"Question reactivity!" This was the advice of Donald Mann, LCSW, a very skilled and perceptive therapist here in Portland, who also specializes in working with adults with histories of trauma. He was talking about questioning our own reactivity, but I think it's also wise to question other people's reactivity. I'll explain. Questioning our own reactivity is the antidote for acting on it and doing something we may regret. Questioning other's reactivity is the antidote for being triggered by it and reacting in a way we may regret. When we are reactive it is because we have been triggered. When other people are reactive it is because they have been triggered.

What I am referring to as reactivity is actually a reactive sequence. I am no brain scientist, but it is my understanding that there is a little almond-shaped organ approximately in the center of the brain at the top of the primitive brain stem called the amygdala. It functions like the control center for an alarm system. Since the amygdala is part of the "lizard brain" there is no conscious thought that takes place there. I think of the amygdala control center as a big empty room with monitors in the center and posters plastered all over the walls, ceiling and floor. At least for us with PTSD there are a lot of posters, maybe even filing cabinets full of them. These posters depict images of past traumas in great detail including sights, sounds, smells, tastes and physical sensations. Watching the monitors are two big dumb guys that don't have a lick of sense between them, Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee. All they do is watch the monitors and look for anything that looks suspiciously like anything on any of the posters. Whenever they spot a similarity, without thinking, they sound the alarm. This message goes directly to another organ in the brain, the hippocampus, which sits below the amygdala just above the pituitary gland. The hippocampus is the fail safe for the alarm system. Its job is to filter out false alarms. But during childhood trauma this little organ gets damaged irrevocably. Consequently, it doesn't filter nearly as well as it should and a lot of false alarms get through. When the hippocampus passes an alarm along it does so by activating the endocrine system and the nervous system simultaneously. These in turn activate the body. So far no thought process has taken place.

Studies of brain function have demonstrated that in persons with PTSD when they are stressed, the primitive brain stem, the reactive lizard brain, gets activated. It is only some time later that the thinking part of the brain, the cerebral cortex, gets activated. In normies, the hippocampus does its job correctly and the cerebral cortex gets activated right away to begin to process the stress and deal constructively and successfully with it. You may be wondering why we have this mechanism in our brain that functions in a way that bypasses thought. It is essentially to keep us from falling down all the time. If every time you tripped on an uneven place in the sidewalk you had to take time to think what to do to regain your balance, you would end up on the pavement every time. The world would be needing a lot more chiropractors. There is no time for the relatively slow process of thinking and deciding. So the amygdala and the hippocampus do their jobs and keep us safe. But somehow in childhood trauma they get messed up. The amygdala becomes over active and the hippocampus doesn't filter very well. Maybe it becomes conditioned to err on the side of filtering too little to avoid filtering something that actually was a danger.

The point of this story is that our reactivity first reaches consciousness when we feel something going on in our bodies. We feel sensations that are like what we felt when something bad happened before. We feel these sensations and we have thoughts in response to the sensations and not the other way around. But we act as if it were the other way around because at other times that also happens, i.e. we have thoughts and those lead to feelings that then produce sensations in our body. In reactivity, the sensations occur first, we experience them and then we interpret them. Our tendency is to assume that we are feeling the emotion that corresponds with the bodily sensations that we are having. If our body is doing a "slow burn" then we tend to assume that our cerebral cortex is also, i.e. that we are mad. If our body is feeling queasy then we think that our mind is also, i.e. that we are scared. And so on.

So when I recommend questioning our reactivity, I am saying to not assume that our bodily sensations are a true reflection of our thoughts and emotions. Instead of telling ourselves that we must be scared or angry or sad or whatever because our body is feeling thus and so, we should tell ourselves that we have probably been triggered. We should start wondering what has triggered us and exploring the connections between whatever happened and our trauma histories. This will give us a great many more options besides just being reactive. And of course then we will be able to have a much better outcome as being reactive almost always produces a bad outcome unless we are in real immediate danger, e.g. jumping out of the way of a bus.

Okay well I didn't say anything about questioning another person's reactivity. I guess we'll save that for a later writing.

Desired Outcome:
To learn to recognize reactivity as such, to question it and to redirect our behavior whenever we are triggered into a reactive sequence.

Discussion Starters:·

• Do I see how my reactivity has taken me into behaviors that I have regretted?What are the sources in my history of my particular forms of reactivity?

• How aware am I of my bodily sensations when I'm being reactive? How could I make myself more aware?

• How aware am I of the interpretations that I give to my bodily sensations? How could I be more aware of these?

• In what other ways might I be able to break this sequence of reactivity?

• What mnemonic devices might I use to help remind me to question my reactivity?

John C Flanagan, LCSW
818 NW 17th Avenue, Suite 7
Portland, OR 97209-2327
503-228-7574
www.johncflanaganlcsw.com

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