Fight, Flight and Freeze Response

I found this article on Dr. Mercola's site that explains what is going on in the background when abuse happens. I thought to share it. 

"The basic idea is that when trauma occurs, whether the injury is to your body, mind or spirit, two basic processes are activated. The first is the fight-or-flight response, which when activated increases your heart rate and blood pressure. Blood is shunted from digestion into tensing muscles, heart and lungs. Stress hormones are produced to help you fight or run.

While crucial in acute situations of danger, the fight-or-flight response is meant to be turned on and back off quickly. As soon as you’re out of immediate danger, you’re supposed to return back to balance, feeling safe and at ease. Problems arise when we go into fight-or-flight and stay there long after a traumatic event is over.

“Sometimes it’s because the trauma is ongoing. That’s what happens to kids who are in abusive or neglectful situations. But sometimes, we’ve experienced a traumatic event and we’re stuck in that fight-or-flight. It’s like our foot is on the accelerator and we can’t take it off.

So, we become anxious and agitated. We have trouble sleeping, trouble concentrating. We’re impatient with other people, impatient with ourselves. Also, we’re stuck in that past. We replay the images, the images of someone abusing us, someone assaulting us or a boss treating us badly or what happened to us when we were deployed …”

The Freeze Response

The second process activated by trauma is the freeze response. Fight-or-flight is part of the sympathetic nervous system, which is one-half of the autonomic nervous system. The other half of the autonomic nervous system is the parasympathetic nervous system.

“In general, we’re trying to mobilize the parasympathetic nervous system to balance out fight-or-flight,” Gordon explains. “But sometimes, if the situation is so overwhelming and so inescapable, we go into what is called the freeze response, which is mediated and governed by the oldest part of the parasympathetic nervous system, deep in the mid-brain.

We just shut down; we collapse. We put out large amounts of endorphins to protect us against the pain that’s there. We distance ourselves because the trauma is so overwhelming and inescapable. We can’t do anything else except shut down our bodies and close off our minds.

This happens, for example, to children who were abused by their parents, because the abuse is terrible and they can’t get away from it. It happens to people who were assaulted by others who are much more powerful than they are. It happens when we’re raped. It happens in a warzone when we can’t get away and we can’t fight. We’re just overpowered by the situation.”

When these two responses — fight-or-flight and freeze — continue, they are the essence of post-traumatic stress. “One way to look at it is that post-traumatic stress keeps us chained to the past, to the traumatic events, which we keep on replaying in our body and mind,” Gordon explains. “We’re worried it will happen again.”

The essence of healing psychological trauma is to return back into the present moment because, when traumatized, you’re chained to what happened in the past. You worry it will happen again. If you can relax and come into the present, then the trauma starts to dissipate."

Tapping is one of the tools to help us return to emotional homeostasis or neutrality. 

EFT is not a substitute for good medical or psychological care, so please contact your own personal physicians when this type of help is needed.

Are You Ready to Heal? Here's What is Going on in Your Brain!

This is a well written article about abuse/trauma.

I want to highlight out a few important points: Please read the article. It explains a lot about why you feel the way you do. It's not your fault, but it is your responsibility to do something about it!

1) "Only a state of non hyper-arousal allows activation of the prefrontal cortex needed for learning and problem solving."

Cathy Corbett Reiling says this about every post she makes! Tapping quiets the body and mind. Only when your mind and body are QUIET can you process your emotional issues. Period.

2) "When those hormones reach a high level, they suppress the activity of the hippocampus and it loses its ability to function. Information that would make it possible to differentiate between a real and imagined threat never reaches the cortex and a rational evaluation of the information isn't possible (Rothschild, 2004)."

I've said this a thousand times. We need tapping because our subconscious mind (SC) has NO concept of time (kinda like God - not saying our mind is God b/c it isn't but it is made in His image, like the rest of us!), so our old emotional stuff isn't truly IN the past tense UNTIL we tap and put it there! This is the work of sanctification. Salvation is FREE, but our work here on earth (sanctification) is to actively DO something to become more like our Savior. Tapping will accomplish that if you do it well and thoroughly!

3) "If a particular stimulus is misinterpreted as a threat, this leads to immediate fight/flight/freeze responses (to non-threatening stimuli). This causes this system to respond to minor irritations in a totalistic manner (Streeck-Fischer & van der Kolk, 2000)."

When we have had trauma, particularly early childhood trauma, we ALWAYS misinterpret everything! We've been programmed to do that. Repetition of hard emotional events ARE learned just like learning your multiplication tables in 3rd grade!! Over and over events are repeated, until trauma is implanted so solidly in our SC we misinterpret minor things in a major way - automatically. We fly OFF the handle at the slightest provocation (and then feel remorseful, sad, guilty, etc. afterwards)!

