“Stop running after the effects of your mistakes and sit down on the kerb.
Watch life coming”.-
Zsorian Arkäin
The mystery of Euribor, the crises and climate change
In 2007, a woman whom we will call Veronica came to my consulting room with a severe anxiety attack. She was 40 years old, married and had three children, boys all of them. Her lifestyle was a typical example of well-off middle-upper class. An owner of several properties and businesses, she had a degree in architecture although she worked as a manager in one of her businesses.
Veronica felt tormented and terribly scared by the unstoppable Euribor raise taking place at that moment, which the media strongly cared to broadcast in rather counterhomepathic doses. This raised her anxiety to the roof because she was afraid of not being able to pay the mortgage on her house and of ending up having to sell her properties in the best case scenario, or sleeping on the streets under cardboard in the worst.
We started psycho-therapeutic work jumping between previous story and present moment, as I always do.[1] This led us to unveil a very striking abandonment experience that she steadily experienced in her childhood. That connection helped her to understand some issues that were taking place in her present reality and to manage her anxiety level till she was able to lead a normal life, despite of which she decided to continue with the therapeutic work and to go deeper into what her subconscious was revealing. The “economic slowdown” begun shortly after and ended up being a systemic breakdown in which we are still immersed, greatly destabilizing her again. In a session that took place when the crisis was already up to its old tricks, Veronica made a very interesting remark. She had completely forgotten Euribor for weeks now, in fact, she hadn’t bothered to calculate it or to keep updated of its state. Nevertheless, her recent obsession was the crisis. She found her forgetting strange and pointed out that she had felt the same distress about climate change ten years ago. At that moment, she stopped, looked me thoroughly in the eye and asked about the meaning of this quiz. What was the relationship between her distress about Euribor, the crisis and climate change? And why was she jumping from one to the other?
A complex system in constant interaction with the environment: The human being
The management and control of the own emotion is the main aspect to work on in the psycho-therapeutic processes that I conduct. If a person doesn’t master their emotions and their energy, any other aspect becomes worthless, as the human being is, above all things, an emotional being.
From my conception, I understand that people develop through the limits imposed by the four main axles that give us structure, form and meaning: body, mind, energy and emotion. These four human realities are only a fractal reflection of the intelligent energy forces that interwove in this frequency tangle we call reality and which take possession in their tingling micro-macro-cosmic dance of what stands between heaven and earth: us.
In line with this hypothesis, I will establish two assertions. The first one is not a subject for this article but it would go about the human being as an expression and alter ego that is penetrated and conditioned by that intelligent energy. The second less abstract one, establishes that those four dimensions function as a complex system in constant intercommunication, in such a way that the emotion that results from the subject meeting an stimulus, internal or external, will reflect on the other three. If the emotion were ink, body, mind and energy would be the books it is printed on.
This complex system can only function and live healthy if its four components coexist in a harmonious relationship between them and with themselves (and consequently with the environment in which it lives). This means that any internal or external experience that may provoke, for example, a sufficiently significant emotional impact on the subject, will be reflected on the body and/or on the mind and/or on the subject’s energy field and can end up causing an organic symptomatology despite its emotional origin. Thus, I understand that any symptom and illness remains a sign that warns us of a loss of harmony and balance in the global system. This concept let us think of healing as a process of integral bio-psycho-energetic-emotional recovery. For instance, an asthma attack can be an organic reflection of a stressful situation experienced by the person at that moment, which they can’t solve functionally. Faced to this fact, the person as a global system absorbs and manages the residual stress transforming it into an organic symptom. We shouldn’t forget that the symptom is the person’s more or less desperate attempt to recover the highest level of balance possible.
