A category error: cognitive therapy versus somatic regulation

Linn of Dee circular

I chose this picture because a river is constantly changing its state, and physical state change is the ultimate answer in this piece.

The day before going to my first singing group I had listened to a guided meditation by Jeff Warren from his 'Ease Your Social Anxiety' series.  His podcasts are a mindfulness version of "Thought For The Day" (a long-standing spot on BBC Radio 4 where faith leaders reflect on issues of the day), which leads into a few minutes of meditation. It's an easy route in to meditation or for when you just don't have much time or when you fancy a snack from the  world of wellbeing.

Jeff says to focus on the person, the focus of your anxiety, in front of you as someone with their own history, their own troubles. In the singing group, faced with the two people in my threat categories, I tried.  Spot the difference. It wasn't remotely helpful.  Actually, I'd had that presentiment at the time I listened: I don't think this is gonna work. My threat antennae were working at another frequency. There comes a point where your nervous system is so close to panic that trying to relate cognitively to the other person doesn't do any good at all.

I tried another of Jeff's meditations in the same series. It was a similar idea: think of the people around you as “Buddha” or “ a fairy godmother” - “secretly wise and kind”. It “puts him in a good mood” and makes him feel more comfortable.

Those techniques belong to a different world than mine. As such they're another cue that I don’t have “social anxiety” but maybe they work for people who do.

I have specific threat-based responses based on my system developing patterns of threat at a subconscious level.  Incoming sensory data is compared against learned threat-related templates stored at a largely subconscious level. The brain estimates the likelihood of the current situation being a threat and if so initiates the corresponding response: OK or RUN/FREEZE/FIGHT. 

 Trauma biases those predictions toward false positives for specific classes of situation. So while the smell of candy floss may trigger no freeze response, in my case seeing / hearing a heavy Scottish woman of working age specifically in my town is flagged as dangerous because there was a past danger, even though that danger has not been active for the best part of 6 months.

The system is actually doing what it's supposed to do, the stored threat templates just got overloaded by trauma. The traumatic experience(s) didn't discharge the way animals, and some people, discharge them, so the body keeps looking for patterns of similar threat.

The most purpose Jeff's meditations served me were as a faint reminder that not everyone is a threat but again - it's the body that needs to know, not the mind.

My curiosity that Jeff's techniques might help me usefully shows a category error: he is doing top-down, cognitive–imaginative regulation to soften mild anticipatory discomfort and that presupposes safety. That is fine and it could well work within a specific terrain.

On the other hand, a nervous system in an active threat state is only going to respond well from the body, through sensory, rhythmic and relational cues. It's a difficult thing to explain in words but you know it when you feel it. You know when you are being met with or finding or using a stimulus that works to change your physiological state.  It might be how a person relates or you, or birdsong, ambient music, watching a cat move or being aware of your own footsteps.  It will be something physical in the immediate environment.    Or it might be medication.

So while it might be interesting to think, before meeting the threat: Oh, everyone has their story, let's meet them with empathy, when actually faced with someone you feel as a threat, that thought is going to go right out the window. You might even beat yourself up about it later:

Mind: Oh, I could have been more tolerant / empathetic / understanding.

Body: Yeah, buddy, you're lucky you got me. Right or wrong, at the time it was a threat!

My first response on hearing this meditation was, this isn't going to work and, when faced with the treat, I (very briefly) tested it out. It didn't work. So why test it at all?  We consciously work all the time with language and reasoning.  The mind is constantly trying to persuade, rationalise and make meaning. In this case, persuade that a cognitive technique might solve a problem. Whereas the body is repeatedly demonstrating, that faced with a threat, it won't. This distinction is something I've been aware of for a few months and I am tripped up by it over and over. It is the same category error mistake in different guises that I keep making over and over. But the more you do see it, the easier it becomes to see. 

You don't reason your way out of threat states: you change state.