The Four Fold Formula for Survival

Trauma, Templates and Triggers(26 slides)

Creatively compiled by dr. michael farnworth

The Original Fight Flight Dilemma

• It was originally hypothesized by Walter Cannon in the early 1900s that an organism’s basic survival instinct was a fight- flight mechanism.

• This belief was based upon the notion that the survival behavior was an instinct that we shared with the animal kingdom.

• It may be a little more complicated.

Any white male bias?

• The fight flight response is a pattern commonly seen in adult male mammals and is highly adaptive to survival.

• Infants and children, how ever, due to age and development, the fight-flight response would be inappropriate and dangerous.

• Freezing, being immobile and dissociative responses would be more in line with survival.

Einstein once said…

• “ Everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.”

• So, in that spirit, the following is proposed:

• That two more words beginning with F be added to the survival mechanism to make it a four fold formula:

• The words are Freezing and Formulating.

Freezing: Frozen in Fear

• Freezing is the act of neither fight or flight but of holding still in the hopes that you won’t be noticed or seen by the source of the threat.

• We do it all the time in real life. Some body loses control and we freeze, scared to death that their energy is going to be directed at us.

• We keep a low profile not wanting to draw attention to ourselves or be very good in the hopes of not getting into trouble.

Freezing that evolves into Dissociation…

• Dissociation is simply disengaging from stimuli of the external world and escaping via day dreaming, fantasy, depersonalization, or going to a special place inside oneself.

• The neurobiology of freezing and dissociation is distinctly different from the neurobiology of hyper-arousal (fight-flight).

• Dissociation leads to passivity, numbness, compliance, immobility and obedience.

• Hyper-arousal leads to aggression, fighting, defiance, oppositional attitudes and anger.

• It is interesting to note that more boys externalize disorders than girls, who have a higher incidence of internalizing them or of blaming themselves.

Formulating

• Formulating strategies for survival is a function of the new brain’s cognitive abilities.

• These formulated strategies for survival find a way for safety and needs to be obtained.

• Whatever succeeds, over time, will be reinforced into mood altering rituals and behaviors that become established as part of the personality due to their being reinforced again and again.

Mood Altering

• To mood alter means to change the emotion/energy/feeling.

• It means to stop it or transform it.

• The mood is what makes the person so uncomfortable it scares them, threatens them and they want to feel safe by feeling what is familiar even if others think it is bad, wrong, or inappropriate.

In summery…

• Old Brain Survival:• Fight: anger, hostility, contempt, subversive• Flight: aversion, fear, avoidance, hiding• Freezing: numbing, passivity, shut down, being quiet

• New Brain Survival:• Formulating: Survival strategies based upon cognition

and conditioned success, in other words: they will do what ever works (mood alter) to reduce the threat.

The Arousal Template

• A template is a pattern used to duplicate something.

• Everyone has an individual arousal template unique to their own history.

• The template can be one that evokes threat or safety

• This template was created in early childhood…

• By experiences that scared and threatened the young and impressionable child or that brought them comfort and safety.

• The constructed template was furthered complicated by the cognitive stage of pre-operational thinking (thinking by perception).

Neural Templates

• Since children are in a malleable and pliable state the more frequent, threatening and intense a certain pattern of neural activation is the more indelible and imprinted the response neural template of the child will be.

• Early childhood experiences provide the organizing framework for adaptive responses to stressful events.

• An example: The story of Albert and the white rabbit (Picture a toddler, a little white rabbit and a pair of cymbals.

• Anytime Albert saw the rabbit, a pair of cymbals would crash together just behind him.

• It didn’t take long for Albert to make the template response and just start crying when the rabbit was introduced!

In other words…

• A young child between the ages of one and seven can have normal life experiences that they can interpret as threatening and stressful.

• They will create a neural template to capture the experience.

• Examples: taking a bath, going to bed, being yelled at, getting into trouble, being ignored, exploring their curiosity, being hit, being left alone, being teased, seeing conflict, hearing conflict, being touched in ways that make them uncomfortable, being disciplined etc. etc.

In other words…continued:

• The young child may also have experiences they interpret as bringing comfort and safety and may be a normal part of growing up.

• And they will create a neural template for that experience.

• Examples may be of being a good girl or boy, being a peace maker, not needing, being quite, being absent or inconspicuous, being loud, being funny, complying with wishes and directions, getting good grades, doing chores, listening, parenting younger siblings, eating, music, being alone, have friends, having fun, studying, etc. etc.

