If your everyday practice is to open to
your emotions, to all the people you meet,
to all the situations you encounter,
without closing down, trusting that you
can do that—then that will take you as far
as you can go. And that you’ll understand
all the teachings that anyone has ever taught.
—Pema Chödrön (Buddhist teacher)
How Do People Change?
Neuroscientists can accurately tell us where in the brain various emotions reside.* However, they tell us precious little about how we can change (our relationship to) such difficult emotions as sadness, anger, and fear. Nor do they shed much light on how people change problematic behaviors by altering these troubling emotions. For us to make headway in approaching this critical question, we need to better understand the very components and structure of emotions as rooted in bodily process and central nervous system functions.
Qu’est-ce qu’une émotion?
Alfred Binet posed this very provocative question at the dawn of the twentieth century. He opened the debate with a salvo, which eludes a clear solution, even to this day. Simple to ask, though difficult to answer, the question remains: “What is an emotion?” (Binet, 1908). Theories of emotion, abundant and diverse, have had a long, twisted, confounding and often contradictory history. Philosophy, psychology, and evolutionary biology, have each attempted to define, refine or, simply understand emotion (Gendron, 2009). The first scientific study of emotion was published by Darwin in 1872 with his landmark work, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.
“Emotion as a scientific concept,” wrote Elizabeth Duffy, the matriarch of modern psychophysiology, “is worse than useless” (Gendron & Barrett, 2009). On the basis of extensive physiological recording available at the time, she felt that there was no way of differentiating one emotional state from another. In other words, distinguishing an emotion, solely on the basis of physiological measurements (such as heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, temperature, skin conductance, etc.), seemed impossible. Thus, emotions, from her vantage point in 1936, were unworthy of scientific study. Yet recently, there has been a rich vein of inquiry and grounding in the emerging field of the ”affective neurosciences,” demonstrating distinct brain systems involved in the expression of various emotions (e.g. fear, anger, sadness and joy) (Panksepp, 2004). However, the question of felt experience (as opposed to emotional expression) has been all but neglected, in spite of its great clinical importance. Psychology, questing for objective respectability, has attempted to purge subjectivity from its midst. It has, in the process, unwittingly thrown out the proverbial baby (the subjective feeling experience) with the bathwater, by studying primarily the expression and brain mechanisms of emotion.
Much of philosophy (particularly Descartes cogito ergo sum, “I think therefore I am”) and early psychology were of the logical, “common sense” conviction regarding the sequence by which an emotion was generated. Let’s imagine that when something provocative happened to Renee Descartes—perhaps if someone raised their fist and called him a jerk or alternatively patted him on the shoulder and told him, “you’re a great guy”—he might have believed that his brain recognized this provocation as being worthy of an emotional response—anger, fear, sadness, or elation. Had the physiology of his times been more advanced, he might have interpreted the next step, in this “top-down” process, as his brain telling his body what to do: increase your heart rate, blood pressure, and breathing; tense your muscles, secrete sweat, and make goose bumps. For Descartes, and for many clinicians, this sequence makes perfectly logical sense and seems to accurately describe how we experience an emotion. However, to paraphrase his contemporary, Blaise Pascal, in an open letter to Descartes, telling the philosopher: Monsieur Descartes, “I cannot forgive you for what you have said,” for Pascal, “The Body has its Reason which Reason cannot Reason.”
At the turn of the nineteenth century, however, the experimental psychologist William James made an experiential inquiry into the study of emotions. Rather than taking a philosophical and speculative approach, James set up various imagined situations, such as being chased by a bear or losing a close friend. Then, through experiential introspection, he would attempt to infer the chain of events by which the experience of an emotion such as fear was generated. In these subjective experiments he would sense into the interior of his body (what is now called interoception), as well as noting his thoughts and inner images. From these subjective explorations, he arrived at a rather unexpected conclusion. Cartesian common sense dictates that when we see a bear, we are frightened and then motivated by fear, we flee. However, in his careful, reflective observations, James concluded that rather than running because we are afraid, we are afraid because we are running (from the bear). In James’s words:
My theory is that the bodily changes follow directly (from) the perception of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion. ‘Common sense’ says, we lose our fortune, are sorry and weep; we meet a bear, are frightened and run; we are insulted by a rival, are angry, and strike. The hypothesis, here to be defended, says that this order of sequence is incorrect, that the one mental state is not immediately induced by the other, that the bodily manifestations may first be interposed between, and the more rational (accurate) statement is that we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble. (Wozniak, 1999)
This counter intuitive view challenged the Cartesian/cognitive (top-down) paradigm where the conscious mind first recognizes the source of threat, and then commands the body to respond: to flee, to fight or to fold. James’s bottom-up paradigm, that we feel fear because we are running away from the threat (while only partially correct), does make a crucial point about the illusory nature of emotional perception. We may commonly believe, for example, that when we touch a hot object, we draw our hand away because of the pain. However, the reality is that if we were to wait until we experienced pain in order to withdraw our hand, we might damage it beyond repair. Physiology teaches us that there is first a reflex withdrawal of the hand, which is only then followed by the sensation of pain. The pain might well serve the function of reminding us not to pick up a potentially hot stone from the fire pit a second time, but it has little to do with our hand withdrawing when it is first burned. Similarly, every student of basic chemistry learns, hopefully after the first encounter, that hot test tubes look just like cold ones. However, what we falsely perceive, and believe as fact, is that the (experience of) pain causes us to withdraw our hand.
