This excerpt from Carolyn Spring, describes what happens during emotional dysregulation; an overwhelming emotional experience that can affect people with anxiety disorders (among many others).
Read more about Emotional Dysregulation HERE
We have included this passage, because it describes what is happening in your brain during an anxiety outbreak, and may help you understand what is happening to you in those upsetting moments. "Rather than the word ‘grounding’ – and certainly rather than the phrase ‘calming down’ – I prefer the term ‘getting the front brain online’. It clearly defines the problem – that my front brain has gone offline – and clearly implies what the solution will look like: that my front brain will be active and engaged again. There’s no fault or blame. It’s not saying that I’m being reactive or even over-reactive. It’s just saying that my front brain has gone offline and that it would be helpful if we could get it back online.
Our ‘front brain’ is our clever, thinking, reflective, strategic, perspective-taking, curious neo-cortex – this most human of assets. And antagonistic to it is our more primitive, survival-based ‘back brain’ comprising our limbic system and reptilian brain: the parts which operate largely without conscious thought, instinctively, to keep us safe.
Because when my front brain is online, things go better for me. I’m able to consider, to reflect, to mentalise, to be aware of what I’m thinking and feeling and to put it into words. It’s where I become aware of automated scripts from the past, and how what I’m thinking in the here-and-now might be layered over with voices from the there-and-then. With my front brain online I can make sense from multiple perspectives and points of view - not just my own. I can see things in grayscale, not just in black and white. I can laugh at myself, and not take myself too seriously. I can respond to accusations without becoming defensive or needing to prove my perfection. I can sift through what’s true, what’s not true and what is yet to be determined as true. I can be curious and open to things I haven’t thought before, and join the dots. I can see patterns, assumptions, and prejudices, and conclusions that I’ve jumped to. I can slow it all down and just wonder what’s going on, and I can take a step back and let all my feelings and thoughts settle before reacting.
In my back brain I’m all action, all re-action, all jump out of the way and ask afterwards what I’m jumping out of the way of. I see things in blacks-and-whites, in all-or-nothings. I leap into the drama triangle and assume the position of victim, rescuer or persecutor. I play pre-programmed responses, of jumping to conclusions, of catastrophe, of outrage, of shame, of despair. I act only to defend myself, even before assessing the validity of the threat. I’m in survival mode, and woe betide the person who wants reason and rationale from me while my back brain is in control.
My front brain lets me feel my feelings, but also to verbalise them – ‘you need to name them to tame them’, as Dan Siegel says. I’m able to see that this is a feeling that I’m feeling, that it’s here now but won’t be later; that emotions have motion; that emotions present one piece of the picture, but not all of it; that feelings are meant to be felt, but not necessarily believed or acted upon. In the green zone with the front brain online, we can validate our feelings whilst also soothing them and making sure they don’t take over.
Sounds pretty ace, doesn’t it? Oh to have our front brain online all the time!
And that’s what the aim of grounding is – to bring our front brain online and re-regulate our nervous system back into the green zone. The aim of grounding isn’t so that we can tick a box to say that we’ve named five things that are green or that we’ve exhaled to the count of four. The aim of grounding is to move out of danger mode back into daily life mode, out from unsafety to safety, out from the amber or red zone back into the green zone, out from the back brain and into the front brain. We do this by increasing blood flow to our frontal lobes, by slowing down our sympathetic nervous system response, by engaging the ventral vagal circuit, by lowering our sense of threat through intentional eye movement [EMDR]: that’s what all the techniques are properly designed to do. The out-breath, for example, engages the parasympathetic nervous system. We don’t need to know this when we’re in a state of panic - we just need to do it. But it’s good to know at least that there is solid science behind many grounding techniques".
9/6/2021
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