Mayan Legacy

The crucial importance of emotions. I

- Primacy of emotions

Our emotions are forms of immediate experience.
When we experience our emotions, we are in direct contact with our physical reality.

Because our emotions are forms of energy are therefore physical and expressed in the body even before we are aware of them.

We can distinguish nine innate emotions (interest, joy, surprise, distress, fear, anger, shame, nausea and disgust) that manifest themselves in facial expressions. Every child is born with these terms "pre-programmed" in your facial muscles and researchers have shown that anywhere in the world, in any culture, identifies these emotions in the same way. They are basic communications biologically need to survive.

Growing up, the emotions are the basic mindset to think, act and make decisions. Emotions are something like our innate biological motivating. They are "the energy that moves us" as fuel for cars. Intensify and extend our lives. Without emotion, nothing really matters, with emotion, everything can import.

When the emotion that accompanies a traumatic experience crashes, the mind can not evaluate or integrate that experience. When emotional energy blocks trauma resolution, mind decreases its ability to function. Over the years, the mind is diminished more and more, and that blocking intensifies the emotional energy every time it happens a similar experience.

Whenever we have a new experience,
and that somehow resembles the original trauma,
felt with an intensity that is disproportionate
with what is actually happening.
It is a spontaneous regression.

Our wounded inner child is full of unresolved energy that comes from the sadness of a childhood trauma. One of the reasons we feel sadness is to complete the painful events of the past, so that we can have our energy for the present.
When not allowed to complain, this energy is frozen.

- Emotions repressed

Because emotions are energy, demand that they express. Children from dysfunctional families often have no allies, no one to whom they can express their emotions.

Then, they express the only way they know: "exteriorizándolas" or "interiorizándolas". The sooner you repress, these emotions become more destructive.

The unexpressed and unresolved emotions is to regard the "original pain". This work involves re-experiencing those traumas and express repressed emotions, which, once done, will not have to externalize or internalize anymore.

- The anxiety and the brain

Today we are beginning to understand the defenses of I based on the investigation of brain chemistry and physiology. "Release" or "off" the defenses of the I, (main activity of good psychotherapy) allows us to connect with our oldest emotions.

The original pain work produces a feeling those healing by allowing unresolved emotions from the past. But why does it cure?

The neurologist MacLean has presented a model of the brain that helps us understand how we affect trauma. According to him, the brain consists of three parts, or three brains within the brain that are part of our evolutionary heritage.

The more primitive reptilian brain or visceral. Contains our most primitive strategy for safety and survival: repetition. A lizard, for example, has a pretty simple life consists of traveling the same road every day, waiting to eat a few flies and mosquitoes without you eat it. If you find a wise way in the weeds and rocks will repeat until his death.
This repetition has survival value. The visceral brain also maintains automatic physical functions of our body, like breathing. We might conjecture that our "lizard" appear when we live for the first time with someone and our old habits collide with the other person.

The following is the brain paleomammalian, or sensory. Technically called the limbic system. When warm-blooded mammals reached the evolutionary scenario, emotional energy was born. The limbic system contains the feelings of arousal, pleasure, anger, fear, sadness, joy, shame, disgust and nausea.

The most sophisticated of our brain is the neocortex, or rational brain. The latter evolved more or less two million years. It gives us the human capacity to reason, use language, plan ahead, solve complex problems, etc..

According to MacLean, these three brains are independent, but at the same time working together (interdependent) to maintain the balance of the whole brain. The balance system of the brain is driven by the need to maintain the minimum pain disorders.

The brain has no problem with occasional disruption of life. Use the expression of emotions for balance. When our anxiety reaches a certain degree, we shout in anger, sad cry or sweat and tremble with fear. Scientists have shown that tears actually suppress stress chemicals that form during an emotional disorder.

The brain naturally tend toward equilibrium through the expression of emotion, unless we have been taught to inhibit it.

- The mark of the first trauma

The sooner inhibit emotions, the deeper the damage. There is increasing evidence that there is a sequence in individual maturation of the brain that basically follows the evolutionary sequence.

Scientists have confirmed that neurologists visceral brain predominates in the later stages of pregnancy and early postnatal stage.

The limbic brain system begins to operate during the first six months of life. This emotional brain allows the creation of the first important links.

The neocortex is still developing during the first year, and the rational brain, in addition to time, you need an environment and adequate incentives to develop healthily.

When we reflect on the fact that the visceral brain is associated with impaired survival and is governed by repetition, the idea makes sense permanent imprint. Traumatic memories are difficult to eradicate because they are reminders of survival responses.

As the brain learns and remembers visceral but not forgotten, prints the trauma with a permanence that will dominate the future. Everything a child experiences during the latter stages of pregnancy or in the first years of his life-time of a marked vulnerability-will remain etched in your mind for the benefit of their survival.

- The repetition compulsion

Neurological research supports what all psychotherapists, from Freud to today, know for sure: neurotic people have the urge to repeat.

There is also a neurological explanation for disproportionate responses aforementioned reactions. Neural brands intensified by stressful experiences deform the body's reaction to a stimulus. The continuous print painful experiences new circuits in the brain, so that it becomes more prepared to recognize as painful stimulus what another person would not recognize as such.

This confirms the theory that once the inner material is established during pregnancy (for any stressful or traumatic passing through the mother) or in early childhood, acts as an extremely sensitive filter shaping subsequent events. The wounded child contaminations fall into this category. When an adult with an injured child faces a situation that resembles a prototypical painful event activates the original answer.

We can compare with a megaphone with ignition key locked. It reacts with strong emotion to something that is actually quite trivial or innocuous. It responds to what does not exist on the outside because it is on the inside.

Excerpt from Back to home. John Bradshaw