to major crises with different levels of social support for the people involved, and not all members of a particular community have the same access to its social supports). In the research by Schnurr et alia (2004), studying response to major trauma in Hawaii, Japanese ancestry Americans had only 14% of the incidence of PTSD that European ancestry Americans had. Polynesian (in the research, specifically Hawaiian; in many ways the same culture as New Zealand Maori or Samoan) ancestry also reduced PTSD rates to 35% that of other Americans. This means that not all the causes of resilience are individual. Cultural background has an effect, both by shaping peoples individual reaction, and by creating different levels of useful social support.

Within a country such as Great Britain, Germany or the USA, we can chart the prevalence of personality characteristics such as high anxiety (a process called Geopsychology – Ebert et alia 2022). For example, in studies in Great Britain, we find that “Significantly high levels of Neuroticism appeared throughout most of Wales and in a number of districts throughout the Midlands, suggesting that large proportions of residents in these areas were comparatively anxious, depressed, and temperamental.” (Rentfrow et alia, 2015)). Since my grandfather came from the heart of this area, this is of considerable interest to me. It has been a tradition in the study of culture to maintain that no culture is “better” than any other. It is important to notice however, that cultures bear the marks of their previous experience. We cannot effectively help individuals to heal while pretending to be blind to culture and to the history of persecution or colonial conquest. These are issues that we will pick up in the next section of this book.

Domesticating Human Beings

Once we remember the importance of the groups we live in, for effective recovery from crises, then we can understand that the evolution of the species as a whole is also affecting how resiliently, how functionally, we respond to stress. Let’s go back to the big picture behind our individual biology, and think about what has been happening to humanity as a whole over the last few million years.

Human beings are one of a large number of species that evolved from a common ancestor with chimpanzees and bonobos, about 7 million years ago. In many ways, we are still very similar, but the three surviving species respond differently to stress. Recent research shows that human beings, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and bonobos (Pan paniscus) continue to have a shared repertoire of gestural “words”, so that untrained humans can accurately identify the meaning of these gestures at statistically exceptional rates (Graham and Hobaiter, 2023). Genetically, the three species are so close (closer than say horses and donkeys, for example) that the correct scientific move is to classify humans as the third type of chimpanzee (Wayne State University, 2023). However, although bonobos and chimpanzees can recognize themselves in a mirror (and so have a sense of self), can make stone tools and plan to solve complex problems, can use language including simple language syntax, they cannot (in the wild) respond to one remarkably central human gestural code, which human babies use routinely from one year old, and which our companion animals such as dogs have learned to respond to: the gesture of pointing.

Hare and Woods explore the origin of our cooperative processing, which they show is linked to the “Domestication Syndrome” (Wilkins et alia, 2014). Domestication is a process by which a wild and fairly aggressive animal species may be bred in captivity or in close proximity to a guardian species like humans, in order to be more gentle and more affectionate: more positively oriented towards their guardians. Oddly, domestication produces a cascade of genetic changes which result in variations in colour of offspring, in thinner more “gracile” bodies, in floppy ears, more frequent reproductive activity, smaller brain capacity, smaller adrenal glands, and persistence of infantile behaviours into adulthood (Wilkins et alia 2014). These characteristics, first observed by Charles Darwin, can be seen in all domestic animals, including the famous domesticated foxes, produced by Soviet researcher Dimitri Belyaev (1979). Belyaev started selectively breeding the most docile foxes he could find, and observing the temperament of their pups. Within just three generations the offspring were noticeably less fearful and aggressive toward people. By the fourth generation some pups would even approach humans, wagging their tails like dog puppies. However, they also exhibited the cascade of related changes that we see in our other domesticated species. They now had variable colouring, floppy ears and all the other signs we associate with the difference between Labrador dogs and ancestral wolves. In short, they were domesticated.