The function of template triggers

• Template triggers are cues in the environment that announce that a threatening or harmful situation is about to occur.

• Examples of threat triggers may be the tone, volume or intensity of the parental voice. “Get over here NOW!”

• It may be a look, a door opening in the middle of the night, dad getting angry, yelling, mom hitting, family tension, new situations, etc., etc.

The kinds of triggers…

• The template triggers act as the prelude announcement to the storm and the child does their best to try and interpret them and to do what ever is necessary to avoid and minimize the results.

• There can be triggers that announce threat.

• There can be triggers that may invite safety and needs.

• The safety and comfort triggers can be generated feelings that originate from activities like eating or sexual stuff that distracts from the pain, behaviors like being good or working to pleases authority figures. Or others like a pet or friend to give them acceptance or thoughts of escape, revenge or fantasy.

• Each trigger can initiate very specific neural templates unique to the child’s history

The training of a reflex that we will call a trigger

• A reflex is an automatic response that an individual has no control over; they just re-act or re-flex.

• Pavlov’s famous conditioned response of dogs salivating to the sound of a bell, even in the absence of anything to eat, is a good example of how strong a conditioned reflexive behavior (i.e. trigger) can be.

Avoidance Learning

• Avoidance learning is a reinforced conditioned response to avoid a painful or uncomfortable event that may be announced by a trigger.

• The best example is one of a dog placed into a wire mesh pen divided by a 2.5 foot fence.

• Each side had a light bulb and when it came on, five seconds later the wire floor was electrified.

• The dog learned within 2 experiences that the light bulb was the sign that a painful experience was about to begin and they jumped over the fence to get relief.

• The learning was profound, quick and long lasting.

• The light bulb became the trigger for the avoidance behavior of jumping to the other side.

Learned Passivity

Another fascinating study done with dogs was to strap on a jacket that delivered shocks to the dog and that was inescapable.

After time elapsed the dog receiving the shocks was unable to

escape and became passive and stopped trying.

The jacket was taken off and the dog was placed in a room where it received shocks (on the floor) but could escape them if he jumped

across a barrier into another part of the room for relief.

Other dogs, placed in similar circumstances would quickly learn to jump and escape the shocks but the jacket trained dog would

passively submit to the pain and discomfort without even trying to escape.

It learned passivity.

Children and Avoidance Learning

• Children learn very quickly, with long term consequences, that what ever they think creates trouble and stress for them is avoided at all costs.

• Children engage in magical thinking that if they do this or that then something bad will happen.

• This self blaming mechanism is common for children in the pre-operational stage of thinking.

Childhood Trauma

• Trauma creates imbalance in organisms. It disrupts harmony and alters brain chemistry and normal functioning.

• This is important: Trauma creates extreme responses in humans. Homeostasis (a sense of balance and harmony) is destroyed.

• The coping behaviors become extreme and are found in either: addictive excesses or addictive deprivations.

Trauma creates fear.

• The trauma created fear can create a reality that: Its going to happen again!

• This reality lives within the Life Story or Narrative of the person, and is often outside the range of conscious functioning.

• It was formed in childhood during the pre-operational stage of thinking: magical, superstitious and illogical to the adult mind.

Impact and effect of trauma

• Early trauma in children creates extreme behavior which becomes addictive in nature: addictive excesses or addictive depravation.

• The imbalance and discord is reinforced and becomes conditioned responses to triggers that the individual cannot control.

• Wounds, hurts, fears, magical thinking is strongly reinforced as part of the personality construct of the child and adapts creatively to the process of aging and getting older with little or no change.

The Shadow Energies…

• The energies of the shadow are fueled by our attempts to ignore those parts of us that are unacceptable to our loved ones and/or to our culture.

• The more the shadow energies are ignored the stronger they become.

• The shadow energies originate in our wounds, our rejections, our failures, our not measuring up, our getting into trouble, our traumas, mistakes, etc.

The Synthesis…

• The old brain (fight, flight, freeze) survival combine with the child’s new brain pre-operational cognition (formulation of strategies) to create a response to trauma.

• The response is conditioned by the history of the individual and determines its unique arousal template and triggers for threat and safety.

• The response to the homeostatic disruption is extreme (excesses or deprivations) and becomes addictive in nature.

• The survival behavior is impacted by self blame, shadow energies and conditioned triggers.

the end