The Amygdala, Fear and Energy Psychology – Contemplations on a Neuroscientist’s Blog
In a 2015 blog titled “The Amygdala Is NOT the Brain's Fear Center”, neuroscientist Joseph Ledoux laments that the amygdala has “gone from an obscure area of the brain to practically a household word, one that has come to be synonymous with ‘fear’.” He goes on to say, “It is not a scientific finding but instead a conclusion based on an interpretation of a finding. “
In my opinion, what Ledoux goes on to describe fits very well with the experience of treating people with energy psychology. More on this in a moment.
Ledoux says that the conscious feeling of fear is not the same thing as the non-conscious detection of threats and control of the body’s reactions to that threat. The amygdala is responsible for the latter, but it does not by itself produce the emotion of fear. Ledoux describes a much more complex process that underlies the construction of the feeling of fear. It includes attention, perception, memory, arousal, appraisal and so on.
What does this have to do with energy psychology? Whether TFT, TAT or EFT are employed, the usual experience for someone being treated for trauma is that, after a few rounds of treatment, the client who had a fear level of “9” thinks of the event and for "some strange reason" no longer feels in danger. The fear is gone. This has nothing to do with changing the client’s logic or cognitive appraisal. The detection of threat is removed and mobilization of the body to deal with the threat ceases.
Think about someone who is freaked out by a flashback or traumatic memory. They consciously know it is in the past. You can tell them there is no danger. Does this help? Not really. The sense of danger wells up from the body/unconscious. Ledoux is absolutely correct; the emotion of fear is a constructed event that includes components from the amygdala, namely the detection of threat and the body’s mobilization response to that threat. But from where does the threat come?
In PTSD the threat comes from an internal memory! The person keeps reacting to the memories (conscious or unconscious) as if they are current, as if the threat is current. None of this is conscious. The person has negative reactions without really understanding why. The memories themselves (both conscious and unconscious) become conditioned as dangerous. It is as if the amygdala fails to know the difference between a real outside danger and the internal memory of past outside danger.
When we use energy psychology, one thing that appears to occur is that the amygdala is no longer detecting threat from the memory. No threat, no response, no fear. This also makes sense with what I have been saying about polyvagal theory. And it fits in with memory reconsolidation theory and energy psychology.
The clarification that Ledoux makes strengthens the argument that energy psychology shuts down limbic responses at a sub-cortical level. Energy psychology works to shut down the non-conscious perception of threat and the subsequent body reactions, eliminating the precursors to fear.
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Author
Robert Schwarz, PsyD, DCEP, has been a licensed psychologist for over 33 years. He served as ACEP's executive director for over 17 years. Bob has trained therapists internationally on trauma treatment, panic and anxiety, energy psychology. He has organized over 25 conferences on energy psychology trauma treatment, Ericksonian hypnosis, brief therapy, that trained over 18,000 therapists. He has authored 3 books, including: Tools for Transforming Trauma, PTSD: A Clinician’s Guide and We’re No Fun Anymore: Guiding Couples to a Joy Filled Marriage Through the Power of Play, as well as numerous articles and papers including "Energy psychology as a polyvagal intervention for trauma."
