Two Different Safety Systems. Two Different Approaches To Safety
Your nonconscious protective system’s job is to protect you from danger you may be in. It protects you in real time. It reads the emotional valence codes of things around you. If anything in the environment has been assigned a code that indicates it is dangerous, your nonconscious system urges you to escape or to fight. It neither of these options is a possibility, it may cause you to freeze.
Your conscious protective system’s job is to protect you by predicting danger you may be headed toward. Instead of protecting you in real time, it protects you in the future.
A prediction is an educated guess. You imagine what could happen. You base your imagination on memories of the past, what you have been taught, and cause-and-effect reasoning. Your high-level thinking then determines whether what is being predicted is safe or unsafe.
If safe, your conscious system’s prediction triggers positive feelings. If unsafe, its prediction produces negative feelings.
Emotion is not triggered by reasoning, but is triggered when the conscious system imagines the prediction. If previously assigned code is involved, the code will cause positive or negative feelings. If there is no previously assigned code, the amygdala will release a moderate amount of stress hormones which the conscious system may interpret as positive and exciting or as negative and anxiety-producing.
Imagine being at a lake you’ve never visited before. You have dived into the water at other lakes before and found the experience positive. As a result, diving is coded positively. When you imagine diving into the water at this lake, your nonconscious system reads the positive code and triggers a pleasant feeling.
But your conscious protective system predicts what might happen. The German word for caution is vorsicht. Vor means before. Sicht means sight. Directly translated, vorsicht means foresight. Indirectly translated, it means caution. We should look before we leap. In this case, we should look, if not physically, at least with our imagination, before we dive.
Thinking about the possibility of a rock below the surface may not trigger fear. But thinking about the possibility of a rock may cause fear if you recall the pain of a blow to your head in a non-diving situation.
Mild fear might not stop you from diving into the water. But if you once hit your head on a rock while diving, the highly negative emotional valence code assigned to that incident may stop you from diving altogether. Even after checking for a rock, if you once hit your head on the rock in a life-threatening incident, you may not be able to dive at all.
If the blow to your head incapacitated you and others saved your life by pulling you out of the water and taking you to a hospital, instead of highly negative code, your nonconscious system assigned a life-threatening emotional valence code.
A life-threatening emotional valence code can be life-changing. The emotions triggered by a life-threatening emotional valence code can stand in the way of doing things you know are safe.
I can give you a personal experience. When I was growing up in North Carolina, I loved to go to the beach and do body-surfing. Even now, I can vividly recall the salty water in my nose, the bubbling sound in my ears, and the thrill of the acceleration when catching a wave.
I was part of a group of college students who rented a house at the beach during spring break. I knew the water would be very cold, but I was determined to go body-surfing nevertheless. And I did. After catching a few waves, I got out of the water, and walked back to the beach house. I could not make it up the stairs. I sat down on the sand. I was unbelievably cold. I was shaking uncontrollably. Though I would have been able to get warm by going inside, my body was in such a state of shock that I could not get back on my feet.
The average temperature of the water at Carolina Beach in April is 64 degrees. AI says, “At 64°F, individuals may experience cold water shock and loss of dexterity within minutes.” I don’t know how much time passed. Finally, I made it back into the house. People asked me what was going on. I didn’t answer. I just wanted to get away from them and get warm.
No one else in the group went into the ocean during the trip. I did it because of my love for the ocean and body-surfing. However, apparently due to shock, my love of the ocean changed. I only feel comfortable in water that is around 85 degrees. If the temperature is below that, though I know it is safe, I do not go into the water. Water that others find invigorating is, to me, like punishment.
That helps me understand how turbulence can feel to someone who has experienced a life-threatening trauma. Intellectually, they want to fly, but emotionally, the slightest movement resonates with past trauma.
Being on a plane means exposing yourself to the possibility that turbulence, which is physically intrusive, will trigger unacceptable feelings.
This can be changed. Recoding the cause of the shocking experience and the context - no control and no escape - in which it happened is the first step. The second step is to experience the flight without any attempt to keep the movements of the plane out of mind, and without any attempt to minimize your awareness of the no-control, no-escape situation you are in. You learn that the up-and-down motions of the plane cancel each other out. You find that nothing - other than some residual unwanted feelings - materializes.