This example points at the need for another explanation concerning the reason why an emotional conflict is somatised as an asthma attack. In this sense, two clear notions should be taken into account, the notion of terrain and the notion of triggering event. Thus, depending on each person’s biography, a bio-psycho-energetic-emotional terrain is generated that will enhance the possibilities of a conflict experience being absorbed through the body, the mind or the energy field. It is known that certain character structures have a higher possibility of suffering from, let’s say, cardiovascular diseases or autoimmune degenerative processes.
Our story and that of our family line is written in our body, our psyche and our energy vibration. And all this shapes our terrain. Starting from that, the way we process and interact with the subjectively perceived reality is what will display experiences before us that may transform or block us, letting us degenerate with a wide variety of symptoms. These blocking experiences are knows as triggering events.
Emotion surfers
In the film “One”, one of the interviewed explains the following sequence: your thoughts become your words, your words become your actions. A sequence of actions establishes your habits, and character emerges from those habits. Culture is established on character.
In the world of psychology, it is generally accepted that thoughts are the first piece that starts the cascade of actions in the world, so that if we were able to control our thoughts, we would be able to control the mechanism that allows us to function in a healthy or pathological way as individuals or as a group. Nevertheless, I think that there is a previous link to the thoughts which is emotion. Let me explain.
I agree with what we say that we generate reality through our thoughts and that believing is creating, but only to a certain extent. Human beings don’t really create anything; they simply receive and perceive something that is there, in the ether, so to speak. And by ether, we mean the wide energy spectrum that human beings can’t access through their five senses. From the energy point of view, human beings have a triple basic device necessary for their development, being two of its parts the abdominal ganglion and the brain[2].
The human brain, “divided” into its two hemispheres, is actually an antenna that receives the ether’s energy frequencies and symbolically represents them in a comprehensible language for the person, according to the symbolic codes in which they have been socialized. On the other hand, the abdominal ganglion, seat of emotions, is the one swinging to orientate the antenna, thus receiving one frequency or another. The more harmonious the emotion is, the closer it is to pleasure, the more integrated will be the reception and the opener the brain, which will operate in a more integrated way as an antenna and have more possibilities to connect to higher frequencies and expansive, creative and evolutionary thoughts. The closer it is to fear, tension and isolation, the schizoider the brain functioning will be and the more resistant, destructive and reactionary the reception of thoughts will be.
This way, emotion attracts thoughts, which unleash the cascade of actions, habits, characters and cultures, as we have seen in the previous sequence. The difference between Gandhi and Hitler, and the cultures both passed on to human evolution, was not in their individual abilities and potential but in their emotional biographies. It was their emotional experiences from the very moment of their conception what created the path for their actions to follow and their ideologies to materialize.
Why do we have the best informed young generation about the consequences of tobacco and consumption of other drugs and why is it the generation that the earliest and most massively uses them? It is not the cognitive information, the thinking, what chooses the using or not. It is the quality of the emotional environment in which they grew up what favours the action in one sense or the other. We shouldn’t forget that self-esteem is an experience acquired from the feeling of being love and important, not from the mental preparation and the verbal repetition of a series of well-intentioned slogans without any experiential and, therefore, emotional substrate. Knowledge is always experienced emotion.
Thus, in the conception of the human being as a complex organic system of four interacting dimensions, we will establish that energy is the necessary and essential fuel that penetrates and unites everything, making it work. Nothing of what we humans do is neutral. There is always an emotion as the sound track of what we experience. If we don’t feel it, it is because we don’t pay attention to it, not because it isn’t there. Human beings are emotional beings, without emotions they simply aren’t.
Likewise, “we become what we contemplate”, being emotion the wave on which humans, reality surfers, take impulse to reach the destiny our eyes aim at, encouraged by sublimated or reactive desire. What has materialized in our existence is what shows how we have been. And likewise, we move to where we look at, what renders the ecosystem around us and its whole sensory display (tactile, audible, visual, olfactory, etc.) an indispensable, and very conditioning cooker of our development. Everything and everyone is connected. From the womb to the tomb, the emotions caused by the intention of my actions interact with those of the ones that surround me, crystallising in a specific reality among all infinite possibilities. That is why it becomes vital to cultivate a culture of exquisiteness and good manners towards oneself and others, same as any discipline can be cultivated.