Brian Hare travelled to Siberia to study Belyaev’s work. Hare and Woods propose that human beings are a kind of self-domesticated hominid, and that bonobos, are another similar case of self-domesticated hominids. Bonobos are often called “pygmy chimpanzees” and they are markedly less aggressive, more amorous, more female-managed and less territorial than chimpanzees. Their experience in the lush Congo basin is very different to the experience that chimpanzees have had in harsher areas of Africa. Hare and Woods note “Domestication is not just a result of artificial selection accomplished by humans choosing which animals to breed. It is also the result of natural selection. In this case, the selection pressure would be on friendliness—either toward a different species or toward your own. This is what we call self-domestication. Self-domestication gave us the friendly edge we needed to succeed as other humans went extinct. So far, we have seen this in ourselves, in dogs, and in our closest cousins, bonobos.” (Hare and Woods, 2021, p. xxv-xxvi) Domesticated chimpanzees, like bonobos and like domesticated wolves (dogs) immediately understand pointing. They are oriented towards understanding and cooperating with others around them. Wild wolves and wild chimpanzees are not.

Brian Hare says (2021) “Each year I challenge my students to use evolutionary theory to solve the world’s problems…. we gave ourselves the same challenge.” His conclusion is that self-domestication, which occurs when we create an environment of psychological safety and affection, is both the leading edge that enabled human success, and the solution to the fear and violence which has darkened our history and puts our world at risk today. To really resolve the world-wide crises like war and totalitarianism, we need to understand not just the individual biology of crisis and “trauma”, but the collective biology of aggressive and domesticating evolutionary trends.

Furthermore, even in a domesticated species, there is a risk with feeling so closely a part of the group. “There are two ways to make a group,” says Emiliano Bruner, a paleoneuroscientist at the National Research Center for Human Evolution in Burgos, Spain. “First, you can rely on what people have in common, giving importance to similarities. Alternatively, you can stress the differences toward another group. Both strategies can work, but in the first case you bet on love, which is often difficult, because it requires the acceptance of our differences. In the second case, you bet on hate which is, unfortunately, much easier to do!” (Quoted in Stetka, 2020).

My own belief is that we have the evidence of human beings almost deliberately domesticating themselves, even in recorded history, in the world-wide development of shamanism and ancient goddess religions. In that sense, religion was not really a maladaption, but an almost deliberate attempt by our species to civilize itself. In a later chapter I will return to this evidence and give examples of how to utilize it to “hack into” our history again and break free from what has darkened it. Here is a simple example quoted from the cult of Isis in Hellenistic Egypt 2500 years ago, claiming to be copied from an ancient stele at Memphis. (from Grant, 1953). It seems to me that here, the imagined goddess Isis (Aest, in Egyptian) introduces herself by saying that she stands for all that we would see as “domestication”.

“I am Isis …
I made strong the right.
I brought together woman and man.
I appointed to women to bring their infants to birth in the tenth month.
I ordained that parents should be loved by children.
I laid punishment on those disposed without natural affection toward their parents.
I made with my brother Osiris an end to the eating of men.
I revealed mysteries unto men.
I taught men to honour images of the gods.
I consecrated the precincts of the gods.
I broke down the governments of tyrants.
I made an end to murders.
I compelled men to love women.
I made the right to be stronger than gold and silver.
I ordained that the true should be thought good.
I devised marriage contracts.
I assigned to Greeks and barbarians their languages.
I made the beautiful and the shameful to be distinguished by nature….”

Stanley Milgram’s Demons

The importance of social support in individual and social crisis situations is also emphasised by some fascinating research first done in the 1950s by social psychologist Stanley Milgram. Milgram began his research soon after the Second World War, after the shocking rise of Fascism and the mass exterminations of the 1930s/1940s in Europe. This kind of brutality has profound long term effects on both the people who are near it, and on their descendants, as we will see below and in the next section, where we discuss some of the main trend in society-wide trauma and recovery over the last centuries. But Milgram was actually interested especially in how members of a species that prides itself on compassion and group support (on “humanitarianism”) could have stooped to such barbarism. He had watched the 1961 trial of former Nazi leader Adolf Eichman, who calmly explained how he had supervised the killing of millions of innocent people, and shrugged it off as “doing his duty”. Milgram wanted to know how common that response would be in other western countries, or with other populations, women for example.

