Unblocking The Frozen Energy Within Us All
How the Nervous System Keeps Us Stuck in the Same Patterns
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Shaking off the Stress 🦁
A lioness spots a group of gazelles. Launching into action, she locks her gaze on the slowest one of the pack. Her speed is no match for the gazelle and she quickly catches up to it, pouncing onto its back and bringing it to the ground. As the lioness sinks her teeth into its neck, the gazelle automatically activates an ancient defensive mechanism that leads to immobilization (“freeze and fawn”), and its body goes limp. It’s pretending to be dead.
The lioness, feeling that there is no risk of the gazelle escaping, loosens its grip on the gazelle's neck and drags it into the bushes. She lets go of the gazelle and goes off to call its cubs to share in the feast. In this moment of distraction, the gazelle seizes the opportunity. It wakes up and sprints off before the lioness can return.
Later that day as the gazelle takes a drink of water by a nearby pond, it stands there shaking intensely. Its nervous system is discharging the built-up stress. The gazelle returns to a relaxed state. It’s perfectly fine and carries no trauma or fear from its earlier brush with death.
This is a common reaction for many creatures in the animal kingdom. Their bodies and nervous systems regulate periods of stress and relaxation. After facing a potentially traumatizing event like escaping near death, they return to a state of balance and homeostasis. In doing so, they don’t get traumatized, and they don’t easily get what we would call “post-traumatic stress.” Check out the video below to see this in action. (Thanks to John from Rageheart for the video).
Why Humans are Different 🧠
What about humans? Well, we seem to be hard-wired the same way as most primates. Our bodies do a pretty good job at responding to stress that is acute, or temporary. When cortisol is elevated acutely it actually increases your immune system function and has an anti-inflammatory response. This is why a 3-minute ice-bath, high-intensity interval training, and 10 minute sauna sessions are generally healthy. This positive effect of short-term stressors is called hormetic stress.
You could say that we have evolved to work in short bursts and rest. But today the big difference is the environments we now live in where the stress is not short, but rather never ending! According to Robert Sapolsky in his book Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, we often “activate a physiological system that has evolved for responding to acute physical emergencies.” But when we turn it on for months on end, worrying about mortgages, relationships, and promotions, this causes a lot of stress-related illnesses and disease.
The Lifespan of an Emotion 😔😂😍😭😠😅
The second difference between humans and many other animals is that we have thoughts that get in the way of our body’s natural resilience. Harvard neuroscientist Dr. Bolte explains that there is a 90-second chemical process that occurs when we experience an emotion before its discharge; anything after that is the result of a person choosing (often unconsciously) to remain in that emotional loop. She explains how this works:
“Something happens in the external world, and chemicals are flushed through your body which puts it on full alert. For those chemicals to totally flush out of the body, it takes less than 90 seconds. This means that for 90 seconds you can watch the process happening, you can feel it happening, and then you can watch it go away. After that, if you continue to feel fear, anger, and so on, you need to look at the thoughts that you’re thinking that are re-stimulating the circuitry that is resulting in you having this physiological reaction, over and over again.”
You might be laughing at this! Hah, a 90 second emotion? That’s not how it works for most of us. After a heated discussion with a coworker, we don’t automatically release the stress, but stew in a storyline. That storyline keeps us stuck in the anger and fear for longer than biologically necessary. That emotion can last for hours, days, weeks, months…or even a lifetime.
Why can’t we let go of our stress, and why can’t we let go of our emotions so easily?
Good question.
How Energy Gets “Stuck” in Our Nervous System😫
Now, if it was just about stress, it would be enough to just exercise, get a massage, and turn off our phone for a day. However, while that provides relief for many of us, we find ourselves getting caught up in the same patterns and reactivity. We are tense, anxious, find it hard to “switch off,” feel like running away, or are disconnected from others and find it hard to ask for help. Instead of leaning into the world, we withdraw.
If it was just about accepting your thoughts and emotions, then meditation would solve your problems. Meditation can show you the impermanence of your thoughts and emotions, and you can watch this dissolve. You can let go of your ego. But just like meditation doesn’t fix a broken leg, meditation doesn’t necessarily solve the deeper patterns ingrained at a neurobiological level that need conscious effort to reprogram. From my experience it’s easy to bypass working with the body in meditation, which is what’s needed for releasing stuck energy.
The missing piece to the puzzle is in understanding the autonomic nervous system (ANS). The reason the gazelle is able to freeze, and then flee the scene escaping the jaws of death is because of our nervous system that evolved over 500 million years. This is the reason that when I had a huge burst of traumatic energy (from the death of a friend and being locked inside) released during the pandemic I felt like running away as far as I could – fight or flight.
The groundbreaking work of Dr. Stephen Porges and Peter Levine set the foundation for our understanding of how our nervous system responds to very stressful or traumatic events. Dr. Porges developed Polyvagal Theory, which is a framework that helps us understand how the nervous system influences our responses to stress and social interactions. According to Porges there are three responses that the brain has to threat:
1/ “The tonic immobility is the most primitive system, and it spans probably over 500 million years. It is a combination of freezing and collapsing—the muscles go limp, the person is left without any energy.”
