This is how the cycle of life best works from my point of view:

Draw a simple plus sign — ‘+’

Place

— ‘HAPPY’ on the left tip

— ‘ANGER’ at the top tip

— ‘FEAR’ at the right tip

— ‘SAD’ at the bottom tip

Draw a small circle at the center and place ‘COMPETENCE’ there

Draw another circle around the outside of this ‘COMPETENCE’ circle and place ‘PROTECTION’ there

(Please note that I will not be presenting information on the happy state in this post because I consider it a bonus that we can access directly from our safe, secure, calm, optimal state of competence.  This post is about the survival process that results from a threat to our state of competence.  Very few of us experience happy as a result of having our life threatened — though for some the exuberance of challenge is stimulating and a positive experience because they feel absolutely confident that they can meet the challenge successfully.)

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We can complicate things all we want to, but even though this is a two dimensional  simple image , I believe that it  can be used to describe and visualize the operational pattern of life.

One thing missing from this simple image is something we have to visualize in our minds.  Picture this little ‘+’ you have drawn in the center of a bubble, surrounded and encased in the ongoing processes of life itself which I believe  can best be described  with one word — ‘CHANGE’.

What connects the ideal optimal state of perfect competence — or calm equilibrium — to all other life factors represented by the word change, is something that we can recognize in ourselves as the ‘STARTLE RESPONSE’.  This response ALERTS us on some level (I believe through interactions that occur within our immune system) that a challenge to competent equilibrium has occurred (as I described in yesterday’s post).  Startle can vary from low level surprise to extremes of traumatic shock.  However a life form detects this challenge, it matters as a central factor of existence.

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Now because I am writing as a human being to other human beings about our unique experiences of life, I have to add another bubble that contains the patterns I just described — ‘SENTIENT’

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Main Entry:

sen·tient

Pronunciation:

\ˈsen(t)-sh(ē-)ənt, ˈsen-tē-ənt\

Function:

adjective

Etymology:

Latin sentient-, sentiens, present participle of sentire to perceive, feel

Date:

1632

1 : responsive to or conscious of sense impressions <sentient beings> 2 : aware 3 : finely sensitive in perception or feeling

– sen·tient·ly adverb

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sentient

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Because I am limited to writing from my own point of view, I will direct you to two pieces of my previous writings so that I can place what I am going to say in context:

ALONE NAKED IN THE WOODS SINGING

This post describes an experience I had when I was 14 that allows me to entertain a certain degree of mystery regarding the possibility that all life has a conscious awareness of its own.  In my ‘vision’ was I sharing with a blade of grass what its own experience of its existence is like, or was I simply experiencing a human version of what a blade of grass experiences?  In other words, which ‘bubble’ was I in?

EARTH DAY: In Honor of the Grieving Chicken

In this post I describe a chicken behavior that defied my explanation of it, and again introduces the possibility that humans have no real idea what other species’ experiences are like to them.

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With those qualifying concepts out of the way, I will write about what I think humans know about how to endure as our experience operates on the sentient level of being as we include both emotions and thoughts into our survival patterns.

Please go back to your ‘+’ image.  I want to describe how I believe this simple pattern operates.

I consider ‘AVOIDANCE’ of harm to be a part of the inner defense and protection circle.  If something happens in the environment that penetrates a life form’s defense circle of protection, it is experienced as a challenge and an adjustment involving resources has to occur to reinstate the equilibrium.

I must now introduce another word — ‘COPING’.  Coping can occur along a continuum from active to passive coping.  What it involves is the resource access and utilization process.  If everything is optimal, the transition process from challenge to adequate adjustment back to a state of harmonious competence happens so fast we hardly need to consider it on any level — except to witness it in our minds with awe and appreciation.

If, however, the transition stage of adaptation requires some more noticeable action for adjustment to occur, we move far enough away from the competent center to notice what might happen next as a life form responds to a challenge.

The startle response always requires an ability to accurately assess threat.  Once that assessment happens, resources have to be accessed in balance with the assessed risk and applied.  Coping skills are resources, and they require available resources.

I believe all of our most effective human coping abilities lie first of all within what we usually might think of as the anger arena and relate to the ‘GO’ (sympathetic) arm of the autonomic nervous system.  A threat to life or well being does not first elicit a lazy response.  A first response will involve the application of enough energy to meet the demands of a challenge.