4) "Research shows that environments of extreme stress lead to increased cortisol levels (Murray-Close, Han, Cicchetti, Crick, & Rogosch, 2008) which can lead to decreased hippocampal volume. Decreased hippocampal volume has been associated with poorer declarative memory which places adults at greater risk of developing PTSD-like symptoms, and is closely correlated with experiences of depression and physical inflammations (Danese, Pariante, Caspi, Taylor & Poulton, 2006)"

Hippocampus, which is our SC's "historian", can go off-line when abuse happens in early childhood. We remember NOTHING - all our memories, both good and bad, are buried. It's a protective mechanism.

Hippocampus shrinks about 35%+ in PTSD like trauma.

Sadly, our SC knows the emotional pain is still all there and runs our life around it. We become sick, depressed feeling, anxious feeling, crabby, act out, etc. and we cannot figure out why we (or our children) do these things.

We do them because our emotional pain has never been dealt with completely. Our body, mind, and soul are screaming for help. We need to tap. We probably should hire a EFT Practitioner to help us process our emotional stuff. We need emotional help and God has created tapping to do just that!

5) "Through this chain of events, violence and abuse pass from generation to generation (Teicher, 2002)."

I've never really said what I am going to say here this pointedly, except in personal conversations. And I may make some people angry when I say this.

Emotional issues are running YOUR life and they WILL run your children's life, too. This stuff IS generational. It is what Exodus 34:7 & Numbers 14:18 say. Your emotional issue may NOT be your fault, but the pain will continue for 3-4 generations. We see it all the time. Scientific research is proving this fact.

Will the buck stop with you? Are you willing to do the work necessary so that your children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren will be FREE to live their lives as our Lord intended in His joy, peace, and freedom?

Are you?

Sherrie Rice Smith

Certified EFT Practitioner

EFTforChristians.com

Author of EFT for Christians Tapping in God's Peace & Joy (2016)

Author of EFT for Christians Advanced  (2017)

Author of EFT for Christians 52 Tapping Devotions (Christmas, 2017)

Author of EFT for Christians Devotions (Christmas, 2019)

Use Promo Code SAVE20 when ordering from Publisher to get 20% Off

Tapping and ADD - An Older Article

EFT for Christians receives questions from all over the globe about a multitude of tapping subjects.

There is a steady stream of inquiries about tapping with ADD or autistic children. Yesterday this was posted on another EFT board. The technique is old as compared to how we tap today, but there is no reason it cannot be adapted to meet today's tapping standards. The language is a bit different, but perhaps this link will help someone out there!

Since EFT tapping has a calming effect when used, it would make sense that it should be helpful for at least some parts of a child's life who has a hyperactive streak.

In my EFT for Christians YouTube instructional video series, the first 4 YouTubes (Videos 1-4) are about tapping with children. These videos are collected ideas and thoughts about using EFT on the little ones.

Remember, EFT is not a substitute for sound medical advice. Please consult your own personal physician before doing any tapping work.

Sherrie Rice Smith

Certified EFT Practitioner

EFTforChristians.com

Author of EFT for Christians 4 Book Series

EFTC 52 Tapping Devotions, Volume 2 Coming Christmas, 2019

Personal Peace Procedure Tapping

This article explains a bit of how trauma forms and gets lodged in our body, and Craig makes a good point in this quote below:

"It is also why when EFT is being done and we start thinking about a childhood memory that at first seems rather innocuous and we start tapping and tuning into the memory, we commonly discover far more emotional intensity than we originally expected to find there."

It is this particular point that pinpoints why we say when using the "Personal Peace Procedure" always add EVERY memory, good or bad, to the list because often as you tap the memory you will find lots of emotional stuff underneath you honestly didn't know was hidden there. The little unexpected, hidden sensory pieces that when repeated often enough (and once is often enough) create our perception (that may be false impressions) about what life is all about. It is these perceptual core beliefs that we use as guidelines and guide posts for the rest of our lives, boxing us into a very small area of existence.

Remember, EFT is not a substitute for medical help so please contact your own personal physician whenever emotional or medical assistance is needed.

