"Why do I do that?": Pattern Matching & Emotional Triggers
An excerpt from Chapter 7 of "Thaw - Freedom from Frozen Feelings"
The following is taken from Chapter Seven of my book, “Thaw - Freedom from Frozen Feelings”
Growing up on the battleground of a moderate-to-severely dysfunctional family keeps a child on ‘high alert’. They are so focused on survival, self-protection, and physical/emotional safety that they rarely have time to settle into just being a kid. When they do let their guard down and relax into their childhood a new incident occurs, which reinforces the need to remain hyper-vigilant. This constant level of alertness keeps the stress response (fight-flight-or-freeze) turned on at the ready. As we will see, living in such an intense state of awareness is fertile ground for the creation of deeply ingrained patterns of behavior known as survival skills.
Pattern Matching
A little over 100,000 years ago a lone hunter made his way across the savanna looking for food. It was a beautiful day. The sun was shining. The skies were blue with white, puffy clouds, and a gentle breeze was blowing. The hunter noticed that off to the left, out of the corner of his eye. A bush moved... The next thing he knew he was being chased by a saber-toothed tiger... Somehow he managed to get away.
About 30 days later the same hunter was out in the savanna again looking for food. However, this time he brought several of his friends with him... They made sure to go 30 miles in the opposite direction of where the tiger was last time. As the hunting party walked along it was a beautiful day... the sun was shining... the skies were blue with white, puffy clouds... and a gentle breeze was blowing. Then, off to the left, a bush moved...The hunter’s friends turned around just in time to see him duck behind a tree about a hundred yards away.
In just one very intense experience, the close call he had with that tiger had been "burned into his neural matrix" as a warning system to avoid getting eaten in the future. All of the elements of that first experience were there – the blue skies... the white puffy clouds... the gentle breeze... the beautiful day... the wetlands... the moving bush. All of these elements joined together in the proper sequence signaled the imminent probability of being eaten by a saber-toothed tiger.
We are born with three basic survival systems encoded on neural networks, wired into a specific location near the reward center of the brain. In The Craving Brain, by Ruden and Byalick, these systems are the instinct to “Eat” (triggered by hunger), “Don’t Get Eaten”, aka Fight-Flight-or-Freeze instinct (triggered by anxiety), and the instinct to “Procreate” (triggered by sexual arousal).
This hunter’s "Don't Get Eaten" survival system instantly and subconsciously triggered a flight response resulting in a powerful jolt of anxiety and a need to find safety – right NOW! This is an example of a mechanism the brain uses in order to learn from experience. It’s called pattern matching (also known as classic conditioning).
Intensity & Repetition
There are two primary mechanisms that signal the brain to encode new learning into its neural networks – they are intensity & repetition. The hunter’s run-in with the tiger was so intense it resulted in one-trial
learning. All the sensory elements of that experience were instantly encoded into the Don’t Get Eaten neural circuitry of the brain after only one experience. Other, less intense experiences take more repetitions in order to be encoded as new learning. The less intense the experience, the more times it must be repeated in order to be encoded into the neural networks of long-term memory.
Learning to read is a good example. We started out learning to mouth one-syllable words or sounds and, with repetition, we got better at it. Then we added two and three syllables to form more complex words. When we could say our first word, everyone around us reacted very positively, which triggered the reward circuits of the brain adding intensity to repetition. The intensity of the positive reinforcement combined with the repetition creates a synergistic effect. Eventually, we learned the alphabet, then spelling, then reading, and later we learned grammar and syntax. All of these “learnings” now belong to the category of language. Whenever we learn something new about language, the information updates the implicit database (or neural network) of language making it larger and more sophisticated.
This is why the more we learn, the easier it is to learn. It would be pretty discouraging to have to re-learn the alphabet every time we wanted to read a book. Without our automatic pattern-matching abilities, we would be unable to learn. Furthermore, as seen with the example of the hunter and saber-toothed tiger, we might not have survived as a race. Knowing even a little about pattern matching and the role of intensity and repetition in learning makes it easier to understand how the survival skills we learn in a dysfunctional family system are the natural, logical, and creative outcomes of adapting to the environment in which we live.
