It is quite interesting when this reaction is compared to the behaviour of children; he notes that as a reaction to unpleasant situations there’s screaming, pushing and lashing out instead of adults” balanced words and movements (Ibid., p.17). More than that, he also points out the fact that adult people manifest the tendency to approach a new situation with a calculated action, and only in some extreme situations an adult would react with a “movement storm” (Ibid., p.16).
Freezing
Kretschmer reminds us about another widespread response to danger which is typical for many living beings, which is: “apparent death”. Some kinds of fish are capable of “freezing” up to 15 minutes and sometimes even longer while lying on one side. This is a defence mechanism which helps the animal hide from and look unattractive to the predator.
According to Kretschmer, such responses are “something frozen, as a formula, squeezed into the fixed template without any flexibility in each particular case” (Ibid.)
Psychological emergency mechanisms
A driver uses the steering wheel, brake and gas in order to adapt to the motion of his or her car to the situation on the road and get to the destination successfully. This is how our rational mind helps us adapt to new situations and overcomes challenges in the course of our lives. This is an adaptation of repeated use, which is activated in normal conditions.
However, there’s also an airbag installed in the car. It is activated in case of an accident and does not require a driver’s specific actions. This is how our bodily mind or our autonomic nervous system reacts to the situations which our body identifies as “an emergency”. When our latest “instrument” doesn’t respond, the primitive one steps in, and in this case we are talking about a single-use escape plan with a limited number of strategies (attack, escape or hide), as we have already noted earlier.
Once having been put into use, an airbag will require a replacement because it just won’t return back to where it was before. The psychological emergency mechanisms work similarly: once activated, they have a tendency to repeat non-stop. Time doesn’t really heal anything in this case. Such conditions become chronic or, as psychiatrists say, “processual”. Thus one would need to take conscious action in order to turn these mechanisms off and bring the body back to normal functioning.
And now let’s have a look at what a person feels when he or she is going through this. This is very important because the key to cure phobias and other psychotraumas is all about addressing one’s feelings.
Phenomenology of fear
Out of the blue: how one perceives a danger alert
When describing an episode that led to a disorder, many describe it as “something that hit me mildly on the head”, “it’s like hot water was poured on me” or “like something went through my body”. Shocking information is perceived as something appearing “out of the blue”.
However unusual and even sometimes strange these descriptions may be, they all share the same features. Hundreds of people whom I have worked with in the course of my research claim that at the moment when they got scared, they felt like their bodies swallowed something which has been poisoning their lives ever since. There’s a feeling that this substance moved down to their stomach where one starts feeling an unpleasant sensation whenever the terrible situation which caused this is merely mentioned. In some particularly difficult cases this substance is clearly associated with a poison that infects every cell of the body.
There’s an expression “my heart leaps into my boots” where “heart” is actually your vital energy which moves down to your stomach when you feel frightened. As a result, the top of your head and the surface of your body feel cold. A rapid transfer of energy from the periphery to the centre is taking place.
Vacuum unit
Imagine a vacuum tank that suddenly depressurises. Everything that is around is sucked into it. If this machine was close to the gold bearing river full of golden nuggets, it would suck in all that too, including the sand, and the pebbles. Something similar happens to a person at the moment of confusion: interior space of the body drags down information, including everything that seems to be terrifying.
Fig. 6. When we are faced with something unknown, we often feel at a loss. Such reaction can be seen in the self-portrait titled “Frightened” by Zinaida Serebriakova (circa 1917). The Girl’s eyes are open wide, and her mouth is open too. When there are no reasonable solutions to be found, there is a sensation of emptiness inside. When the “emergency” signal is “sucked into” the area of the solar plexus, the process of “sensibilization” takes place.
When frightened, people open their mouths and eyes widely, make signs of dismay and then sharply inhale.
At the level of our sensations, this is exactly the moment when information is “sucked into” the head, chest and the solar plexus, which could later cause a phobia.
Rely on sensations
I treat these descriptions of the sensations as useful clues which could prove very helpful in the course of healing. They should be taken into consideration within the constraints of their own logic, that is: as they exist. You can hear the following description: “It hit me like a ton of bricks, and the dust from them got under my skin,” because this is actual feedback on the processes that are taking place in the body.
Evidence from spatial perception lays the foundation for further work.
Your bodily energy and wisdom is where your attention goes!
In order to restore the process, you need to establish a back-and-forth connection with it. As soon as this connection is established, you get the access to control the processes which earlier seemed uncontrollable. This includes the processes at the level of the autonomic nervous system.
An important discovery of Psychocatalysis is that when attention is paid to the sensations in the interior space of the body, one is able to establish the necessary connection with the processes that take place at the autonomic energetic level, and thus one gets to control them successfully. More than that, this is pretty much the only actual way to access these processes.
One of the principles of our method says: “Energy and reactivation of regulation is where your attention goes.” As soon as a person starts noticing something in his or her interior space, an influx of energy is directed to it, and the process reactivates. However, there is a second factor that also plays an important role, and it is comparing the actual state with the ideal condition. It is our attention that contains information about our ideal state and to what extent our current state differs from it. Any process in the body, once it finds its reflection in the mirror of our attention, begins to turn itself around. That is why we would like to add the second principle to the first one about attention and energy: “Your attention guides you to the wisdom of the body.”
The two components
In the descriptions given by the people who suffer from phobias two components can be singled out:
• Head (or “cognitive’) component: images, thoughts, fantasies about the traumatic incident;
• Bodily (or “sensory’) component: sensations in the body connected with the danger signal and the reaction to it.
Healing from phobias through Psychocatalysis presupposes careful attention to both levels of our consciousness. Psychocatalysis as a cognitive-sensory