James was able to recognize that the experience of fear (as well as other emotions) was not primarily a cognitive affair; that there was first a muscular (tension) and visceral reaction in his body (including increased heart rate, cold hands, fast respiration, churning stomach). Then, it was the perception of this body reaction (joined with the image of the bear), that generated the felt emotion of fear. What James observed (in terms of neurophysiology) was that, when the primitive brain senses the potential danger, it makes this assessment so quickly that there isn’t enough time for the person to become consciously aware of it. What happens instead, according to James, is that the brain “canvases” the body to see how it is reacting in the moment. In what was a revelatory revision, James relocated the consciousness of feeling from mind to body. In doing this he demonstrated a rare prescience about what neuroscience would only begin to (re)discover a hundred years later. In his theory of “Somatic Markers,” neurologist Antonio Damasio clearly has resurrected James’s perceiving sequence (Damasio, 2000). Let us follow this line of inquiry, beginning with our basic sense of agency.
In the mid 1980s, Ben Libet (1985; 1999), a neurosurgeon and neurophysiologist at the University of California Medical School in San Francisco, conducted a revealing series of studies regarding the sequencing of experience. He essentially confirmed James’s observational chain with a series of ingenious investigations. Here’s a simple little experiment that you can do right now. Hold one of your arms out in front of you with your palm facing upwards. Then, whenever you feel like it (i.e. of your own “free will”), flex your wrist. Do this several times and watch what happens in your mind. You probably felt as though you first consciously decided to move and then, following your intention, you moved it. It feels to you as though the conscious decision caused the action. Common sense?
Libet asked experimental subjects to do this same hand exercise, while he systematically measured the timing of three things: 1) The subjects’ “conscious” decision to move, which was marked on a special clock, 2) The beginning of (what is called) the readiness potential in the (pre) motor cortex using EEG electrodes on the scalp, and 3) The start of the actual action—using EMG electrodes on the wrist to measure the electrical activity of the wrist muscles just as they began to contract. So which do you think, based on your experience in the preceding hand experiment, came first? Was it the decision to move activity in the motor cortex, or the actual movement? The answer, defying credulity, dramatically contradicted common sense. The brain’s activity, as measured from the motor cortex, began about 500 milliseconds (half a second!) before the person was aware of “deciding” to act. The conscious decision came far too late to be the cause of the action. It was as though consciousness was a mere afterthought; a way of “explaining to ourselves,” an action not evoked by conscious intention, but by something like “perceptual responsiveness.” As peculiar as this might seem, it fits in with previous experiments that Libet had carried out on exposed brains as part of a neuro-surgical procedure to treat epilepsy. Here, Libet had demonstrated that about half a second of continuous activity of stimulation in the sensory cortex was needed for a person to become aware of a sensory stimulus (Libet, 1981).
In summary, Libet found that what the subject believed was a “conscious” decision to perform a simple action (such as pushing a button) preceded the action. This conscious decision, however, occurred only after the “pre-motor” area in the brain first fired with a burst of electrical activity. In other words, people decide to act only after their brain unconsciously prepares them to do so. Much earlier, the evolutionary biologist Thomas Huxley (known as “Darwin’s Bulldog” for his advocacy of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution) observed that: “Consciousness has no more influence on our actions than a steam whistle has on the locomotion of a train.”
Daniel Wegner, working at Harvard University, later reinforced Libet’s proposition (Wegner & Wheatley, 1999). In one of his studies, an illusion was created by a series of mirrors. Subjects, thinking that they were looking at their own arms, were actually seeing (in the mirror) the movements of an experimenter’s arm. When the experimenter’s arms moved (according to the instructions of another researcher), the subjects reported that they had made and therefore willed the movements (when, in fact, they had not even moved their arms)! Hence, the strong bias in favor of volitional will is once again challenged. “Nothing seems to us to belong so closely to our personality, to be so completely our property as our free will,” decried Wilhelm Wundt, considered one of the founders of experimental psychology.
The results of Libet, Wegner, and others, taken together, seriously challenge our common sense understanding of consciousness and our love affair with free will. The annihilation of free will, suggested in Wegner’s book (2013), goes against what we believe is the very core of our existence as autonomous human beings. It challenges such cherished beliefs as the capacity for planning, foresight and responsible action. Who, or what, are we without the power of free will? This dispute of free will, revered in Western thought for 3,000 years, is not just another philosopher’s opinion, but rather stems from a variety of dispassionate laboratory research. Einstein, in paraphrasing the philosopher Shopenhauer, re-stated the conundrum of free will with his characteristic understated wisdom: “A human can very well do what he wants but cannot will what he wants.”