2/ “The next in evolutionary development is the sympathetic nervous system, the fight-or- flight response. And this system evolved from the reptilian period which was about 300 million years ago. And its function is enhanced action, and, as I said, fight-or-flight.”
3/ “Finally the third and most recent system is the social engagement system, and this occurs only in mammals. Its purpose is to drive social engagement—making friends— in order to defuse the aggression or tension.”
The body has a natural way to discharge the energy, kind of like the gazelle shaking off its trauma I mentioned in the start of this article. But when the body is unable to do that, perhaps due to a mix of circumstances/ our personality/ overthinking, our bodies are unable to complete this physiological response. That’s when we can develop symptoms of post traumatic stress – the energy getting “stuck” in our bodies.
Peter Levine explains:
“...Trauma is a highly activated incomplete biological response to threat, frozen in time. For example, when we prepare to fight or to flee, muscles throughout our entire body are tensed in specific patterns of high energy readiness. When we are unable to complete the appropriate actions, we fail to discharge the tremendous energy generated by our survival preparations. This energy becomes fixed in specific patterns of neuromuscular readiness. The person then stays in a state of acute and then chronic arousal and dysfunction in the central nervous system. Traumatized people are not suffering from a disease in the normal sense of the word- they have become stuck in an aroused state. It is difficult if not impossible to function normally under these circumstances.”
Trauma is, in other words, a process through which our body keeps defending against a threat that took place in the distant past.
That’s why we overreact, and we are not really in control. Our limbic system becomes hijacked. It’s our brains that are stuck in the “on” switch. When a coworker says the wrong thing and you can’t calm your brain down for hours or days, or a partner/spouse ignores you and you take it way too personally instead of simply reconnecting with them.
Chronic anxiety, for example, can be seen as that stored survival stress (in your nervous system) from years and decades that keeps the body in a state of fight-or-flight (sympathetic), resulting in nasty symptoms and negative patterns. High functioning anxiety becomes a sort of “coping mechanism,” like the need to prove yourself. I believe that much of Wall Street and Washington are built on men and women holding and acting out these past traumas or stuck energies.
Why Most People Have Some Energy That Hasn’t Been Released 🌀
One definition of trauma = fear + helplessness. Some people can witness the same thing and not be traumatized. So it’s not so much the specific event that occurs, but how our bodies and minds interpret it. As Peter Levine says,
“trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness.”
Of course, there are some events that are more likely to lead to a traumatic response. Dr. Gabor Mate talks about little t trauma and Big T trauma. The big T trauma includes witnessing or being subjected to rape, war, violence, natural disasters, child abuse. These terrible things are what we think of most of the time when we think of the word “trauma.”
However, let’s forget about the word trauma for a moment and think in terms of the nervous system and blocked energy. The foundation of our nervous system is developed when we’re young. Allan Schore, a neurobiologist, says most of all psychopathology is due to ruptures of the bonding/regulation sequence that occurs during the first 12 to 18 months of life between the caregiver and the baby. He says we “download” our nervous system from our caregiver’s.
Of course, no childhood is perfect. Studies show that 33%-50% of people had an insecure attachment style during their childhood. For example, an anxious attachment style stems from caregivers who aren't consistently responsive or soothing (maybe because they are stressed themselves or are working all the time). An avoidant attachment style comes from caregivers who are dismissive or unresponsive, perhaps because they are emotionally distant, have too many other kids to take care of, or haven’t dealt with their own issues. This causes the child to become self-reliant and to avoid seeking comfort from others.
How does this play out in romantic relationships? When anxious-attachment individuals perceive a threat to the relationship, they may become anxious, clingy, and seek reassurance from their partner to alleviate their anxiety (this is totally me, by the way). Avoidant individuals, on the other hand, tend to have a fear of dependence and will distance themselves from their partner as a way to cope with perceived threats to their independence.
This results in all sorts of issues in adulthood – including, surprise surprise – avoidance and anxiety in our relationships. And when you have two people with different attachment styles, you can imagine this complicates things even further. If you become consciously aware of these patterns and are able to talk about them with your partner or friends, it can bring light to the discussion and you can start to transform your attachment style.
The important part to note here is that these attachment styles are ingrained in our nervous system. They can of course be connected to certain emotions like shame, and triggered by certain situations.
Example: your colleague Jeff gives you feedback but you take it as criticizing your work. These words are a trigger because your parents/caregivers did the same, during which time you were just a child that couldn’t fight back. Your internal biological reaction – your nervous system– is the same as it was 30 years ago, and so you go into “shutdown mode,” aka the dorsal vagal response. This automatically triggers a limbic-system hijack and feelings of shame, a cascade of negative thoughts, and since your social connection system is offline ( the “ventral vagal system”), you find it hard to take the feedback constructively. It takes a few hours or days for you to reconnect with your body and deal with the situation, and you might just avoid Jeff all together.