Here is what his experiments looked like. A psychology experiment is taking place in a central city building. In one room a man sits strapped to a chair with an electric wire attached to his wrist. He is memorising a list of words, and has been told that when he makes a mistake he will be given an electric shock. In the next room sits the ‘teacher’ at a control panel. He/she (the experiment has been done with both men and women) has come to these rooms in response to a newspaper advertisement. The teacher has been told that this is a study in the use of punishment. Beside him/her stands a lab technician psychologist in a grey technician’s coat, who says when to give the electric shocks.

They can see the man strapped to the chair through a one‑way mirror. As the experiment goes on, the psychologist instructs the hired teacher to give heavier and heavier electric shocks. They turn up the dial to a level which is marked ‘Danger ‑ Severe Shock, 330 Volts’. As the shocks become more severe the man strapped to the chair says he wants to stop. He begins to beg to be let out. He explains that he has a heart condition. Finally, he appears capable only of emitting agonised screams, and then he is silent. The psychologist does not threaten the teacher in any way, but he calmly insists: ‘It is absolutely essential that you continue the experiment…’.In fact, the person strapped to the chair is a trained actor, and he is not receiving any shocks. The real aim of this disturbing experiment is to find out how long the hired teacher will continue giving what he/she believes are severe shocks.

How many people in this situation would obey the psychologist’s orders and ‘murder’ the man in the chair? Psychologist Stanley Milgram, who ran this experiment, asked psychiatrists how many people they thought would obediently kill in this way ‘One in a thousand’, they told him. The true answer was always more than 60 per cent. Most people in our society are obedient enough to make excellent Nazi concentration camp commanders. The horrific behaviour we witness in war could be done by most ‘normal’ human beings.

Milgram’s teachers often told the psychologist they wanted to stop, trembled, stuttered, laughed nervously or groaned (all indications of severe trauma) … but they went right on pressing the button. One said afterwards: ‘I believe I conducted myself behaving obediently, and carried on instructions as I always do. So I said to my wife “Well, here we are. And I think I did a good job.” She said: “Suppose the man was dead?” [The man replied]: ‘So he’s dead. I did my job!’ (Milgram, 1974)

Dr Jerry Burger, of Santa Clara University, replicated this experiment in 2007 (Miller, 2009). Again, the vast majority of the 29 men and 41 women taking part were willing to push the button knowing it would cause pain to another human. Even when another actor entered the room and questioned what was happening, most were still prepared to continue. Obedience is not a virtue. Obedience means giving over to someone else’s control every virtue you might otherwise have. Obedience is the death of virtue.

But there is an important set of variations that Milgram originally employed: variations that show us how history can be changed by the few influencing the many. He found that obedience rates dropped when the learner was in the same room as the experimenter and dropped even further when the teacher had to physically touch the learner to administer the punishment. Participants also were far less willing to continue the procedure after seeing other “teachers” refuse to press the shock levers. A single fellow experimental subject (actually also an actor) who refused to torture would cause the disobedience of the actual subject. And that is the hope. If enough human beings refuse to participate, then the majority of the 60% who were vulnerable to the brutality will remember their humanity and stop. The reason is the same reason that they would obey, in a sense. We are profoundly social animals. That is our biological curse and our biological superpower.

Eye Movement Integration and Epigenetic Healing

In the later chapters of this book, we will look at a range of strategies for healing traumatic amygdala responses, not just individually, but at the society-wide level, which is the only safe way for us to do this. In this section, I want to refer to one example process which focuses on individuals. The fastest and often most dramatic technique for removing traumatic responses which we teach in our NLP trainings involves the person trying to focus on a traumatic memory while moving their eyes rapidly from side to side and corner to corner. This technique should not be attempted without competent training first, but is explained briefly here for your information.