Is this a farewell to Freud’s ego and Descartes’ cogito ergo sum? Although this credo, “I think therefore I am,” was an important start in freeing people from the power and rigidity of Church doctrine, it’s in great need of revision (Damasio, 1995). These different researchers suggest something more like: I prepare to move, I sense, I feel, I perceive, I reflect, I think, I conclude and therefore I am.
Together, the studies of James, Libet, Wegner and others confirm that before a “voluntary” movement is made, there is an unconscious, let us call it for now, “pre-movement” impulse. In addition, there are non-conscious sensory systems that trigger equally unconscious movements. We see this demonstrated in a revealing condition called “blindsight” (Weiskrantz, 1986). Oliver Sacks, from his many moving and wise vignettes about the tragic, yet compelling consequences of neurological disorders, describes the case of Virgil. Virgil’s entire visual cortex was destroyed rendering him completely blind; yet Sacks describes Virgil’s wife’s inexplicable observations: “Virgil had told her that he was completely blind, yet she observed that he would reach for objects, avoid obstacles and behave as though he were seeing” (Sacks, 1996, p. 146). Such is the enigma of this type of implicit (“bottom-up”) information processing derived from pre-motor impulses. These experiments of nature challenge the very “common sense” idea of consciousness. How do we reconcile that he avoided these objects but yet, seemed completely unaware of this.
The primary visual cortex, located in the back of the brain (and known dispassionately as area 17) provides us with conscious visual images. In addition, however, there are multiple visual nuclei in the brain stem and thalamus, which eventually ascends to area 17. Input from the retina to these primitive (“non-conscious”) subcortical centers somehow registers basic information that normally has the function of directing eye movements to garner more data. And it does this significantly, before a visual image is recorded in the conscious visual cortex in area 17. These primitive centers also render potential threats as well as a flimsy sketch of which we are largely unconscious. Such was the case with Virgil when, seemingly completely unaware, he avoided the obstacles in his path.† Hence, we are once again appreciative of the prompting to respond to events before we become overtly aware of them. Fortunately, these seemingly unconscious impulses can, with coaching, become conscious if we learn how to access and follow subtle physical sensations. This “pre-conscious awareness,” as we shall see, is a key to changing difficult emotions.
There has been a tendency in psychology to view consciousness as a binary phenomenon: either “conscious” or “unconscious.” However, consciousness occurs on a continuum, a multitude of shades from white, through many shades of grey, to black. For the more conscious states (white and greys), awareness is like a flashlight, beamed in a particular direction. On the other hand, the less conscious states are more like distant, glowing embers. As we gently blow our breath in that general direction there is a faint glowing pulsation, just perceived against the dark background. It is just the complex, subtle, ever-shifting interoceptive (body) sensations, that are just this gentle breath. This way we can begin an exploration of “core consciousness.” This primal consciousness allows difficult emotions to morph and finally to transform. Indeed, recent work in affective neuroscience, (e.g., see Panksepp, 1998) argues that our core sense of self emerges from our basic mammalian motoricity and emotionality, derived from brain structures in the limbic system, brainstem, and thalamus. We know ourselves, in this perspective, through action, sensation, and feeling.
Consider your response to a fleeting shadow, the subtle gesture of another person, a distant sound. Each of these events can evoke in us survival-bound (movement and emotional) responses without our being “consciously” aware that something in our environment has triggered them. Notably, when traumatized, we are particularly sensitized to (and hyper-aroused into frantic action by) these fleeting sensations, of which we are largely unaware. Our senses of seeing, hearing, and smell provide countless stimuli that provoke us to over-react, even though we may be unaware of the presence of these subliminal stimuli and our pre-motor and emotional responses to them. As a result, we may, and often do, attribute our actions and emotions to irrelevant or confabulated causes.‡
Causality gets misconstrued for traumatized individuals in two ways. The first one involves the unawareness of the pre-movement trigger; the second involves the extent of the response (see Levine, 2015). Imagine the consternation of an individual trapped in the full-blown ferocious re-enactment of a survival-bound response; for instance the Vietnam vet who wakes up strangling his terrified wife, unaware that it was the backfiring of a distant car, or even the light footsteps of their young child in the hallway, that provoked his “freakish” behavior and grossly exaggerated reaction. However, years earlier, when sleeping in a bamboo thicket, under fire from the Viet Cong, his immediate kill-response was an essential, life preserving action. It may only take a very mild stimulus to abruptly trigger the tightly coiled spring (his survival kill-or-be-killed reaction sequence) into an intense, out-of-control, emotional eruption.
Thankfully, there is a potent way to break such compulsive cycles of reenactment and diffuse a maladaptive action and corrosive emotion. And in the process, to expand consciousness towards greater response-ability, openness, receptivity, and freedom. Becoming aware of the interoceptive sensations associated with the pre-movement before it graduates into a full-blown movement sequence allows us to break the compulsive cycles of reenactment. It is, in the vernacular, to extinguish the spark before it ignites the tinder. As Libet showed, there is a delay of only about one-half a second between the time when we prepare for action and the actual time when we execute it. Let’s consider a couple of non-clinical examples that help demonstrate the use of pre-movement postural adjustments:
Many times in the past, I walked with my dog in the Colorado Mountains.
