“Put aside any worries. and with a serene heart, purify yourself of irritability and vexation of spirit.” ~ The Buddha.

When I wasn’t laughing out loud, I found myself thinking about the thought that went into the writing of this fascinating and lucid memoir by Daniel Smith. In fact, it appears Daniel Smith has been thinking about anxiety for most of his life.

He has not only thought about it, he has lived it, researched it and found a way to convey its terrible condition of suffering with grace, dignity and shocking humor.

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“Yea, they sacrificed their sons and daughters unto devils, And shed innocent blood, even the blood of their sons and of their daughters, whom they sacrificed unto the idols of Canaan and the land was polluted with blood…Therefore was the wrath of the Lord kindled against his people, in so much that he abhorred his own inheritance.” ~  Psalm 106.

The Kindling Effect has been used to describe the neurological tendency of the brain to become over-sensitized following exposure to trauma (MacFarlane, Van der Kolk, et.al, 1995). The result is the lowering of an individual’s threshold to trauma, making the individual both more susceptible to re-traumatization as well as re-victimization.

The individual is more likely to suffer the biological effects of trauma as evidenced by mood disturbances, personality disorders, anxiety states, as well as the more classic DAM IV symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Authors such as MacFarlane and Van der Kolk have referred to this composite of post trauma symptomology categorically as Disorders of Extreme Stress. Re-victimization becomes more likely because of this sustained condition of arousal.

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“All things truly wicked start from an innocence.” ~ Ernest Hemingway.

The Banding of Calf # 257  

Calf #257 was in the field with his mother. The calf was on one side of the fence and the mother was on the other side. The rancher had plans to band calf #257 on this particularly cold spring day.

The wind offered an aggressive spray of dirt and gravel; stinging like a thousand small bees on the exposed parts of the rancher and his son. Banding of calves is done within a week or weeks of their birth. It is a form of castration.

Banding is less painful than the removal of the testicles, but it is still excessive on the scale of pain for a little newborn to endure. The calf, being transformed into a steer by way of castration, will often jump, howl, writhe, roll on the ground, and kick for hours after the procedure which is done without anesthesia. The mother of the calf is usually nearby. She is considered extremely dangerous during the process of banding. Her baby will scream in agony and she will be powerless to do anything about it.

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“Who speaks to the instincts speaks to the deepest in mankind and finds the readiest response.” ~ Amos Bronson Alcott.

We have been talking about dating, mating, lovers and that special relationship known as marriage, intended in part to propagate our species. We fall in love, make love, have babies and secure the future of human beings on this planet. We are social animals and we need one another. This is the good news.

The bad and good news is that we are creatures of memory. We are not unique from other animals in this regard. Other animals rely on memory, the past, and traumatic experiences for their survival. If we are a small bird and forget about the hawk we will not survive.

Sometimes memories will find their way into our daily choices and decision-making where relationship partners are concerned. Trauma and painful life events don’t have to be with us on a daily basis. In fact, it is best if they aren’t. Love relationships have a way of teasing these old things out if a part of how you were harmed was within a relationship.

We want to learn to Unlock Our Inner Instinct and use it to our advantage. Here is one way to do this:

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“The minute people fall in love, they become liars.” ~ Harlan Ellison.

Perhaps the minute people fall in love, they become intoxicated by the Limbic structures’s influence over their decision making. Let’s take a look at more relationship scenarios:

Jenna is a svelte blond in her late twenties. Single and successful; athletic and driven. Jenna has had more dates than found under the letter J in the phone book. Most of these dates were sexually consummated. She doesn’t feel used by men; she feels she is doing the using.

Jenna can’t find Mr. Right.

Let’s take a look at her history: only child, dad an attorney, mother a model, parents divorced when she was eight, parents are still fighting, both parents know how to carry issues to extremes, and both parents have been verbally vicious to Jenna during her childhood. The parents did not evidence good control over their own Limbic system structures. There was only episodic monitoring of feeling and impulse by the frontal cortex. Jenna became familiar with extremes. Extremes were normalized. To be extreme is to be normal.

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“The past is our definition. We may strive, with good reason, to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it, but we will escape it only by adding something better to it.” ~ Wendell Barry.

In the last blog we looked at how to match a trigger in the present with a memory from the past. This activity is about using your pre-frontal cortex and your Limbic system structures to match a trigger with a memory.

The goal is to provide clarity in terms of a response on your part and to reduce anxiety so you can make better decisions.

Let’s assume you have met the perfect woman. She is attractive, you find her to be kind, you like the way she cooks and you like the way she is compassionate toward others. She is able to take care of her own affairs and is fiscally responsible. She is in good overall health and she like her family of origin. She has issues with things from her past, but overall she feels she did relatively well with her childhood.

So, why don’t you just go for it and make this a permanent thing? You’ve been dating for about a year now.

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“The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you will see.” ~ Winston Churchill.

Archaeologists excavate sites in order to learn something about the past. The more we know about the past, the more we will be able to use that information in the present and in crafting what we want our future to look like.

Just how important is your past when it comes to finding, establishing, maintaining and cultivating significant interpersonal relationships?

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“It has been said that time heals all wounds. I do not agree. The wounds remain. In time, the mind, protecting its sanity, covers them with scar tissue, and the pain lessens, but it is never gone. ” ~ Rose Kennedy.

So far we have covered the following psychosocial stages of development as it applies to human development and the developing couple: normal autism, hatching, practicing, separation individuation, and the oedipal stage.

Let’s continue.

The Latency Stage of development is characterized by quiet withdrawal. It lasts in human development from approximately eight to twelve years of age. It is the stage directly before adolescence. Parents often assume, due to the intellectual and reasoning abilities of a child this age, that they can take care of themselves. This is far from true.

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“There are certain clues at a crime scene which by their very nature do not lend themselves to being collected or examined. How’d one collect love, rage, hatred, fear…? These are things that we’re trained to look for.” ~ James Reese.

We left off in the last blog discussing relationships and the development of a human being. It is my premise that relationships develop in a similar way to the way we developed from infancy through adulthood.

The developmental stages are important to know so that we can next discuss the way your new partner or an established partner may act as a trigger for old memories stored in the Limbic System structures of your brain.

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“Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to the truth but not its twin.” ~ Barbara Kingsolver.

Relationships are complicated. So too is the brain and our memories of our first relationships in life. Most trauma takes place at the hands of people; most trauma comes by way of a relationship of some kind.

Let’s look at a particular type of relationship, the love/partner relationship. When you are looking for that special man or woman to spend your life with, what might you expect in terms of the development of that relationship? What are the red flags being supplied by your Limbic system? What are the warning signs this might be a return to an old emotional crime scene?

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