The Stuff You Can’t Remember ⚡
In fact, there are a lot of events that could have messed with your nervous system but that you can’t remember. Dr. Peter Levine talks about a patient he saw who suffered from a lot of anxiety. After helping her discharge some of the traumatic energy from her body, she had a vivid memory of having her tonsils removed as a kid. She remembered being terrified and the doctors forcibly strapping her down, as her parents stood beside her and watched.
Studies show that at least 1/5th of children will develop PTSD symptoms after a surgery, which can have all sorts of impact on them as adults. In another study, more than 52% of orthopedic patients being treated for broken bones were shown to develop full-blown post-traumatic stress disorder. Quick tip: If your kids are getting surgery, go to the hospital with them, make them feel soothed, and don’t let scary strangers in white coats forcibly pin them down.
The risk to our health by not releasing these traumas, by the way, is tremendous. Interestingly, many nurses have noticed that patients with cancer, multiple sclerosis (MS), rheumatoid arthritis, or inflammatory bowel disease fit certain personality profiles. This includes suppressing emotions (especially anger), focusing on other people’s needs more than their own, and generally being “really nice.” Noel B. Hershfield, clinical professor of medicine at the University of Calgary adds that “an individual’s emotional makeup and the response to continued stress may indeed be causative in many diseases.”
How to Unblock The Stuck Energy 👣😺
“True human enlightenment will only happen when each and every single person on the planet has learned how to regulate their very own nervous system.”
— Peter Levine
First of all, time does NOT heal all wounds. Sometimes, you need to actively heal the wounds yourself. The good news is you don’t necessarily need to remember the events of the past in order to work with your nervous system. You can work at the level of the body and nervous system itself.
Fortunately, there’s been a lot of work done on this in the last few years. Many people will try to get talk therapy and to some degree that can be effective. For example, if you go back in time and witness a difficult memory of your childhood self, you can bring a level of empathy and love to that past-you, with the maturity of an adult, and if you are in touch with your bodily sensations, you can start to release that energy.
However, that approach is often limited. The blocked energy of trauma can often be mysterious and it can be hard to pinpoint the exact situation or situations that led to the trauma. There is also preverbal trauma, trauma in utero, and intergenerational trauma. For example, the 2nd generation children of Holocaust survivors seek psychiatric help 3x as much as the average, which is said to be caused by epigenetic transmission.
Intergenerational trauma can be a lot more subtle. It all boils down to simply accepting each other for who we are and approaching life with love and not judgement and hatred. That’s captured beautifully by this random meme I saw on Facebook:
All of this makes it hard to use regular talk therapy to heal certain types of trauma, not to mention talking about the trauma can sometimes be re-traumatizing! Instead, you need to work directly with the body and the nervous system to discharge the energy, retrain the nervous system and widen your “window of tolerance/resilience” (how flexible your nervous system is). This process does not really require you to understand all the past details of what happened in your life, but is extremely effective. Here are three effective and well-studied techniques:
Somatic Experiencing: Somatic Experiencing (SE) was developed by Peter Levine, is well-studied and has proven effective for many people. After a few sessions, I found my worst symptoms subsiding. Most of the time when I was not feeling okay it boiled down to being in one of two states: either too activated and in a “sympathetic state”, the fight-flight response; or feeling more shut down, in a “dorsal vagal” state, which is our body’s freeze and fawn response. SE therapy gradually retrains your nervous system using techniques like titration and pendulation. A simple technique you can do now is sit for 10 minutes noticing pleasant sensations and alternating between unpleasant ones. You can also rawr like a lion and follow your body’s cues and impulses :) Video here.
EMDR: EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. It’s one of the most effective and popular trauma release therapies. The central feature of EMDR therapy involves bilateral stimulation, which can be achieved through various techniques such as moving the eyes back and forth, tapping on the hands, or using auditory tones. This bilateral stimulation is believed to mimic the natural processing that occurs during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, a phase associated with memory consolidation and emotional processing. Video here.
EFT: Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), often referred to as "tapping," is a therapeutic approach that combines elements of traditional talk therapy with acupressure-like tapping on specific points of the body. It's used to address a range of emotional issues, including trauma, stress, anxiety, and other negative emotions. EFT is based on the idea that emotional distress can be related to disruptions in the body's energy system (meridian points), and by tapping on certain points, you can restore balance and alleviate emotional and physical symptoms. Video here.
Psychedelics and MDMA: In combination with the above techniques you can use psychedelics and MDMA to accelerate your healing. This can increase feelings of empathy, safety, and make neuroplasticity more likely. I have used small doses of peyote in combination with body-awareness and somatic experiencing to work with my nervous system. Generally don’t recommend doing this by yourself unless you have lots of experience, and there is a lot of work being done around this now in Europe and the US where you can find qualified guides.
As always, thanks for reading!