Pouncer, a dingo mix, was imbued with a strong instinctual urge to chase deer and other swift creatures of the upland meadows. Try as I might, it was not possible to neutralize this “habit” by reprimanding him. If I tried to call him back or admonished his behavior when he returned, breathless and panting from the chase, it was of no avail. However, if when we encountered a deer up ahead, at the very moment his posture changed (just hinting at his readiness to leap forward), I would firmly, but gently say, “Pouncer, heel.” He would then calmly continue on our walk, striding enthusiastically by my side. Then there is the story of a brash young samurai sword fighter and a venerated Zen master.
Two Horns of the Dilemma
There is a vital balancing act, between expression and restraint necessary to neutralize corrosive emotional states. This resolution requires that when we experience a strong emotional feeling we need not necessarily act upon it, but rather experience its underlying sensations. In the following Zen “teaching story,” a young, somewhat brash samurai swordsman confronts a venerated Zen master with the following demand: “I want you to tell me the truth about the existence of heaven and hell.” The master replies gently, and with delicate curiosity: “How is it that such an ugly and untalented man as you can become a samurai?” Immediately, the wrathful young samurai pulled out his sword, raising it above his head, ready to strike the old man and cut him in half. Without fear, and in complete calm, the Zen master gazed upward and spoke softly: “This, young man, is hell.” The samurai paused, sword held above his head. His arms fell like leaves to his side, while his face softened from its angry glare. He quietly reflected. Placing his sword back into its sheath, he bowed to the teacher in reverence. “And this,” the master replied again with equal calm, “is heaven.”
Here the samurai, sword held high at the peak of feeling full of rage (and at the moment before executing the prepared-for action) learned to hold back and restrain his rage; instead of mindlessly expressing it. In refraining, with the master’s quick guidance, from making his habitual emotional expression of attack (as I did with my dog, Pouncer), he transformed his rage-full “hell” to peaceful ”heaven.”
One could also speculate on what sub-conscious thoughts (and images) were stirred when the master provoked his ire. Perhaps he was startled, and at first, even agreed with the characterization that he was ugly and untalented. This strong reaction to this insult (we might hypothesize) derived from his parents, teachers, and others who humiliated him as a child. Perhaps he had a compelling sensation of collapse, along with a mental picture of being shamed in front of his school classmates. And then the other micro-fleeting ”counter thought”—that no one would dare to call him that again and make him feel small and worthless. This thought and associated picture, coupled with a momentary physical sensation of startle, triggered the emotion of rage that lead him down the driven road to perdition. That was, at least, until his ”Zen therapist,” precisely at the peak of rage, kept him from habitually expressing this “protective” emotion (really a defense against his feelings of smallness and helplessness) and, by connecting him with his physical sensations moments before striking out in rage, allowed him to redirect his energy and take ownership of his real power and gain a peaceful surrender.
How Do We Create Change in Our Emotional Responses
In the above examples (the parable of the Zen master and samurai swordsman, as well as the tale of my dog Pouncer), choice occurred at the critical moment before executing attack, during the brief pre-motor readiness. With the Zen master’s critical intervention, the samurai held back and felt the preparation to strike (a bodily sensation) with his sword. In this highly charged state, he paused and was able to restrain and transmute his violent rage into intense energy, and then into a state of clarity, gratefulness, presence, and grace. It is the ability to hold back, restrain, and contain (but not suppress) a powerful emotion that allows a person to creatively channel that energy.
Containment buys us time and, with introspective self-awareness, enables us to separate out what we are imagining and thinking from our physical sensations. It is this fraction of a second of restraint, as we just saw, that was the difference between heaven and hell. When we can maintain this “creative neutrality,” we begin to dissolve the emotional compulsion to react as though our life depends on responses that are largely inappropriate in the present. The uncoupling of sensation from image and thought is what diffuses the highly charged (survival-based) emotions and allow the sensations then to transform fluidly into sensation-based gradations of softer “contoured” feelings. This process is not at all the same as suppressing or repressing emotions. For all of us, and particularly for the traumatized individual, the capacity to transform the “negative” emotions of fear and rage is the difference between heaven and hell.
The power and tenacity of emotional compulsions (the acting out of rage, fear, shame, and sorrow) are not to be underestimated. Fortunately, there are practical antidotes to this cascade of misery. With body awareness, it is possible to “de-construct” these emotional fixations. In terms of brain function, the medial pre-frontal cortex is the only part of the cerebral cortex that apparently can modify the response of the limbic system, particularly the amygdala, which is responsible for intense survival-based emotions. The medial pre-frontal cortex (particularly the insular and cingulate cortex) receives direct input from muscles, joints and visceral organs and registers them into consciousness (Damasio, 2000). Through awareness of these interoceptive sensations, i.e. through the process of tracking bodily-based awareness, we are able to access and modify our emotional responses, and deepen our core sense of self.
