Clear and Present Safety

“I can only hope it helps for you to know that you’re not alone in your grief, that our world, too, has been torn apart, that all across this land of ours, we have wept with you. We’ve pulled our children tight.”

President Obama, 2012


All too often we are called together as a nation and asked to observe, tolerate and process the thoughts and feelings associated with the viewing of horrific events.  Some are natural, like hurricanes, tornadoes and earthquakes. Many others are human inflicted – school and theater shootings, children starved, burned, beaten, or abducted and never found. As a species, because we were slow and relatively weak, human survival depended upon relationships and the formation of social networks. Through evolution, humans had to develop specialized neurons to read the intentions of others not only to ensure an individual’s safety but also the safety of others in the social group. Because we were so dependent on the group for survival, the same neural network that communicates that the body has been injured (pain) also gets activated when we experience a threat to our connection to our social group. These groups of mirror neurons allow us to resonate with the internal state of others and sense both the sequence of actions that are coming and the emotional energy that motivates those actions. When the group is threatened there is a biological response to “circle the wagons” and move into a defensive mode of thinking and behaving. The perception of threat activates an automatic behavioral and hormonal response designed to increase the chances for survival. Whether that threat or perceived threat is directed at us or at others in our social group, our biology reacts to protect us.

Our stress response system activates a total body-mind reaction that mobilizes resources and prepares us for action. Neurochemicals that flood our brains and bodies shift us out of our thinking brains and into our survival brains. Sugar is released into the blood stream from the liver and muscles, oxygen levels increase, heart rate and blood pressure increase, and our immune system is activated and prepared to fight infections.  Our attention gets focused on the threatening stimuli and our impulses drive us to protect ourselves through aggression or withdrawal. As the fear rises we begin to lose higher order executive functioning, the ability to modulate our fears and regulate our arousal levels, and the ability to encode information and express our thoughts verbally.  We are in a biological state designed for action not sophisticated problem solving.

Our brain’s way of recording experiences is through associations – a threatening experience gets connected to other events that elicited a similar internal state. Fear begets fear and the system becomes sensitized to danger. As a reaction to these biological changes a person can begin to see threat when none is present; or they can avoid any situation that triggers a stress response and miss important cues that can signal danger.

As we watch the images on our television of the scene of a terrifying event and hear the commentaries on what took place, our body and brain react as if we are facing a similar threat. We attempt to make sense of something that seems senseless. We resonate with the feelings of the victims and their families. We imagine that this could happen to us or to those we love. We feel a wide range of emotions and we experience in our bodies that which took place somewhere far away as if it was happening in our town. Our safety and assumptions about a benevolent world are threatened. We all struggle to put these types of violent acts into our mental models of a just and fair world. In order to accomplish this we begin to polarize the world and people in the world into categories of good and evil.

We want to reestablish an internal and external equilibrium. In order to manage feelings of helplessness and powerlessness generated by hearing and observing the impact of terrifying activities, we have a strong need to move toward action. We want to send money, make calls, advocate for the creation of policies and laws, and work to contain the perceived evil from the good. We reach out to our leaders to do something to make us all feel safe again. In an effort to respond to the crisis, at times we are willing to push through system changes that probably would not have been approved at another time. In our haste we are at risk of missing the important impacts of such policies – impacts that may result in the loss of liberties and freedoms we all value as a nation. Feeling safe outweighs any abstract concept of freedom during these times of crisis.

What we need most from our leaders at these critical times is for them to be present, attentive, and attuned to the fears and pain of the victims and the nation. We need them to acknowledge what has happened but not identify with the sense of hopelessness and helplessness – to inspire the nation to use these painful moments to bring all of us closer together and remind us of the power of relationships and community. We can make a difference and create a better world but we also must grieve our losses and heal our wounds. We want our leaders to put aside their personal agendas and work together to make us feel safe in the short run and not betrayed in the long run.

With the ever expanding media coverage of these terrible, horrifying experiences, we will have to learn how to effectively cope with disasters. Intense traumatic events will always transform us but it is up to us to determine if they will transform us for the better or for the worse. It does not matter if you are the President of the United States, a leader in your community, a teacher, or a parent. How we handle these events will serve as a model for how our children will learn to manage these types of events in their future. Children don’t always listen to us but their neurobiology makes them experts at imitating us. As adults we must reestablish a sense of physical and psychological safety, tolerate and manage our emotions, grieve our losses, and maintain hope that we can make a difference that will make the future brighter.

At a psychobiological level it is true that they are all of our children!

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Your comments and questions are welcome. Please feel free to post below or to contact me directly at jerry@denvercac.org