The Power Of Actively Pausing After Reacting

A trigger will often throw us into our very strong but primitive brain states of fight/flight/freeze/fawn. These are not ‘bad’ at all, we need them all. But in the case of trauma, they can over fire in the present day as if we were still back in the same place where we had no time, space, resources or support to choose a different response.

Much more recent evolutionarily are the parts of the human brain allow for a broader assessment of the situation, beyond the knee-jerk reaction to danger. Neural circuits in the frontal cortex allow us to determine that, even though a given situation feels like a major threat, it is not actually that threatening. This allows us to downgrade from Red Alert to something more appropriate. This is our work in recovery, to help grow an active pause in order to allow us to practice downgrading the danger alert and allowing our system to stay online and choose a different response.

What I call the proactive mindset is the human ability to engage the more evolved neural circuits and perform a sort of due diligence to improve the quality of the information that we get through the reactive mindset. I am not talking about ignoring our more primitive reactions, far from that. I am talking about building on these primitive reactions. Instead of reacting impulsively, we use the reactive impulse as a starting point for a more sophisticated process that helps us respond more effectively to a given situation.

The proactive mindset I describe can also be seen as mindfulness. Given how some people think of mindfulness as an esoteric practice, it is important to state that what I am describing here is a natural human ability: The ability to function more effectively, by discriminating more clearly what is a manageable threat from what is not, and adopting more appropriate responses. It is an ability we gain only through a lot of practice, to bring the ‘watchtower’ (our prefrontal medial cortex) of our brain back online to observe non judgementally what is actually happening in the present moment.

Now, how do we do this? Of course, it helps to have an awareness of this process, and the intention to shift from a reactive mode. It helps, but it isn’t nearly enough. Because we are talking about overriding a very powerful mechanism, one that has been reinforced by millions of years of evolution (so in other words it is no one’s fault!). This mechanism enables us to mobilize enormous amounts of energy in the service of survival when we face what we perceive as a major threat. The bigger the perceived threat, the more impossibly difficult the task will feel. Pushing against the fear will only increase the sense of pressure and danger and make it even more difficult to override the reactive impulses.

When you’re reactive, you may not perceive your reactivity as fear. For instance, you may feel confused. Or feel stuck. Or you may be very angry… so that doesn’t sound like you’re afraid, does it? So, let’s not call that fear. Let’s just call it ‘intense emotion/activation, related to a sense of threat’. The point is: It is the very intensity of the emotion that makes it hard to override.

How does one deal with this? I’m going to take a simple example, one where the ‘threat’ can be managed relatively easily. I’m going to talk about what happens when you start wearing contact lenses, how you get accustomed to inserting them into your eyes.

You put the lens on the tip of a finger, and you start moving the index finger toward your eye. You notice that, even though you’re moving your index slowly, and even though you know that this is not an attack on your eye, you automatically close your eyelids as the finger is approaching. So you need to pull down the lower eyelid with one finger of the hand that has the lens, and pull up the upper eyelid with the other hand, to keep the eye open.

Even as you do this, and even though the movement of your finger toward your eye is slow and controlled, you notice that the eye has a tendency to close despite the fingers holding the eyelids open. Fortunately, over time, this operation becomes easier and easier, as your mind learns from experience that there is no risk. As we reassure ourselves and anchor in the choice of the moment, the system accepts the new safety signals more easily and we learn new skills and pathways of behaviour and feeling and meaning around the act of putting them in.

In trauma healing work, we look at channels of sensation, image, affect (emotion), behaviour and meaning. In a past moment of threat, different elements of this will get bound up and imprinted. For example if in the past someone shoved a contact lens in our eye we may couple (associate) a contact lens with a Sensation of pain , with a Meaning like people can’t be trusted, with an image of something heading towards us (that means if we see anything like that again we can react as if the threat is here), and with an Emotion of fear. In renegotiating the experience slowly and mindfully - we get to untangle these elements and allow old associations to integrate and new meaning, sensations, behaviours, emotions to emerge in the present moment.

This learning is possible because a lot of conditions are gathered to renegotiate the reactive impulse to the perceived attack. For one thing, there is the reassuring knowledge that this procedure is one that has been done by millions of other people, and that the medical profession is behind it. But also, the finger that moves toward your eye is your own, so you can modulate the movement; in other words, there is less of a threat because you have control over the movement. The need for a protective reaction is lessened as you feel safer.

Conversely, you wouldn’t be able to relax enough to keep your eye open if somebody else’s finger was coming at you really fast. It would be impossible to override the perception that this is an attack.

So, in order to override reactivity, you need to feel safer. This doesn’t happen through logic alone. Logic helps, of course, as it does in the case of contact lenses: It helps to know that eye doctors think of this as a safe procedure. But it is not enough. What is necessary is the experience of actually feeling safe, so that the powerful protection circuits of the brain can relax their grip and make change possible. Remember that these protective circuits are those we share with other animals, they’re more primitive than our cortical circuits, they’re not good at the subtleties of complex thought. To overcome reactivity, you need to experience a visceral sense of relative safety (not total safety there is no such thing), because the function of reactivity is to protect you.

This visceral sense of safety, and a visceral understanding of the intense emotions that have a grip on you, cannot be fully accessed when we try to get at them by only using words, logical discourse. This is because the brain circuits involved in these emotions are more primitive. So, we need to pay attention to moment-by-moment physical experience. We need to keep coming back to that, as opposed to staying solely at the level of ‘talking about’ what might be happening. It is why the very basic skills we teach people to stabilise their nervous system work over time and practice, because they are engaging the brain areas we need in order to stay online and revisit experiences in the body safely without going into a trauma response.

In the example I gave, that of becoming progressively more comfortable inserting a contact lens, comfort with the procedure comes from repeatedly practicing it in a mindful way and deactivating any threat responses that come up during the process.

Is it sufficient to just have a ‘mindful practice’, such as mediation, or yoga, or Focusing? It would probably help some, but it wouldn’t be enough to replace the specific practice of inserting the lens. The more intense the potential danger, the more our reactive circuits take over, bypassing the circuits that counterbalance reactivity. In other words: The more intense the potential danger, the more we need to train our mind and body and nervous system to recognize that this specific danger is safer than it appears to us.

Why am I calling this a ‘mindful practice’, as opposed to just ‘training’? Let’s pay attention to what happens when we practice inserting the contact lens with our finger. As described earlier in this text, it is something we do slowly, carefully. There are micro-movements forward, interrupted by micro-pauses. The micro-pauses allow us to get a moment-by-moment assessment of the situation. The pauses also allow our nervous system to settle and re calibrate.

There is no attunement possible without these micro-pauses, because they are what makes it possible to process the potential threat in manageable bites. At a macro level as well as a micro level, the pause gives our nervous system the moment-by-moment realization that we can regulate the flow of experience, that we can make it safe, hence we can open up to it in an optimal way in order to integrate it. This is why work with recovery goes slowly for all of us. We are integrating tiny little shifts towards greater coherence, regulation and felt relative safety. For those with developmental trauma, this really is a journey of discovery that can take years. We begin to live again in that time, allowing ourselves to both experience life more fully and know integration will be a longer term comassionate path of growth.