At first, directly contacting our bodily sensations can seem unsettling, even frightening. This is mostly because it is unfamiliar—we may have become accustomed to the (secondary) habitual emotions of distress and to our (negative) repetitive thoughts. We have also become used to searching for the source of our discomfort outside of ourselves. We may readily attribute them to other people’s actions or inactions. We simply are unfamiliar with experiencing something, as it is, without the encumbrance of analysis and judgment.
The first step in creating emotional change requires an active refusal to be seduced into (the content of) our negative thoughts. These thoughts seem so real (as to define us) and, in turn, reinforce the negative emotional states. One simple “cognitive” intervention I have found effective is simply to have the client say something like: “I have the thought that: I am a bad person, that I don’t deserve to feel good,” etc. It is merely by inserting the prefix “I have the thought that” which allows the person to begin to cultivate an observer stance, engaging the pre-frontal brain areas that have been shut down by the intense emotional states (see Van der Kolk, 2015). At least as important is the capacity to resist being swept away by the potent drive of an emotion or galvanized into immediate action. Rather, we need to choose to redirect our attention to the underlying physical sensations as they transform. This restorative sequence is the basis of Somatic Experiencing, the approach that I have developed during the past 45 years for resolving traumatic states (Levine, 1977, 1996, 2010, 2015; Payne, Levine, & Crane 2015; www.traumahealing.org).
Changing How We Feel; the Posture of Experience
One dreary, rainy, January afternoon in 1972, I was immersed in the warm, musty stacks of the Berkeley graduate library, sorting through the enumerable books on theories of emotion. This was well before the advent of computers and Google, so my search strategy was to find a relevant area in the graduate stacks, those vast literary catacombs, and spend the day browsing for relevant material. It seemed to me that there were nearly as many theories of emotions as there were authors. In this search, I rather accidently stumbled upon an astonishing treasure trove—the visionary work of a woman named Nina Bull. This innovative work provided me with a deep appreciation of the nature and structure of emotions and their rooting in the body. Her book, “The Attitude Theory of Emotion,” (1951, summarized in Levine, 2010) clarified what I was observing with my early body/mind clients. It suggested a clear conceptual framework and a strategy for the process of emotional change.
In the 1940s and 50s, Nina Bull, working at Columbia University, conducted some remarkable research in the experiential, observational, tradition of William James. In her studies, subjects were induced into a light “hypnotic” trance and various emotions were suggested to them while they were in this receptive state. These emotions included disgust, fear, anger, depression, joy, and triumph. Self-reports from the subjects were noted. In addition, a standardized procedure was devised whereby the subjects were observed by experimenters. These researchers were trained to accurately observe and record changes in the subjects’ postures. The postural patterns, both self-reported and objectively observed, were remarkably consistent across multiple subjects and researchers.
The pattern of disgust was noted to involve the internal sensations of nausea, as if in preparation to vomit, along with the observed behavior of turning away first with lip and then with head/neck. This pattern, as a whole, was labeled “revulsion” and could vary in intensity from the milder form of dislike to an almost violent urge to turn away and vomit. This latter acute response could be recognized as an effort to eject something toxic, or as a means of preventing being fed something that one doesn’t like. This type of reaction is seen when children are abused or forced to do something against their will; something that they cannot “stomach.” This could vary from forced bottle feeding to forced fellatio§ or, often, something they cannot stomach, metaphorically and psychologically.
Nina Bull then analyzed the fear response and found it consisted of a similar compulsion to avoid or escape and was associated with a generalized tensing up or freezing of the whole body. It was also noted that subjects frequently reported the desire to get away, which was opposed by an inability to move. This opposition led to paralysis of the entire body (though somewhat less in the head and neck). However, the turning away in fear was different from that of disgust. Associated with fear was the additional component of turning towards potential resources of security and safety.
In studying the emotion of anger, Bull also discovered a fundamental split. There was, on the one hand, a primary impulse to strike out and attack, as observed in a tensing of the back, arms, and fists (as if preparing to hit). However, there was also a strong secondary component of tensing the jaw, forearm, and hand. This was self-reported by the subjects, and observed by the experimenters, as a way of controlling and inhibiting the primary impulse to strike (see Somatic Experiencing Trauma Institute, 2014).
These experiments also explored the bodily aspects of sadness and depression. Sadness was associated with a weakness in the legs and an impulse to cry. However, depression was characterized, in the subject’s awareness, as a chronically interrupted drive. It was as though there was something they wanted but were unable to attain. These states of depression were frequently associated with a sense of “tired heaviness,” dizziness, headache and an inability to think clearly. The researchers observed a weakened impulse to cry (as though it were stifled), along with a collapsed posture, conveying defeat, and apparent lethargy. I have consistently observed similar postures in shame. We easily recognize that there is a fundamental difference between negative and positive emotions. When Bull studied the patterns of elation, triumph, and joy, she observed that these positive affects (in contrast to the negative ones of depression, anger, and disgust) did not have an inhibitory component; they were experienced as “pure energy” and “an unconstrained readiness for action.” Subjects feeling joy reported an expanded sensation in their chest which they experienced as “buoyant,” and which was associated with free, deep breathing. The observation of postural changes included a lifting of the head and an extension of the spine. These closely meshed behaviors and sensations facilitated a freer breathing and overall lightness.¶ This aforementioned “readiness for action” was accompanied by energy and the abundant sense of purpose and optimism that they would be able to achieve their goals.# Understanding the contradictory basis of the negative emotions, and their structural contrast to the positive ones, is revealing in the quest for emotional health and well-being. Recall that all of the negative emotions studied were comprised of two conflicting impulses, one propelling action and the other inhibiting (i.e., thwarting) that action. In addition, when a subject was “locked” into the posture of joy, by suggestion, then a contrasting mood (e.g., depression, anger or sadness) could not be produced unless the (joy) posture was first altered. The converse was also true; with feeling sadness or depression, it was not possible to feel joy unless that postural set was first changed. These observations are profoundly important in transforming trauma and its corrosive emotions, particularly that of shame.
