Alpha 5.0

[mat422]

Thanks guys.

On a side note I came across something that really made sense. It has to do with trauma. I haven't read too in depth yet, but the gist of it is that we humans get stuck in trauma. From there we operate out of really really basic instinct. That good ol fight or flight response. When you get stuck in trauma it makes life infinitely difficult because your logical brain is telling you to move forward while your more reptillian brain is telling you to either run, freeze, or fight.

And it got me thinking about anxiety. The common belief is that anxiety is caused by negative beliefs. But I'm not so sure about that. It is a component, but I think it's really just a manifestation of that deeper primitive response. I remember reading that we make decisions based on instinct and later rationalize with logic. So it makes sense that humans might put words to a very deep unsettling feeling in order to rationalize why we must avoid it.

Also depression, despite how it sounds, is actually a highly aroused state. It's almost like being stuck in fight or flight 24/7. Maybe it's just the body stuck in trauma.

I'm gonna be reading a book about this more. I think this is something I really overlooked. I think this might be the key to getting my life back on track. This is pre-beliefs, that gut level response that shouldn't be ignored.

Trauma is a BIG one.

If you have trauma, you definitely should work on it.

For myself, the way I started approaching my development was to recognize that my trauma was a very real component of my cognitive experience. The key, then, became dealing with the trauma itself.

Tapping is proving very useful in that regard.

I've been able to "tap my way out" of traumatic states simply by being firm. It's never easy, nor is it very clean (when dealing with an un-tapped trauma, sometimes I can only tap the points once, and each point may take me 5 or 10 minutes, because I'm often frozen in my mind. Think "shell shock".), but the improvements are very noticeable.

I think tapping breaks the cycle somehow, whereas if you never tapped, you'd keep doing the same thing over and over, forever.

I don't have particularly traumatic experiences, well not to most people. But the thing I realized with trauma is it's not what happens, it's how you respond to it. Like I said, I grew up very sensitive so I'm convinced I was prone to more trauma from little things most people would shrug off.

Tapping can work, but it tends to be slow because it operates on the more emotional level. When the true problem is your survival instincts kicking in. There's a deeper layer that most self help glosses over, we've been told to go deep into emotions. But the real depth is finding out the underlying traumatic reaction and disarming that.

It's all about breaking deep deep knee jerk responses. It goes even further too. There's this theory about mirror neurons. Essentially when you witness something happen, your own body tends to emulate it. So it's possible that even witnessing a guy being rejected or humiliated by a woman could cause the same neurons to fire in your own brain and build those deep associations. Possible, but all speculation of course.

I thought the subconscious was the deepest part of the mind, but I think this goes further. The subconscious still understands language, but this part is very instinctual and communicating with it you have to get on a different wavelength almost.