Chapter summary: presents all the ways in which physiological defenses can form in the brain and body physiology to cope with and defend against difficult emotional experiences.
In this chapter, we will explore a variety of physiological dynamics, such as constriction and arousal, that might be involved in generating and defending against emotional experiences. As we shall see, all the physiological dynamics identified in this chapter can be involved in generating an emotional experience or in defending against it. Each of these dynamics can also be involved in generating one emotional experience while defending against another emotional experience at the same time.
An understanding of these complex physiological dynamics, and of whether they are contributing to generating or defending against an emotional experience in a specific situation, can be particularly helpful for therapists who use tools such as touch and awareness of body sensations to work directly with the brain and body physiology to change physiological states, in order to change emotional and other psychological experiences. Such understanding can help improve the work of all therapists to identify and target specific physiological dynamics for manipulation to change psychological experiences such as cognition, emotion, and behavior; and to ensure that physiological dynamics, such as constriction, are not always mistaken as defenses against emotional experiences and targeted for removal, with the risk of loss of significant emotional and other psychological experiences.
Please note that an understanding of all these complex physiological dynamics is not necessary to do good emotional embodiment work. Therefore, this is perhaps the most optional chapter in the book for the technically challenged.
The notion that physiological dynamics or states such as constriction can form in the brain and body physiology as a defense against emotions and other psychological experiences has been present in body psychotherapy approaches going back to the therapy of Wilhelm Reich.1 The use of such tools as breath, movement, and exercises to remove physiological defenses and access the psychological experiences being defended against has been an integral part of body psychotherapy treatments ever since.2,3 Constriction of the musculature is a physiological state that is often seen as a physiological defense. For example, one might constrict the muscles of the arm to inhibit the boundary-setting behavior of pushing a loved one away, for fear of losing the relationship. Over time and with enough repetition, someone who does this might not only lose the impulse to set boundaries through the arms but also inhibit the cognitive possibility of boundary setting from ever reaching consciousness, as it could lead to inner conflict between one’s cognition and one’s behavior. One can also imagine emotions associated with experiences of boundary violations, such as hurt, betrayal, and anger, being inhibited along with the cognitive and behavioral experiences around boundary formation.
Constriction of the arm muscles is not the only way through which one could inhibit cognitive, emotional, and behavioral experiences around boundary setting. Flaccid states in the arm muscles involved in setting boundaries or lowering of arousal or energy in the arms are other ways in which these experiences can be defended against.4
When emotional experiences are unacceptable or unbearable, physiological defenses can form against them. Even pleasant emotions such as love and sexuality can become unacceptable because they might be associated with unbearable consequences of unpleasant emotions such as fear and shame. Inhibition of muscles in the pelvis such as the iliacus, which is associated with psychomotor actions involved in sexuality, can keep one’s sexuality at bay.5 Inhibition of sexual glands from secreting the sex hormones of testosterone and estrogen can also produce the same effect. When emotional experiences become unbearable, physiological defenses can form against them.
Emotions can become unbearable in one of two ways. First, emotions can become unbearable when they push the brain and body physiology toward extremes threatening the organism’s very survival. For example, in the phenomenon called “fright death,” one has a fatal heart attack from excess fear. I once read an account about a boy who went camping with his family at Big Bear Lake, California. One morning the boy came out of his tent and ran straight into a black bear—and his heart just stopped, never to beat again. High levels of fear are associated with a very high level of stimulation of the heart’s natural pacemaker and the cardiac musculature by the sympathetic nervous system. At very high levels of sympathetic stimulation, far beyond normal range, there is a risk of electrical malfunction either in the pacemaker that regulates the heartbeat or the musculature that regulates the strength with which the heart pumps blood.
In such instances, the parasympathetic nervous system could kick in and inhibit the heartbeat and the pumping of the heart from reaching levels dangerous to one’s survival. Unfortunately, the parasympathetic nervous system could also overcorrect the problem and stop the heart for good in the middle of an experience of terror.6 So we can manipulate physiological dynamics such as constriction and arousal to defend against emotional states that threaten our survival by generating out-of-the ordinary and dangerous physiological conditions.
The second way in which physiological defenses against emotional experiences could occur has to do with clinical evidence showing that people might resort to physiological defenses against emotional experiences even when there is no threat whatsoever to the survival of the brain and body physiology. Because unpleasant emotional experiences are by definition states of stress and dysregulation of the brain and body physiology, they are inherently painful, and they lower a person’s sense of their well-being. For this reason, we are programmed to avoid unpleasant emotional experiences and seek pleasant emotional experiences instead. This, as discussed earlier, is Freud’s pleasure principle. The ability to tolerate unpleasant emotional experiences varies considerably in the population, as does the engagement of physiological defenses against emotional experiences. We saw clinical examples of this variation in affect tolerance levels, and cases involving severe psychophysiological symptoms like asthma even at low levels of emotional suffering, in the cases presented in chapters 1 and 2.
