Last night my wife and I went to a lecture by Joseph LeDoux, the author of The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life and the Synaptic Self.
His research has primarily focused on understanding the emotions of fear and anxiety through animal models, and how these emotions impact memory.
One of my favorite chapters in the Emotional Brain is titled “Where the Wild Things Are” which describes the link between what he has learned about the amygdala, hippocampus, and common emotional problems.
Top 5 take-away’s from Joseph’s talk
1) There is evidence that early traumas, even those that occur right after birth, get seared into the amygdala (emotional memory) and stay with us for life.
Even though our ability to remember a trauma requires some development of the hippocampus, and likely does not begin until around the age of three, we can still react emotionally to particular triggers that we were exposed to prior to the age of three even if we have no memory of what happened.
2) Trauma changes the physical brain and how it operates, and in so doing, influences the behavior of the person. People respond very differently to trauma, even when exposed to the same traumatic events.
3) We are hard-wired to respond to threatening situations behaviorally before our rational brain evaluates a situation and makes a determination of whether something is dangerous.This is why we jump back when we see something squiggly on the ground.
It is an evolutionary, survival response. And if the squiggly thing is a killer snake, then good thing we jumped before we thought about it.
4) Traditional anatomy and physiology texts teach that our emotions come from the limbic system. LeDoux’s work has shown that emotions like fear involve many parts of the brain that extend beyond how we understand the limbic system. So…he believes we should do away with the limbic system – it doesn’t exist.
5) The work of psychotherapy is about our neocortex learning to exercise control over the evolutionary old emotional systems – over the amygdala.
For those who struggle with addiction
Addictive behavior can be understood as an unhealthy coping strategy to an amygdala that likely has some emotional wounds. This is why so many relapse prevention programs focus on mindfulness and CBT strategies for behavioral self-regulation.
I continue to believe that all who struggle with addiction can benefit from trauma resolution work.