Our most constructive responses originate, I believe, within this anger arena because it is here that we have stored all of our effective learning about how to actively defend ourselves against harm.  Our species very often experiences this as an instantaneous adrenaline response that we recognize as the ‘FIGHT’ response.

Good!  Recognize the threat, identify it, assess it, and respond appropriately and adequately to get rid of it as quickly, efficiently and effectively as possible using known and proven active coping skills so that calm equilibrium of optimal competence can be restored as quickly as possible.

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OK.  But what if that doesn’t work?  What if the immediate response based on past learning experience (and remember that all genetic survival knowledge is contained in our active coping skill category) still leaves us at risk and under threat?  Now comes the move from the anger place to the fear place on our ‘+’ drawing.

I believe that for humans fear is always about the threat of being overwhelmed so that our life might be extinguished.  Our initial anger response is not related to fear because we first use resources that we are confident will do the job based on our competence abilities.  Only when those coping responses fail and our confidence becomes shaken do we move to the fear place. This movement only takes place if our active coping responses were ineffective and/or overwhelmed.

If we feel anger on any level that means we are in a state of using or hoping to use everything we know with success.  When we feel fear we can know instantaneously that we need to learn something new and find/use additional resources to meet a challenge, but we have to find a way to stay alive long enough to do this.

The fear state also involves active coping responses, most usually what we think of as the flight response.  I consider the freeze response to be a version of flight because it is also designed to remove one at risk from threat.  Both involve trying to be ‘out of sight’ from the threat and invisible (and therefore immune) to it.  They are retreat coping mechanisms designed to escape to a place of safety and security.

If one survives threat by using fear state resources and then is able to return to a state of competent equilibrium, most usually something new was learned in the process.  This ‘something new’ may then be available as a resource during the anger-fight stage next time this or a similar threat occurs.

If we continue to live but the fear state actions do not result in a return to the center state of competence, it is possible that the sad state may be the final resting point.  If we do not acquire knowledge of a new coping skill as a resource, we can end up completely stuck in this sadness state on our ‘+’ drawing until we do learn.  I believe this state is where depression manifests itself.  It is where helplessness, hopelessness, discouragement and demoralization feed into an incompetence cycle and the optimal state of calm and safe competence is never reached.

I believe that the state of sadness is a place of hiding….

Because we do not get to the sad state without first passing through the fear state, fear is literally carried through and combined with sadness.  When sadness from, for example, a ‘legitimate’ grief stemming from any kind of loss, becomes contaminated with fear, all sight of learning a way out can be lost.  This can result in giving up the fight, and only through teasing apart fear from sadness and examining each of them separately can we begin to see how to overcome both.

I believe that some of us are born naturally closer to the sensitive end of the human continuum, and that this puts us at greater risk of experiencing anxiety states that do not result either in effective and appropriate survival responses or in the learning of new adaptive actions.  In addition, what we identify as posttraumatic stress disorder also involves a failure to learn new responses to apply to future threats.

I believe this can happen to anyone if the actual experience of the trauma was more than any single member of our species could ever surmount alone.  Because we are a social species, we have been designed throughout our evolution to advance the survival potential of our species by sharing new learning about how to both avoid harm and to respond to it adequately once it occurs.  This is part of the reason that social support following a traumatic event is such a critical factor in recovery.

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It is crucial to understand that our brain is a part of our nervous system, and that all these described reactions to a challenge from the environment that threatens our optimal state of calm well-being of competence involve reactions that occur in our bodies, including our experience of the emotions themselves.  A central point in my writings is that abuse and trauma during early fetal, infant and toddler stages of development prevent this state of competent well-being at the center from ever developing in the first place.

If the stresses of trauma become built into a body from the start, their corresponding threat reactions will NEVER be the same as they are for a body that developed in an optimal environment.  We need to know this for a fact because every interaction a person has is connected to whatever state lies at the center of their body. If overwhelming threat occurs before a possibility of active, competent response exists, this incompetence will be built into the body from the start.