There is poignancy to this truth, revealed years ago, in a simple exchange between Charlie Brown and Lucy. While walking together, Charlie, slumped and shuffling, was bemoaning his depression. Lucy suggested that he might try standing up straight to which Charlie replied, “but then I wouldn’t have a depression to complain about,” as he continued on his way resigned, slouched, and downtrodden. And what are we to do if we don’t have an ever vigilant Lucy to elucidate the ever perplexing obvious. However, as correct as Lucy was, in a metaphoric sense, mood-changing is not a matter of simply willing or imposing postural change (like the “proud” military stance). Indeed, altering one’s psychological disposition through postural change is a much more complex and subtle process. It is a process that is mediated by interoception** and imbued with the quality of spontaneous change.
The extensive life’s work of psychologist Paul Ekman adds the role of “facial posture” in the generation of emotional states. In experiments similar to Bull’s, Ekman trained numbers of subjects to contract only the specific muscles that were observed during the expression of a particular emotion. When subjects were able to accomplish this task (without being told what emotion they were simulating), remarkably they often experienced those feelings, including appropriate autonomic arousal states (Ekman, 2008).
In a quirky experiment, Fritz Strack and colleagues of the University of Würzburg, Germany had two groups of people judge how funny they found some cartoons (Strack, Martin, & Stepper, 1988). In the first group, the subjects were instructed to hold a pencil between their teeth without it touching their lips. This procedure forced them to smile (try it yourself). The second group was asked to hold the pencil with their lips, but this time not using their teeth. This forced a frown.
The results reinforced Ekman’s work, revealing that people experience the emotion associated with their expressions. In Strack’s experiments, those with even a forced smile felt happier and found the cartoons funnier than those who were forced to frown.
The Nobel Prize for medicine and physiology was awarded to Nikolaas Tinbergen in 1973 for his contribution to the field of ethology, the study of animal behavior in their natural environments.†† In his acceptance speech, Tinbergen took the liberty of extending his field of inquiry to the naturalistic observations of human behavior. In the article titled, “Ethology and Stress Disease,” he both speculated on the repetitive (bodily) behaviors of autistic children, as well as describing the beneficial effects of a method of postural re-education called “The Alexander Method” (Tingbergen, 1974). Both he and his family, in undergoing Alexander’s treatment process, had experienced dramatic improvement in sleep, blood pressure, cheerfulness, alertness, and resilience to stress, simply by altering their postural states as suggested by the work of Nina Bull. Other prominent scientists and educators had also written about the benefit of this treatment. These included John Dewey, Aldous Huxley, and scientists like G. E. Coghill, Raymond Dart, and even the great doyen of physiology, and earlier Nobel Prize recipient, Sir Charles Sherrington. While admiration from such prominent individuals is provocative, it hardly constitutes rigorous scientific proof. It is unlikely, on the other hand, that men of such intellectual rigor had all been duped.
Alexander’s therapeutic work (described in his book, The Use of the Self, 1932) consisted of very gentle manipulations, first exploratory and then corrective. It was essentially a re-education of one’s entire muscular/ postural system. Treatment began with the head and neck, and then subsequently included other body areas. There is no such thing as a right position, he discovered, but there is such a thing as a right direction.