Emotionally traumatic experiences are very intense. Take, for example, defending your country at war. Active combat is incredibly intense. The military knows this, so they want to do everything they can to prepare their soldiers quickly. They know that intensity “burns new learning into your brain” so they have a very intense person called a Drill Instructor (DI) be your teacher. The neural networks for survival at war time have to become automatic very quickly so the DI adds repetition to intensity to step up the training process they call “boot camp." Once boot camp is over the neural networks for survival are in place, and the soldier gets deployed. The battlefield or “theater” as it is now called, is even more intense, so all of those sights, sounds, smells, tastes, memories, and experiences get burned into the brain too. The neural networks created in basic training become even more ingrained and sophisticated through the intensity and repetition of the battlefield; so much so that Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) often results.
Unauthorized Networks
Every time we have a new significantly intense experience the brain does a database search for similar experiences and encodes the sensory elements of the new experience in the same “category” or neural network. So, our natural pattern-matching ability is the basis for all sorts of phobias and panic disorders such as the saber-toothed tiger example described above. For example, all it takes is one intensely frightening experience with a spider to develop a spider phobia.
Seeing a spider = freaking out
Reading the word ‘spider’ = freaking out
Feeling something on the skin that could be a spider = that’s right.
Pattern matching is also responsible for cravings and relapses back into addictions after a period of recovery. For example, hearing a bell could trigger someone addicted to gambling to feel the urge to go to the track to put a bet down on his favorite horse. Just reading the word "chocolate" can trigger an urge to find and eat some chocolate.
Returning to our analogy of a moderate-to-severely dysfunctional family as a battleground; to a small child sleeping in her bed at night, isn’t suddenly hearing mom slamming dishes on the floor while screaming at the top of her lungs, or dad punching holes in the front door while yelling obscenities at mom just as intense as an exploding roadside bomb is to a real soldier? You bet it is. And it can have the same impact if it occurs repeatedly – a mild, moderate, or severe form of PTSD.
The emotional wounding process may be much more subtle than the above example. A child may be forced to wear a pretty dress, with white gloves, and patent-leather shoes all day, every day. She may be allowed to “…go outside, but sit on the porch and don’t get dirty!” by a parent who likes the accolades of having such a well-behaved, presentable child – an example of Impression Management rather than healthy parenting. Alternatively, a child may not be allowed to have his feelings or opinions. The unwritten rules might be “Don’t feel," “Don’t trust," or “Don’t talk” – in other words, “Don’t be you!” or “Don’t be different than me!” or “Be who I want you to be.”
Frozen Feeling-States
When these kinds of experiences occur early in life, while a child is negotiating the delicate and complicated tasks associated with normal developmental stages, there is a deviation from “normal” development. The child has to learn sophisticated methods of self-protection called survival skills. The child has no one to rely on to accomplish this learning except their own instinct to survive – i.e., pattern matching and the fight-flight-or-freeze response. These survival skills are learned behaviors that are encoded in the neural circuitry of our brain. They help the child to adapt to the dysfunctional patterns, cycles, and rules of the family.
Information that gets encoded into our brain falls into two primary categories; information having to do with self-preservation (survival) and information having to do with self-actualization (growth). The information having to do with survival is more difficult to access and update than information having to do with growth. One reason for this is that the latter is in a constant state of flux as new learning is occurring daily. This growth-oriented information is stored in the higher cortical regions of the brain, i.e., the “thinking brain." Survival-oriented data is stored in the deeper emotional and visceral regions where it is immediately accessible to all the structures of the brain responsible for the fight-flight-or-freeze response. The survival systems of the brain are more difficult to update for another reason – the prime directive of the brain is self-preservation. Everything else is deemed less important than that – including growth.
Once a survival skill or experience is learned it becomes tagged as valuable data and must be protected. Think of it as being encoded in an especially secure area of the brain where there is a firewall around it so that hackers can’t get in and change or delete a pattern that may make the difference between life and death. So the survival skills that are learned by a child growing up in a dysfunctional family are rooted in a protected, hard-to-update area of the brain – immediately accessible to all the structures responsible for the fight-flight-or-freeze response.
One of those structures is the amygdala, the part of the “emotional brain” that is responsible for tagging an incoming experience with feelings. When an incoming experience is similar to that of a previous experience that has been categorized as a threat or danger the amygdala sounds an alarm by charging the new experience with fear, anxiety, and/or anger – the feeling-states of the fight-or-flight response. A momentary freeze may occur because the brain needs a second to evaluate the incoming data in order to choose which feeling state to create if any at all. The chosen feeling state is then followed by an automatic behavioral response – i.e., fight or flight.