This fact makes anyone who experienced severe abuse, deprivation and trauma early in their development at the highest risk for inadequate or inappropriate responses to additional traumas and threat for the rest of their lives.  I speak from personal experience on this one.  My trauma reaction bucket was filled to over flowing from the first breath I ever took, and there is no possible way to empty it out because the trauma built itself into my body from the beginning.

Everyone has a threshold of tolerance for traumas.  Compared to my mother, I was not genetically given the option of breaking under the burden of my traumas as she did.  I believe that what we call ‘mental illness’ exists in our genetic heritage to ensure that the human body can survive in the worst possible conditions so that there remains a hope that offspring will find their way to a better world in the future.  The cost of this survival can mean that the distortions required of a developing child in order that it CAN survive result in a broken relationship between the child and the self, and the adult person and the world around them.

What lies at the center of a person severely maltreated from birth is an overwhelming sadness.   (Because males are destined to develop differently from females, their sadness can very easily be replaced with rage.)   When conditions become humanly unbearable, alternatives for survival have to be found or death will be the result.  Suicide is being tied through research very clearly to a genetic base.  If actual death does not become the outcome, then we have to expect a natural reaction that results in dire future consequences for those whose bodies do continue to endure.  Having a balanced calm competent center of equilibrium will be a nearly impossible state to achieve.

Believe me, severe infant and child abuse can cause one to ‘go insane’ and/or die of a broken heart.  The toughest survivors usually have to continue to endure the experience of ongoing, overwhelming,  unbearable sadness for the rest of their lives while all the time being pressured to wonder why they cannot either catch up or keep up will all the others who have built into their bodies competence, calm and balanced well-being from their developmental experiences in an adequate if not optimal world.

For some of us life continues like one of those nightmares where you are falling and falling and never hit bottom.  We just grieve for the love we desperately needed from our birth that would have let our brains and bodies develop based on benevolence rather than malevolence.  Our hearts continue breaking and breaking until we die.  This is OUR natural state.

Because we are members of a social species we know fundamentally that our survival and well-being depends upon our acceptance into our species.  This information is gleaned initially from the mother and all other early caregivers.  Misinformation becomes mis-formation as a body adapts to the crisis of remaining alive while being rejected (ejected) from one’s species.

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Let me take for instance the present threat of a very serious spread from swine flu.  If we as people could have done something to avoid this threat in the first place, obviously the threat would have been prevented.  Once the threat exists, can we contain it?  Can we adequately address the threat through taking steps based on preexisting knowledge we already have so that we can eliminate the threat and restore for ourselves a competent state without threat?  If we don’t already have adequate resources to do these things, then the faster we learn something new to apply to our solution so that containment, elimination and restoration can occur, the better.

Avoid-prevent, contain, eliminate-destroy and restore.  These actions might be motivated by anger and fear, but not by sadness.  Sadness exists in the giving up-overwhelmed state.  Sadness is NEVER a desired stopping place.  If we ever find ourselves stuck in sadness, we need to know that this is both the most vulnerable state we can be in at the same time that it is most valuable because it contains within it the greatest potential for learning something new that is vitally important.

An escape from sadness back to optimal calm competence only happens a most important characteristic is accessed and applied — that of resolve.  Resolve, to me, is a direct reconnection back to the competent experience of the anger state because it involves an awareness that competency is possible.

The problem for many people who are stuck in the sadness state is that they lack the resource of hope that would allow them to experience resolve in the first place.  Hope is something that is built into our being through secure attachment experiences in our environments from the start.  Hope happens because we learn that someone will be there to respond adequately to our needs, and is built into our foundation through these foundational experiences.

Hope is thus intimately and inexorably intertwined with the experience of growing and developing competence literally into our bodies. It stems from connections and linkages that exist (or don’t exist) between ourselves and others.  If we were deprived of the development of hope through early abuse and trauma, it IS something we can learn to acquire later because the potential for experiencing hope appears to be hard wired into our brains before we are born.

In the case of the swine flu, I might feel completely powerless to defend and protect myself and others from its threat (short of disappearing somewhere?), but I have hope that there are people out there with the competence and resources to take adequate care of the threat for us.  These others are thus a part of my immune system resources, and I am dependent upon these others for a solution.

This last statement would lead me in the direction of a discussion of dominance and submission, of ordinate and subordinate conditions — but I will address this in a future post.

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As always, thank you for reading — your comments are welcome and appreciated.