F. M. Alexander and Nina Bull had, each in their own way, recognized the intimate role of postural muscular patterns in behavior and affect. Alexander (in the late 1980s), an Australian-born Shakespearian actor had made his discovery quite accidentally. One day, while performing Hamlet, he suddenly lost his voice. For this condition, he sought help from the finest doctors in Australia. Getting no relief, and desperate, he pursued assistance from the most influential physicians in England. Without a cure, and given that acting was his only profession, Alexander returned home in great despair. As the story goes, his voice returned spontaneously, only to elusively vanish again. Alexander took to observing himself in the mirror, hoping that he might notice something that correlated with his erratic vocal capacity. He did. He observed that the return of his voice was related to his posture. After numerous observations he made a startling discovery that there was a distinctly different posture; one associated with voice and another with no-voice. To his surprise, he discovered that the posture associated with the strong and audible voice felt “wrong,” while the posture of the weak or absent voice felt ”right.” Alexander pursued this observational approach for the good part of nine years. He came to the realization that the mute posture felt “good” merely because it was familiar, while the postural stance supporting voice felt “bad”, only because it was unfamiliar. Alexander discovered that certain muscular tensions could cause a compression of the head-neck-spine axis, resulting in respiratory problems and consequently the loss of voice. Decreasing these tensions would relieve the pressure and allow the spine to return to its full natural extension. Attending to this disparity allowed Alexander to cure himself of his affliction. Thus, through better mind-body communication, he was able to recover much of his natural ease of movement, leading to an economy of effort as well as improved performance. Realizing that he had the makings of a new career, Alexander gave up acting and began working with fellow actors and vocalists with similar performance problems. He also began working with musicians whose bodies were twisted and in pain from the strained postures they believed were required for playing their instruments. The great violinist, Yehudi Menuhen was one of his students. A number of famous pop stars and actors including Paul McCartney, Sting, and Paul Newman all received treatments from Alexander Method teachers and sung their praises loudly. However, even today, this method remains rather obscure.‡‡ This is largely because the muscles involved in postural adjustments are not under deliberate voluntary control, but involve, rather, minute contractions and relaxations of muscles. These derive from interoceptive awareness and are at the dim continuum (threshold) of pre-conscious awareness. Indeed, it is this challenge that had many of Alexander’s clients nearly tearing their hair out in frustration. In addition, it seems that Alexander (and many of his students) was not comfortable in dealing with emotions, and so likely inhibited his clients.
Let us now combine Alexander’s observations (of posture’s effect on function) with Lucy’s wise incite into the cause of Charlie Brown’s unnecessary, but self-perpetuating, suffering. Together, they illustrate the centrality of body-self-awareness in the change process. Perhaps the most effective way of changing one’s functional competency and mood is through altering one’s postural set and thence changing proprioceptive and kinesthetic feedback to the brain (Blakeslee, 2007). As previously mentioned, the medial prefrontal cortex (which receives much of its input from the interior of the body) appears to be the only area of the neo-cortex that can directly alter the limbic system, and in turn, emotionality. Hence, the awareness of bodily sensations is critical in changing stress patterns and emotional states.
Attitude—Reconciling Emotions and Feelings:
Through a related experiential set of experiments and analysis, Nina Bull demonstrated that emotional feelings occur only when emotional action is restrained. Or said in another way, it is the restraint that allows the postural attitude to become conscious for the attitude to become a feeling-awareness. We are, once again, reminded that it is primarily through the motivated awareness of internal sensations that the corrosive dragons of negative emotional states can be tamed. Recall how, instead of expressing his habitual rage, the samurai’s personal hell was arrested, exposed, and brought into awareness by the impeccable timing of the Zen master. It was when the brash samurai learned to, momentarily, hold back, contain and “feel–into” himself, that he was able to transform his rage into peaceful bliss. Such is the alchemy of emotional transformation through the felt sense.
What I believe that William James missed, and what Nina Bull has deeply grasped, is the reciprocal relationship between the expression of emotion and the sensate feeling of emotion. When we are “mindlessly” expressing emotion that is precisely what we are, in fact, doing. Excessive emotional reactivity (or suppression) almost always precludes conscious awareness of the underlying (body-based) feelings. On the other hand, restraint and containment of the expressive impulse allows us to become aware of our underlying postural attitude. It is the holding back (the restraint) of expression that brings a feeling into consciousness. Deep change only occurs where there is containment and (embodied) mindfulness; and mindfulness only occurs where there is a bodily (felt-sense) feeling, i.e. the awareness of the postural attitude so that it can shift and regulate.
Transforming Terror: A Case Example
It is life’s only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life... It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unerving ease... You feel yourself weakening, wavering... Fear next turns fully to your body, which is already aware that something terribly wrong is going on... Your muscles begin to shiver as if they had malaria and your knees to shake as though they were dancing. Your heart strains too hard, while your sphincter relaxes too much. And so with the rest of your body.
—Yann Martel, The Life of Pi
Louise was working on the 80th floor of the north tower of the World Trade Center, the clear blue morning of September 11, 2001. After witnessing the walls in her office moving twenty feet in her direction, Louise mobilized immediately, springing to her feet and readying to flee for her life. With the help of a courageous off-duty detective, she was slowly and methodically led down 80 floors, via stairwells filled with the suffocating, acrid smell of burning jet fuel and debris. After finally reaching the mezzanine an hour and twenty minutes later, the south tower suddenly collapsed. The shock waves lifted Louise into the air, throwing her violently on top of a crushed bloody body.
In the weeks following her miraculous survival, a dense yellow fog enveloped her in a deadening numbness. Louise felt indifferent by day; merely going through the motions of living. Her great passion for classical music, “no longer interested [her]...[she couldn’t] stand listening to it.” While numb most of the time, at night she was awakened by her own screaming and sobbing. For the first time in her life, this once highly motivated executive could not imagine a future for herself; terror had become the organizing principle of her life.
During our session, I guided Louise to the experience of being led down the staircase where she encountered a locked door on the seventieth floor. Suddenly, trapped, and unable to complete the escape, her body became paralyzed with fear. In working through this experience, which reestablished her thwarted running reflexes, she opened her eyes, looked at me and said: “I thought it was fear that gets you through...but it’s not...it’s something more powerful, something much bigger than fear...it’s something that transcends fear.” And what a deep biological truth she reveals here.
