Creating a Peaceful World: dealing with Threat brain and embracing Peace brain
For the majority of my life I was in a fear based state and I didn’t even know it. After reading “What Happened to You” by Dr. Bruce Perry and Oprah Winfrey I realized that a near to death with pneumonia experience at around 2 months old and an incident at 3 yrs old most likely had a significant impact on the primal (survival) part of my brain, mostly because they relate to being without my mother, my primary caregiver.
I make an assumption that back in January 1970 babies were likely placed in incubators away from direct contact with their mother. I also knew that my mother had my brother to care for at home. I don’t have a lot of information because my mom has passed. I know my mother and father were both smokers.
At the age of 3 I experienced my mother almost dying because of having too much insulin in her system (she had type 1 diabetes since 7 yrs old). So I saw my mother convulsing on the floor in her parents home and bleeding because her thumbnail kept jamming into her chin while she convulsed on her belly. It was at this time that an older but still very young relative told me that my mother would die one day, it’s just a matter of time.
I learned at age 23 that when children under 4 or 5 yrs of age (usually of parents with an illness) see their primary caregiver’s death or near death it can be perceived as their own death because they have yet to see themselves as separate from their primary caregiver.
That childhood memory has stuck with me but the impact of that situation was, for about 30+ years, mostly unconscious to me. At about 30, I became aware that a prevailing fear existed in my daily experience, even a decade after this awareness I realized that I had what probably would be described as panic attacks every night as I lay down to sleep - I think I may have equated sleep to death. I was afraid of death and my child mind concluded that death could happen at any time, if my mom died.
Most of my decisions and experiences from early childhood to midlife were fear based - fighting (competitiveness, over exercising), fleeing (procrastination, people pleasing, dissociation, escapism, fantasy creation - lucid dreaming), freeze (anxiety, depression). I was in survival mode most of the time, always seeking out the threat to my existence and trying to over come this threat in a socially acceptable way. I felt separate, had self loathing and self doubt (other child hood traumas) so in order to have some semblance of acceptance I learned to perform for others. I tried to please my parents, please everyone else because maybe then I would feel accepted and not alone while existing completely in fear.
I share because this experience of living in fear has enabled me to understand how people can become mentally ill, how they can live a life looking for threats and even creating threats that do not exist only so that they can be the winner/survivor. I can relate to creating a busy life to avoid looking at my worst fear - just being, like sleep, would be death.
Many of us are in a world where we are only surviving. We do so for our own personal reasons and because of a negative brain bias (the brain's tendency is to search for threats AND it saves negative experiences immediately but positive experiences must sustain for at least 12 seconds in order to be saved as a memory) (Dr. Rick Hanson’s research). When we all operate from this level it means that we are creating a world where there are threats and we get to react, consume something, choose a side, eliminate the threat, win, survive. This is a very volatile world to live in and it is not sustainable.
While this “negative” behaviour is built into the primitive part of our brain where the default mode is survival, we also have access to the higher brain functions like compassion, hope, human connection, love, planning. Accessing those higher functioning parts of requires a calm, self regulated body and if you are recovering from a micro trauma or trauma, it requires lots of training, healthy practices (at least three positive emotions to one negative emotion to achieve well being, Barbara Fredrickson), and tough decision making by you. When you become aware, you start to see when it is beneficial to use the primitive parts of the brain (evaluating your basic needs like food, clothing, shelter, and maybe finances) and when it is beneficial to use your higher brain functions (sustaining nature, people, health, well being). YOU decide what world you want to live in, we can create our experiences in life. Our past practices have created the world that exists right now.
So, while I have negative pathways in my brain, I heal these through the self care and practices that I do daily, hourly, and moment by moment. I also do well being exercises whenever I need to do them. These activities are NOT a pill. They are not done in an instant…that is threat brain thinking. Peace brain knows this takes time, I deserve time, care, attention and I do this with self care practices. You can do it too! Together we can change these conditioned fearful and negative reactions that we have used to create the world that exists and we can use our loving, peaceful caring responses and create a peaceful, health sustaining world where humans still exist.
Christine ❤️
