you’re conditioned (think Pavlov’s dogs) to respond to certain situations with learned knee-jerk behaviors.
Think of this tiny brain structure as the seat of primal fears (Inner Child) and the trigger-point for your reactive patterns (Outer Child) to those fears. Just as feet and noses vary from person to person, so do our amygdalae. Some of us have more prominent, easily activated amygdalae than others.
My amygdala must be huge. I’m a train wreck if I even think about attempting a new relationship.
I have a hyperactive amygdala. My Outer Child is off to the races if my partner disagrees with me. It takes over before my Adult Self has a chance.
Your higher thinking brain can send messages to your amygdala, but that’s a dial-up connection compared to the information superhighway that links the amygdala with the part of your brain that carries out your behavioral impulses. The amygdala’s job is to prepare you to act first, think later. It creates a state of action-readiness to prime you for an instant emergency response. You fight, flee, or freeze if your amygdala perceives any potential threat to your well-being. And this all happens under the radar of your conscious awareness.
Long ago the time it took to react to a threat could be the difference between life and death. You ran or were eaten for lunch by a tiger! Today’s threats to safety and well-being take different forms. And they’re individualized. Your amygdala’s stimulus-response system has been conditioned by your own personal history of emotional experiences, stemming all the way back to when you were born—experiences you’ve mostly forgotten. The way you respond, which emergency defenses you use, that’s uniquely yours too.
The amygdala is always on the lookout for a threat and it picks up subliminal triggers. This causes you to react automatically before your higher thinking brain has a chance to consider a more prudent course of action. In other words, you flinch before you think. Yes, flinching can save your life if you’re jerking away from a rock hurtling in your direction, but when there is no physical threat, flinching can make you appear jumpy and extremely nervous.
When you perceive a threat—you fear your partner may be falling out of love with you—your amygdala sends an urgent warning down through the brain (to areas like the brain stem) to activate a behavioral response. These behaviors stem from a two-part process: first a buildup of emotional arousal in your amygdala; then a behavioral discharge of activity. In this sense, emotion and behavior—stimulus and response—function like symbiotic twins: One feels; the other reacts. Inner feels; Outer acts it out.
I screamed at my boyfriend over this little thing, knowing my outburst would be the last straw, but I couldn’t stop myself.
Your primal fears and your learned automatic defenses are coupled, and this coupling is what my program is designed to undo. Until the advent of the Outer Child concept, we lacked a tool for untangling feelings from behavior. But now we can separate them, empowering our Adult Self to use our higher brain to intervene, even in moments of passion (which are, of course, amygdaloid in nature).
YOUR ADULT SELF
Outer Child, Inner Child, and Adult Self all stem from functions in higher, middle, and lower regions of the brain. The Adult essentially comes from the higher, cerebral brain centered around the frontal and parietal lobes. The Inner Child’s fears and other emotions come from the mid-range area, containing your limbic structures, centered around the amygdala. And your Outer Child’s repetitious behaviors, while triggered in the amygdala, are behaviorally discharged primarily through brain operations connecting from the motor cortex and basal ganglia, to the lower region of the spinal cord, which controls movement.
Learning about the amygdala and how it connects to higher and lower brain areas helps us understand why we might lash out at someone or freeze up instead of having the mature conversation we had planned. That lashing out can catch you by surprise because abandonment fear and other primal emotions can be triggered by seemingly ordinary life experiences (e.g., an offhand comment). Your emotional triggers may be subliminal, but they are often powerful enough to induce reactive behaviors (from the lower brain) that go against your better judgment (in the higher brain).
I went to the movies with my boyfriend, and all of a sudden, I got to worrying that he might not love me anymore. He didn’t know what hit me and neither did I. It ruined our whole evening.
THE MONSTER UNDER THE BED IS GROWING
Joseph LeDoux, leading research expert on the amygdala, has produced another piece of information so vital to the work we are doing that I can’t say it often or loud enough:
Fear tends to incubate rather than dissipate over time.
In other words, fear develops and grows fuller over time rather than fading away. When I first learned that fear incubates, I finally understood the dilemma for abandonment survivors. Their fear tends to burrow beneath their conscious awareness, where it intensifies and rebounds with greater force when they attempt to start a new relationship.
Did it ever occur to you that certain fears might intensify? That the monster under the bed was growing larger and more threatening? If you’re like most people, probably not. So when you attempt a new challenge, the intensity of your abandonment fear can come as quite a shock. Abandonment survivors tend to experience more than their share of these unexpected bouts of intrusive insecurity and anxiety.
Let’s say you’ve been through a painful breakup and decide there’s no need to rush back out there to replace your ex. You’re not ready. You’re prudently taking time to heal, to find your balance, to reduce your emotional neediness. No rebound relationship for you (you’re way too smart for that). But when you finally think you’re ready to meet someone, one of two things can happen:
1. No one turns you on (even though they look great on paper) or
2. Someone does turn you on and you’re suddenly so vulnerable you can barely stand being in your own body.
What’s going on here? In the first instance, no one turned you on because your overefficient amygdala was short-circuiting the attraction, triggering the release of numbing opiates and other anti-passion neurohormones (similar to the ones creating numbness during early bereavement) designed to blunt your emotional responses. Uninvited, it was doing (overdoing) its job to protect (overprotect) you from getting attached and potentially hurt again.
In the second instance, your amygdala declared a mini state of emergency precisely because you were attracted to someone. In fact, it pulled out all the stops, sounding the alarm to warn you about a full-blown abandonment crisis in the making. Your amygdala had learned (through fear conditioning) to perceive losing someone as a life-threatening situation. After all, to children, losing a caretaker could mean life or death and this fear incubates and remains into adulthood.
All this neural activity takes place beyond your conscious control. Powerful stress hormones, triggered by your primal abandonment fears, went coursing through your body and sent you into an involuntary state of fight, freeze, or flee. This put you at your most defensive just when you thought you were ready to get back on that horse.
I really liked this woman, but my heart raced and my mouth went dry when I tried to ask her out on a date. So much for trying to act casual.
Therapists and self-help books might tell you that if you are emotionally overreactive to a new person it means you’re not ready, but often, that’s simply not true. You could have waited another decade to become “ready” and still freak out when you find yourself genuinely connecting with someone new. Why? Because the fear instilled by your last breakup didn’t dissipate; it had grown.
The same is true when you avoid taking any other positive risk in your life, such as making a career change, moving to a new area, or asserting yourself to your boss. The longer you procrastinate, the more your anxiety and inhibition can escalate. Avoidance and its cousins procrastination, isolation, and inertia are probably the most common ways we abandon ourselves.