Am I safe? With this person? This situation? I know what I need to do. I know what I should do, I even know how to do it. And yet… I don’t. Why is that? It might, consciously or unconsciously be because you do not feel ‘safe’.
What do we mean by ‘know’? I might ‘know’ in my cognitively - but there’s another part that ‘knows’. It ‘knows’ something different. My body ‘knows’ whether I’m safe and it’s telling the…
Enter the (over-simplified, I know) Triune Brain. Loosely made of three structures — the reptilian, the limbic and the neo-cortex: the survival, the emotional and the thinking. Guess which part evolved first?
The product of c.4 million years of evolutionary wiring, we started out as cells. Cells that wanted to survive to multiply. Cells still to this day, coded for survival. Those cells grew into the reptilian brain first. And those cells are the first to pick up signals for ‘not safe’.
Literally then, when we take it right back to the core, we are constantly sensing for safety.
Consciously in situations with ‘DANGER” written all over and unconsciously through the neural wiring of our bodies. Length and breadth. (You know that feeling of hairs on the back of your neck…?)
Much the same as your heart beats outside of your conscious awareness, your reptilian brain, through your neural network, is always checking. Am I safe?
If not, it wins. Hands down.
For control then - we must observe this brain in action and learn the strategies to work with it. What will it take for my reptilian brain to feel safe?
Do you know how to work with yours?