Eye Movement Integration (EMI) was developed by NLP Trainers Connirae and Steve Andreas in 1989, based on their learning of “Editing” used by NLP co-developer John Grinder. Similar processes are noted in previous Reichian Therapy, and of course previously NLP trained psychologist Francine Shapiro developed a similar method called Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR).

Compared to EMDR, the original NLP process of EMI has less interest in creating a long therapeutic protocol, less interest in consciously discussing the memory, and more flexibility with the movements used. EMI also uses NLP insights about anchoring and eye movement accessing cues. Gestalt Therapist Danie Beaulieu has built a more elaborate model around the method in her book Integral Eye Movement Therapy. Andrew Austin has a quicker protocol which he calls Integral Eye Movement Therapy (IEMT) which adds some excellent questioning skills to focus the person and presuppose change.

For some time, it has been known that moving the eyes causes enormous floods of electrical information across the brain and for this reason, during brain scans, a person is usually instructed to hold their eyes still. We now have research showing that rapid side-to-side eye movements during an event or during active recall of an event prevent the recording of even short term memory traces, and that the result is not a re-ordering of those memories but an interference with the neural circuitry of the memory being formed or reconsolidated (see for example, Engelhard et alia, 2010). It seems possible that the state the brain enters when the process is applied to a disturbing memory is similar to the state in which the brain naturally reconsolidates memories during REM sleep.

While we do not have clinical research on this exact protocol for the Eye Movement process, we do have some dramatic research on EMDR, based on a very similar protocol. A 2012 study of 22 people found that EMDR therapy helped 77 percent of the individuals with psychotic disorder and PTSD. It found that their hallucinations, delusions, anxiety, and depression symptoms were significantly improved after treatment. The study also found that symptoms were not exacerbated during treatment. Only five of the twenty-two completers (22.7%) still met criteria for PTSD after treatment. (van den Berg and van der Gaag, 2012).

One of the key markers of traumatic emotional responses is the production of epigenetic alterations in the body cells. “Epigenetic” refers to the information that surrounds our genetic database for creating proteins our body needs. An epigenetic change such as a “methyl group” added to a set place on a person’s genes can prevent that gene producing a specific protein, creating a cascade of effects that leaves their entire hormonal system on a kind of “permanent alert”. Because the epigenetic change is stored even in the cells that produce offspring (sperm and ova) the “alert status may then be transferred to children that the person has. For example, research found that methylation on a specific genetic site “FKBP5” is higher than normal for Jewish holocaust survivors, but lower than normal for their children. (Kellerman, 2013; Yehuda et alia, 2016). Natan Kellerman explains, “Specifically, epigenetics may explain why latent transmission becomes manifest under stress.”

However, amazingly, methylation on the “ZFP57” DMR (Differentially Methylated region) on the human genome increases within a short time after successful Eye Movement therapy for PTSD. One of the first studies showing this was done in 2019 at the University of Utrecht (Vinkers et alia, 2019). “We examined genome-wide DNA methylation profiles from blood before and after trauma-focused psychotherapy in both responding and non-responding PTSD patients as well as trauma-exposed controls. Significant DNA methylation findings from this treatment cohort were then related to the development of PTSD in an independent prospective military cohort before and after deployment.” The results: “Successful treatment of PTSD was accompanied by significant changes in DNA methylation at 12 differentially methylated regions (DMRs) in the genes…. In conclusion, this study demonstrates that successful psychotherapeutic treatment of PTSD is associated with specific DNA methylation changes. Of these epigenetic changes, the finding of ZFP57 methylation is the most consistent, as DNA methylation in this region decreases during the development of PTSD but increases following its successful treatment. This study is the first step to identify the epigenetic mechanisms underlying a successful treatment of PTSD.”