Sherrie Rice Smith

Certified EFT Practitioner

EFTforChristians.com

Author of EFT for Christians 5 Book Series

Tapping & Metaphors

I liked this comment from Dr. Peter Levine about working with trauma, "The organism uses what it already knows to describe what it is experiencing. Don't take it literally. A sensation can feel like it is fuzzy, jagged, made of glass, wood, or plastic. Obviously, 'feel like' is the key part of the description. There isn't anything inside you that is really fuzzy or jagged, unless you have suffered some very poorly executed surgical procedures. The sensations just feel like these things. THEY ARE METAPHORS [my emphasis]. Sensations, however, can also be literal and correspond with information received from organs, bones, and muscles."

He goes on to explain that many of our memories are composits of multiple memories.

As we all learned in EFT class, the truth of memories is irrelevant just like the descriptions probably aren't literal. It is how it all FEELS that is important and the tapping changes those feelings into something more positive, neutralizing the negative implications in the process.

It allows us once again to become alive, spontaneous, ready to explore life as we once did as kids, enjoying every single moment as we step into that present mindfulness!

Please keep tapping!

Remember, EFT is not a substitute for sound medical advice, so please take care of yourself and call your own personal physician when necessary!

Sherrie Rice Smith, R.N. (Retired)

EFTforChristians.com

Author of 3 EFT for Christians books

EFTforChristians@gmail.com 

Outcomes

EFT is an amazing tool to allow us to stop carrying emotional loads that we need to simply let go and let God handle.

Often we are too vested in other peoples' outcomes when those outcomes aren't up to us.

Tapping helps us divest ourselves of holding ourselves responsible for other peoples' actions, thoughts and habitual behaviors.

Let God handle it. Tap!

EFT is not a substitute for standard medical or psychological care, so please consult your own personal physician when needed.

Sherrie Rice Smith, R.N. (Retired)

Certified EFT Practitioner

EFTforChristians.com

Author of EFT for Christians (2015)

Author of EFT for Christians, Tapping in God's Peace & Joy (2016)

Author of EFT for Christians Advanced (2017)

Epigenetics and Tapping

Epigenetics is simply defined as the study of biological processes that will switch disease genes on and off. To say this simply – we only have less than 15% of our genetic material as completely predetermined. This might include height, hair color, shape of our nose, but our disease future is not only in God’s hands, but it is also up to our free will!

Because we know that emotionally negative life events do turn on disease genes, it is our choice to do the emotional work to keep these genes turned off, or perhaps to reverse any genes that have already turned on (allow God to heal us). This statement is powerful! God has granted us dominion over the earth (Genesis), but it also appears He has granted us more dominion over our own body than ever before thought!

Let me state this one more time. Highly emotionally charged life memories can allow disease genes, such as heart disease, diabetes, cancer, neurological problems, such as MS and ALS, etc. to “manifest” in our body. Conversely, it appears that negating and neutralizing those same highly charged events and the perceptions they left us with will do the opposite – keep disease, both chronic and acute, genes turned off, keeping us in good or better health. Research routinely continues to show us how powerfully important our environmental impact is to us.

Essentially anything we come into contact with including what we eat, where we live, who we grew up with, how we sleep and exercise, how we were treated by others, our educational and economic levels, sights, sounds, and smells in our everyday life shifts and changes our internal cellular chemistry.

Epigenetics, a relatively new science, has proven that cells are respond constantly to their environment. Each cell has internal and external antennae that continuously scan our body/mind and our habitat for clues it needs to maintain homeostasis. Our SC wants total stability; it hates change, so it acts like a chemist adding in a dollop of this neurotransmitter, or subtracting a dollop of that hormone based on what our conscious mind would consider insignificant environmental clues just to keep our body stable. Our genes respond situation by situation to all outside and inside thoughts, reactions, and situations, all of which are determined by our emotional perception to what is going on.

So, what does this mean to you and me? We have a greater control over our genetic “destiny” than ever imagined. The field of epigenetics has made it quite clear that our life beliefs and our perceptions about life events deeply affect our physical health. Those perceptions and beliefs literally turn disease genes on or keep them off.

Dr. Bruce Lipton, a cellular biologist, has written an astounding book, albeit from a new age perspective, about this topic. Dr. Lipton’s research seems to prove we can move past our internal and external environmental stressors and move toward better health and well-being by down-regulating the impact of negative emotional beliefs and memories which then down-regulate our disease genes.

If you want to read further on this topic, pick up a copy of his book Biology of Belief. Another excellent book on this topic, another book that will amaze you, is Dawson Church’s Genie in Your Genes. I recommend both as good educational reading."

Sherrie Rice Smith

Certified EFT Practitioner

EFTforChristians.com

Author of EFT for Christians 4 Book Series

EFTC 52 Tapping Devotions, Volume 2 Coming Christmas, 2019