Emotions and feelings. They seem to be the same but they aren’t.
At this point, I think it is indispensable to give a brief but completely necessary clarification: emotions and feelings are not the same. Since giving a definition of emotion is as absurd to me as to try and explain what energy is, I’ll just list its manifestations, which are five in my view: joy, sadness, aggressiveness, worry and anxiety.
Although all cultures and human groups label them as good or bad, all are necessary to the human being. We can’t do without any of them because they play an indispensable role in their evolution: they shape the vital device that, as a compass, points to the North, taken up by the emotion of joy or pleasure. However incredible it might seem, the human being is basically a pleasure generating factory, being pleasure the aim to which they are pointed to. The natural state of a person should be one of joy, calm, concentration and creativity. And if you find it hard to believe, just watch a small child for a while, one who has his or her basic needs covered. He or she would be kind, tender, happy, calm and focused on what he or she is interested in[3]. We feel connected and brighten up by pleasure, through which we create the best version of ourselves. And that is what emotions are there for, since any time we get off the course that does us good, we suffer from worry, anxiety, sadness or aggressiveness, which carry inside the right mechanism to redirect the person through actions and thoughts till they regain balance (experienced as joy and pleasure). We shouldn’t forget that life is precisely that: consecutive states of balance and crisis. Thus, as Alan Watts masterly pictures in “The Wisdom of Insecurity”, let’s not run away from suffering, but be wise enough to use it in our favour by facing it.
For all these reasons, I establish the natural sequence of human behaviour as follows[4]: feel, reflect, act (or inhibit action) to act again, and so forth. When an experience is interpreted as disturbing by the person, they generate a flight-or-fight response (the latter being typical of aggressiveness), formed by specific thoughts and actions (a kind of restructuring of the energy pattern). If the response is adaptive, either because the subject understood and adapted to the situation or because the situation was transformed by the subject, balance is regained and joy and pleasure with it. If the response, however, is not adaptive, it will continue to be a flight-or-fight response (aggressiveness, uneasiness, anxiety) until a favourable solution for the subject is reached. If this response never came, a new situation would take place in which the emotion would get stuck and transform into tension and irritation, triggering a mutation from emotion to feeling. Thus, i.e., when aggressiveness[5] doesn’t achieve its aim and is held over time, it loses the function it appeared for and mutates into a feeling of anger whose only aim is to get some relaxation through expressing itself. For example, if I don’t use the energy I get out of my aggressiveness to defend myself and I freeze and submit myself before the aggression of a stranger[6], selflessly assuming an unfair and damaging situation, my aggressiveness is held back and transforms itself into an internal anger that will try to express itself in a more or less controlled way through the most viable means available. This escape can be the referee’s mother in a soccer match, my partner, the beggar in the cash dispenser (in extreme cases), but also an anxiety attack, an incipient depression, a skin rash or the beginning of a night bruxism, just to mention some possible effects. That is, aggressiveness transformed into anger seeks solution and extinction jumping up against something or someone outside or against oneself. Therefore, all human groups provide an outlet to underlying anger by means of social elements such as the ones previously pointed out, through which the expression of that feeling is permitted[7]. And that is also why many suicides are perverted expression acts of non-expressed anger.
Therefore, feelings are mutations of emotions, or in other words, materializations of each person’s emotional biography. Not every feeling is necessary, a double categorisation can be established according to its being desirable or undesirable, its helping us grow and expand towards new realities or, on the contrary, its keeping us immobile, paralysed, in hieratic colder, slower and more and more contracted living space-times[8]. The more joy there is in my life, the more I nurture feelings as love, solidarity, generosity, assertiveness, among many others. The less joy, the more other feelings appear, such as for example, fear, anger, revenge, longing or grudge. In light of this, we can clearly establish that ideologies are the result of nurtured feelings, which means that human beings don’t choose anything but just say yes or no to what life displays in front of us. We are the only animal with the power to accept or reject what we experience.