Obviously, the Eye Movement processes are not the only therapies which could produce this result, and we are in the early days of this research. A similar study showed successful results in the epigenetics of people diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder, although over a longer time period. The researchers explain that the anxiety and aggression seen in Borderline Personality Disorder were known to have some environmental and possibly some epigenetic components: “M. Linehans’ model of a biosocial development suggests that BPD is a disorder resulting from biological vulnerability combined with harming environmental influences. A depreciating and emotionally unstable environment during childhood together with genetic vulnerability could result in the disturbances of emotion regulation which is typical for BPD (Crowell et al., 2009, Linehan, 1993). Whereas twin and family studies suggest a heritability of BPD between 35% and 65% (Distel et al., 2009, Torgersen et al., 2000), individual risk genes could not be identified for BPD thus far (Calati et al., 2013, Gunderson, 2009). Over the past years, evidence emerged that epigenetic mechanism play a major role in the mediation of genome–environment-interactions.” (Noblich et alia, 2017). The Dialectical Behaviour Therapy used included:

Core Mindfulness – training in accepting awareness of internal responses
Distress Tolerance by using distraction, self-soothing, and assessment of the value of the reaction
Interpersonal Effectiveness by using listening skills and gentle assertive communication
Emotional regulation by naming and changing emotional responses.

NLP Eye Movement Integration

(Adapted from Steve and Connirae Andreas, with insights from Danie Beaulieu, Andrew Austin and Francine Shapiro)

1. Confidently sit facing the person and synchronize your breathing and body position with theirs.
2. * Elicit the undesired state and scale using SUD (Subjective Units of Distress) 1-10 (Shapiro, 1995, p.62)
“Do what you usually do to create this feeling. What shall we call this feeling you want to change, and on a scale of 0-10, how strong is this feeling now, with 0 being nothing and 10 being as strong as it could be?”
“Find the earliest time you had this feeling at this intensity, and hold this memory in your mind as we do the process.”
3. Do the Eye Movement Process (the primary 3 movements identified in EMDR, described below, are usually enough. See Shapiro, 1995, p64-65.)
“OK, look at the pen and hold your head still. As I move the pen, try to hold that memory and be aware of how your experience of it changes.”
Face the person with your hand holding the pen a meter from their face. Remind them to keep their head still. Use smooth even movements and a wide range.Move back and forward starting with horizontal movement and then move diagonally from corner to corner across the center. Do 5 movements each way. Ideally the client will report difficulty recalling the visual and auditory elements of the memory. Shapiro (1995, p. 64) suggests that circular movements can be used to calm down emotion also.

4. Test and Check Future expectations
“When you try get that feeling now how strong is it 0-10?”
“And when you think of a future time, when in the past that feeling might have come up, what happens now?”
If a negative emotion emerges then repeat the process from the asterisked point above (*), locating the earliest memory again.

Key Points:

Our biological “superpower” as human beings has been to learn how to cooperate intelligently with each other, essentially domesticating ourselves to work together.
Our cooperation also leads us at times to obey destructive leaders, as revealed in the Milgram experiments, and to create in-group – out-group conflict.
When memories are first created, they are stored in the hippocampus in the brain, and are given an emergency rating in the amygdala. They are then reconsolidated to the cortex.
The brain readjusts memories continuously to help us make sense of them, including reprocessing disturbing memories as observer-experiences.
In a crisis, our cooperation skills become most important. At such times most people will be resilient, setting specific goals, reframing to find useful meanings, anchoring themselves into positive states, and having a big picture perspective.
A small group of people will have chronic problems after a crisis, largely generated by asking “Why?” and “What if?” questions, focusing on and labelling their problems, being reluctant to acknowledge success, and thus feeling out of control of their feelings.
Eye Movement Integration processes, which have the person enter a REM sleep-like state where they move the eyes back and forward while trying to hold on to a disturbing memory, can help reconsolidate memories more effectively in chronicity. These gains are then passed on epigenetically.

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