The feeling of danger is the awareness of a defensive attitude. It is NOT fear! It prepares us to defend ourselves through directed escape. Similarly, when our aggression is not thwarted, but is clearly directed, we don’t feel anger but instead experience the offensive attitude of protection, combat-ability, and assertiveness (of “healthy aggression,” see Levine, 2014). It is only when the normal orientation and defensive resources have failed to resolve a situation that we see fear, terror, or rage, non-directed flight, paralysis, or collapse. Rage and terror-panic are the secondary emotional anxiety states that are evoked when the orientation processes, and the preparedness to flee or attack (felt originally as danger), are not executed successfully. This distortion only occurs when primary escape does not resolve the situation, or is thwarted, as was the case when she came to the locked door.
The emotion of fear may follow from the sensate feeling of danger—that is if we cannot flee or otherwise protect ourselves in an effective way. Thus the normal “unfolding” of activity is suddenly substituted by what Claparede and McDougall (grandparents of modern psychology) titled, a “miscarriage of behavior.” It is in this way, that emotional reactivity hijacks the adaptive (feeling/sensation based) behaviors of orientation and defense.
Feelings are the basic path by which we make our way in the world. In contrast, (fixated) emotional states derive from frustrated drives and particularly the thwarted (“last-ditch”) mobilization of emergency (fight/flight/freeze). With the paucity of saber-tooth tigers, this critical reaction of last resort rarely makes sense in modern life. However, we are compelled to deal with a myriad of very different threats, such as speeding cars and over-eager surgeons, for which we lack much in the way of evolutionarily prepared protocols.
In conclusion: Emotions are our constant companions, either enhancing our lives or detracting from them. How we navigate the maze of emotions is a central factor in the conduct of our lives, for better or for worse. The question is under what conditions are emotions adaptive and conversely, when are they maladaptive? In general, the more that an emotion takes on the quality of “shock” or “eruption,” or the more that it is suppressed or repressed, the more prominent is the mal-adaptation. Indeed, often an emotion begins in a useful (organizing) form and then, because we suppress it, turns against us in the form of physical symptoms or in a delayed and exaggerated explosion. Anger, when denied, can build to an explosive level. There is a popular expression that is apt here: “That which we resist, persists.” As damaging as emotions can be, repressing them only compounds the problem. However, let it be duly noted that the difference between repression/suppression and restraint/containment is significant though elusive. While cathartic expressions of emotion in therapy sessions can be of value, reliance on “emotional release” stems from a fundamental misunderstanding about the very nature of feelings and emotions. The work of Nina Bull, described earlier, provides us with insight, both into the nature of habitual emotions and why feelings accessed through body awareness, rather than emotional release, brings us the kind of lasting change that we so desire.
When we poses the tools necessary to deconstruct (the postural attitude of) an emotion, and thereby defang even the most intense and corrosive emotions, we begin to make peace with them and enlist their positive qualities. It is essential, however, to take this in small chunks and to titrate our exposure to them so that they can be digested and assimilated (Levine, 1996, 2010). The existential theologian, Henri Nouwen, says it this way: “You have to live through your pain gradually and thus deprive it of its power over you. Yes, you must go into the place of your pain, but only when you have gained some new ground (some inner strength). When you enter your pain simply to experience it in its rawness, it can pull you away from where you want to go.” It is, I believe, the capacity to shift our postural attitude, through interoceptive awareness, that is just such an effective tool in transforming fixated emotional states.
Reflect, once again, on how the samurai warrior delicately, but definitively, arrested his compulsion to strike, allowing himself to feel his (former) murderous rage simply as pure energy, and then ultimately as the bliss of feeling alive, as was advocated by the Buddhist teacher, Pema Chödrön, in the opening of this chapter.
References
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* See Damasio, Antonio. The Feeling of What Happens; Le Doux, Joseph. The Emotional Brain
† This is the same type of unconscious brain stem and limbic system information that evokes the readiness for movement (i.e. pre-movement) we saw with Libet’s subjects.
‡ These specious attributions of causation, are like those of the subjects in Wegner’s experiments who, falsely, believed that they had willed the movement of the experimenter’s arms.
§ See A&E’s original show, Intervention, Episode #74 (Season 6, episode 2), about a girl named Nicole, who was forced to perform fellatio by her next-door neighbor (and father’s best friend) for several years. Once her family found out, they tried to cover it up, and Nicole was forced to live next door to the man for years after. Later, Nicole developed an overactive gag-reflex, leaving her unable to swallow anything, including her own saliva. She was placed on a feeding tube.
¶ This is something that was also observed by F.M. Alexander when his lost speech returned.
# See Triumph and the Will to Persevere, in Levine 2014.
** Interoception is the composite (experienced) afferent sensory information derived from muscles, joints, blood vessels, and viscera.
†† His speech was reprinted in 1974 by the prestigious journal, Science.
‡‡ Many of Alexander’s principles inspired the work of Moshe Feldenkrais and Ida P. Rolf.