The saurian, the feline and the wise sit under a cherry blossom.
Before solving Veronica’s enigma, I would like to introduce some last ideas I consider to be important to round up this explanation on the human emotional world as I conceive and apply it.
I think it is important to describe the human brain architecture from a physiological point of view. It is supported by three main, clearly differentiated but interconnected and integrated structures: the reticular formation and the striatum, the limbic system and the neocortex. We could say that our brain is composed by three brains, which are the reptilian, the mammal and the human brain, respectively.
The reptilian brain, composed by the reticular formation and the striatum, is the orchestra conductor during pregnancy and the first weeks of life outside the womb. It is also “residence of the individual and species’ survival behaviours. It generates automatic and invariable behaviours that don’t offer a great adaptive capacity when faced with change. The striatum takes part in the behaviours specific to the species (instincts): territory, hunting, etc. (….) The reptilian brain is said to preserve the ancestral archetypal emotions and develops fully in the embryonic phase, registering the experiences of the developing organism from the sixth pregnancy week on.”[9]
The limbic or paleo-mammalian system is seat of emotions, motivations, language and memory, being specific to mammalian species. It is the dominant brain from the first weeks after birth until the age of 7-9, when the neocortex reaches its full performance and thus taking over its managing and integrating function.
Finally, the neocortex is the brain that allows us all the functions based on abstract thinking, such as empathy, visualisation of situations and objects, logic and mathematic operations, anticipation of action effects, etc.
According to this architecture, we must be conscious that our brain development makes us first saurians, secondly mammals and last and luckily humans. Therefore, in us there are a reptile, a feline and a wise person living together in more or less harmony. Thus, our development as individuals points at us first acting and then thinking during our first nine years of life. That is, we are primal and impulsive beings, because our ability to meta-relate with reality through the neocortex isn’t fully operational yet. However, after a certain age, the process must be gradually inverted so that in the pre-adolescence, we are finally able to think before acting, so becoming masters of our emotions[10]. In early years, such impulsive behaviours are normal, as long as the tendency is gradually reduced over the years.
Thus, reality becomes a kind of “game” or “play” that allows me to cultivate one of these two ways: the reptilian/mammal one[11] or the human one. According to the self-consciousness degree and the intention that I place in each one of my decisions, even in the most insignificant one, they become a sort of coins that I can put one by one into either of both piggy-banks, the reptilian and the human one. The first one, steered by the amygdala[12], produces tension and is subject of fear, which we know to be that parasite that feeds on fast, on our secrecy, isolation, passiveness and victimhood. The second one, which grows in what is slow and flexible, is steered by the neocortex, and produces understanding and expansion. It is daughter of trust, openness, connection and of active and responsible attitudes. Whenever we are reptiles, we live imprisoned in our mind and our thoracic respiration under the auspices of the nostalgia for the past and the fear for the future. Whenever we are humans, we slide on reality breathing abdominally, focused on the present moment and the senses, with no distractions of the mind, which is only used as a tool to imagine possibilities.
The resolution to the enigma
According to everything previously explained, we can conclude why Veronica was so distressed by climate change, Euribor and the crisis. What was the cause of her anxiety attacks? How was her symptomatology to be solved? In fact, her anxiety attack was due to her being distressed for a long time, that is, her fear had grown so much and had generated such a rich terrain that she only needed a source to focus her attention to let that historic fear “incarnate”. She could lead a normal life as long as her fear, which was fed back according to her management of daily life, stayed within the “standard” and known levels that she was familiar with. In the very moment that a specific situation contained a trace of fear, the dam, barely contained till then, overflowed and drained excessive emotional fuel through an anxiety attack that made her a victim of impulsiveness and let her experience reality in the same way as when she was 4 years old, more or less when the information pattern that still applies was set (by the fear due to a lack of safety when she wasn’t emotionally contained by her attachment figures).