Now remember that children in a moderate-to-severely dysfunctional family are like prisoners of war – the younger they are the less able they are to outwardly fight back or flee. So when they encounter a new threat, they can get stuck in the freeze response for a lot longer than usual. The clinical term for this is dissociation – a process in which the child “zones out” or “goes somewhere else” in their mind while the mind takes care of the business at hand. During this time, the brain continues to process the incoming data, continues to trigger the alarms (increasing in intensity), and continues to search for an appropriate behavioral response. The pre-frontal cortex (thinking brain) comes to the rescue by devising a plan for how to deal with these experiences – creating a survival strategy. If the whole ordeal is intense enough, one-trial learning occurs in the same way as our example of the hunter and saber-toothed tiger. Sometimes the dissociation or “zoning out” or “going somewhere else” itself becomes the survival mechanism creating a dissociative “disorder” – which was, at the time it was created, actually a solution.
This is where what I refer to as frozen feeling states come into play. It is very important to recognize a couple of things. First, the survival skills that are burned into the most highly secure area of the brain as a result of intense, traumatic experiences are created by a child, with the mind of a child, the experience of a child, the understanding of a child, the physiology of a child, and with the only inner resources available to the child at that time. They are imprinted into the neural circuitry for survival in the same way as our friend the hunter.
Secondly, due to the repetition of these experiences and the intensity of hyper-arousal from an ongoing lack of safety, these imprinted survival circuits are reinforced and strengthened with each new similar occurrence – and these emotion-laden states are frozen in time, sometimes at several points in time! In other words, due to pattern matching and the way the brain encodes information related to self-preservation, all the elements of these survival strategies remain the same as the day they were imprinted including all the beliefs, physiology, behavioral responses, emotions, and sensory data (hear, see, feel, smell, taste) taken in by the child during the imprint experience, resulting in the creation of what I refer to as a frozen feeling-state.
Here is an example: A four-year-old boy is being severely abused in a very dark room and there is a strong smell of garlic present at the time. His mind represses that memory because it is much too intense for him to handle at four years old. Twenty-five years later that same person finds himself in a dark room with the scent of garlic hanging in the air. Suddenly, he is in the grip of a horrible panic. He feels as scared and vulnerable as a four-year-old boy, backs up against a wall, and hunkers down into a fetal position. There may be no images or other memories (it was dark); only the feelings, physiology and behavioral response, and a strong sense that he’s been here before. This is a clear-cut example of the frozen feeling state known as a “flashback."
Many people who grew up in a moderate-to-severely dysfunctional family had less clear-cut experiences on a more subtle level. If you have ever gotten into a fight with a significant other and afterward wondered how two grown adults could act so immature – you may have had a flashback. If you’ve ever felt childish after an argument with a coworker – you may have had a flashback. If you have ever felt scared and small after a scolding from your boss – you may have had a flashback. If you have a long history of stormy relationships fraught with such occurrences – you may have a form of PTSD. Indeed, if you are familiar with the cycles of abandonment, shame, contempt, and other patterns outlined in this book you're likely to have a moderate-to-severe form of PTSD known as Adult/Child Syndrome.
I understand Adult/Child Syndrome to be a condition where an adult who has grown up in the types of dysfunctional environments that produce the emotional wounds of abandonment, shame, and contempt is set up to experience the frequent triggering of frozen feeling-states that were imprinted as a natural, logical, and creative means of survival. These emotionally wounded people “live life in reaction” by acting out (Externalizing), or acting in (Internalizing) their wounds in their most significant relationships.
I also believe that this syndrome is at the root of most of the mental health, substance abuse, and interpersonal issues we see in people today whether it is addiction, codependency, obsessions & compulsions, treatment-resistant depression, anxieties and phobias, borderline personality disorder, anti-social personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, etc. Having said that, in my experience, the above complexes and conditions need to be identified, treated, and stabilized BEFORE one can address the underlying emotional wounds of Adult/Child Syndrome – i.e., abandonment, shame, and contempt.
All of these clinical syndromes are labels clinicians use to discuss clusters of symptoms. Many of these “symptoms” were once natural, logical, and creative “solutions” I have referred to herein as survival skills. They were born of the instinct for self-preservation, which takes priority over self-actualization (growth). If there is an attempt to remove a symptom-solution without taking into account the underlying emotional wounds – there will be resistance. We will discuss this when we look at the concept of homeostasis in Chapter Nine.