Hence, Veronica’s work had to go through four phases. The most urgent to achieve was an immediate reduction of her distress level, for which there were two options: a series of energy and neuromuscular, non-aggressive techniques or, if they were not successful, medication under medical supervision. Once this was achieved, it was necessary that she understood the reasons why that behaviour pattern carried such a weight and applied to that extent in her present moment. This would give her perspective and allow her to try out formulas and ways more in line with her adult age. The third step was to strengthen her inner self, to bring it to its full swing. This was necessary in order to her being able, in the fourth and last work step, to face the situations that caused her to panic so that the linking of a series of successful confrontations would instil a sentiment of trust in her.
Indeed, as long as work progressed and the distress feeling was exorcised, her symptomatology lost weight and presence. This is why I never fight the symptom when someone comes to me. I always respect it. I understand it as a manifestation of something deeper. It is useless to cut down a tree’s branch, it’s better to dry out its roots.
A brief conclusion
In line with what was set out in this article, I think it is important to be aware that we are the expression of a lived story which largely influences us. However, to be influenced doesn’t mean to be determined, so there is a wide margin for hope and action.
In my practice, I always say that there are only two things that can destroy us as beings: victimhood and passiveness. Anything else is avoidable. Notwithstanding, if I am not determined to have an active and responsible attitude and to take in hand what is happening to me, what I am experiencing, there is neither future nor evolution for me.
We are so used to live in fear that we aren’t aware of a terrible truth: we are in fact apostles of and addicted to bad vibes, what demands enormous discipline and great tenacity. No one is able to easily destroy their life. In fact, there are so many positive elements around us that going down requires a great deal of work and to strictly cultivate a lifestyle based on negativity, contraction and tension.
Growing, evolving and having a good life is hard. And it is a way of being in the world, being responsible for how we nourish our body, our energy, our mind and our emotion. It is absurd not to realize that stopping to cultivate good vibes inevitably means to cultivate bad vibes. In this case, there is no middle path. The good thing about cultivating the first is that it feels good, is cheap and very pleasant.
[1]I maintain that 80% of the actions we undertake in our daily life are in fact only an almost mechanical repetition of information patterns (emotional, relational and cognitive) that we learnt during the first 7-8 years of our lives in the first big human laboratory, the family; and this being lucky. These patterns are stereotyped and unconscious response behaviours that, once learnt in the first years of existence, are automatically replicated by the subject when faced to situations that he or she interprets to be similar to those lived at the time when those patterns were learnt. The deactivation of these information patterns necessarily requires the level of understanding that its acquisition had at the instant of its origin.
[2] More specifically the corpus callosum.
[3] Those children with an attention deficit condition should be called by their real name: suffering children. A “label” like that has the problem of placing the conflict outside the child, stopping them from being actors and making them victims of their adults’ world. And I am not necessarily referring to their parents……
[4] I thank you very much, Zsorian Arkäin, for such a simple and brilliant synthesis.
[5] It is a defensive response of the organism that provides the subject with an extra plus of energy that allows them to face and go through a situation that is perceived as threatening or disturbing.
[6] Let’s imagine that I have been taught to “always do whatever the authority says (father, teacher, police, boss)” no matter how unfair and humanly reprehensible.
[7] Which additionally leads to its members not questioning the established social order.
[8] We already know that what doesn’t evolve, degenerates, and that fear is death.
[9] Analogous translation from The Biology of Emotions by Jean Didier Vincent. Ed. Anagrama.
[10] Do we guide the horse to get where we want or are we victims of the animal’s vagaries?
[11] From now on, I will only refer to this way as the reptilian one.
[12] What a curious organ, placed in the depth of the temporal lobes.