From the discussion so far, it might appear that physiological dynamics or states such as constriction that are involved in physiological defenses against emotions serve only one function: minimizing or eliminating life-threatening or unbearable emotional experiences. However, upon closer examination, we can see that such physiological dynamics might be involved in generating other emotional experiences at the same time. This is because when we try to get rid of an emotional experience, we are trying to create another emotional state. For example, a successful defense against anxiety produces calm or a sense of neutrality, both of which qualify as emotions in the broadest definition, along with changes in one’s sense of well-being. So, to be accurate, we have to say that the physiological dynamics engaged in reducing anxiety are defending against anxiety or generating calmness, or both. Therefore, we have to specify the emotion and the situation (to make sure that it makes sense to experience the particular emotion in the situation) to determine whether a physiological state such as constriction or arousal is involved in defending against an emotion or in generating one.
In this chapter, we are interested in creating a useful framework for understanding and working with physiological states within the brain and body physiology that contribute to generating and defending against emotional experiences. Our emotional experiences in a situation are derived from the sensations of all the physiological states generated in the brain and body physiology by all the ways in which we are coping with the situation, and from the sensations of the direct physical impact of the situation on our brain and body physiology. Because physiological dynamics or states that give rise to emotions arise in the execution of all of the coping strategies and from the direct impact of the situation on the physiology of the brain and body, let us quickly review all the coping strategies we might employ in a situation including the one we just saw—what body psychotherapists call physiological defenses against emotional experiences.
We saw in chapter 5 that our emotions are assessments of the impact situations have on our well-being. When we are faced with a situation, we respond to it in ways that maximize our well-being and minimize threats. Such adaptive responses, which we call our coping strategies or mechanisms, are generated through a large number of physiological changes in the brain and body physiology. We will refer to the physiological changes generated by the execution of the different coping strategies or mechanisms as physiological dynamics or states associated with our coping mechanisms. The various coping strategies we might employ to deal with a situation are:
Let us look at each of these coping strategies in a simple example. If I am in an automobile accident, my brain predicts emotional consequences in terms of how the accident could affect my well-being by recalling emotional experiences from similar experiences in the past—e.g., coping strategy (a)—and by activating instinctual survival circuits hardwired in the brain through evolution (b). The predictions based on past experience and instinctual brain circuitry also include optimal energy mobilization and behavioral response strategies given the situation. Based on these predictions and on evaluation of current information from the environment, my body mobilizes energy (c), and it uses that energy in behaviors such as turning the wheel to the right to guide the car off the road and avoid further collisions (d). I realize that I cannot avoid hitting a tree on the side of the road, even though I might have avoided hitting other vehicles on the road. The impact of the crash against the tree affects my entire brain and body physiology in a shocking manner (direct physical impact of the situation on the brain and body physiology).
As I lie dazed after the impact, my heart is racing too fast for its own good, so that physiological defenses are engaged to slow it down so I do not have a heart attack and die (e). The fear I have of dying is too much to bear; thus, physiological defenses against the fear are engaged to numb the brain and the body physiology so I can be calmer until help arrives (e). Emotions that the brain generates in this situation involve sensations arising from the physiological changes in the brain and body physiology resulting from the execution of all these coping strategies and the direct physical impact of the situation on the brain and body physiology.
With regard to defending against emotions, coping strategy (e), we saw earlier that a physiological dynamic involved in implementing this strategy, such as constriction or arousal, might also be contributing to the generation of another emotion. In each of the seven categories of physiological changes or dynamics we will discuss at length below, we will also see that the same reality applies. That is, none of the physiological dynamics grouped under the categories to follow might be exclusively generating or defending against emotions. For example, the coping strategy of external behaviors directed at the world (d), such as action and expression to deal with a dangerous situation, could be contributing to generating the emotion of anger while defending against the emotions of fear and helplessness. As another example, high arousal contributing to the emotion of confidence in a situation could very well be a defense against the feeling of helplessness.
If we were to encounter the physiological dynamic of constriction in the brain and body physiology in a situation, it would be difficult to attribute it exclusively to one of the coping strategies (a) through (e) or the direct impact of the situation on the brain and body physiology, because more than one coping mechanism at the same time could be using constriction. For example, if we are involved in fighting in a dangerous situation, we are likely to be constricting our musculature to move in order to fight (d). It is also possible that we might be using constriction of our musculature to brace our body to reduce or manage suffering from the blows that are landing on it (e), the sensations of which are also an input for the construction of emotion in the brain.
If things are so complicated—if it really is very difficult to say with certainty whether a physiological dynamic such as constriction is in the service of generating or defending against emotion—how can body psychotherapy approaches claim that physiological dynamics such as constriction in the breathing muscles, the diaphragm, the intercostals, and the abdominal muscles always defend against emotions? The claim is valid because the abovementioned breathing muscles have the general psychological function of managing emotions.7 Therefore, it is possible to make such a general statement as long as one overlooks the fact that constriction of the breathing muscles to block certain emotions, such as agitation, might make the person feel other emotions, such as calmness.
Also, body psychotherapies usually specify the situation, the emotion, and at times even the behavior, and only then describe a constriction as blocking the emotional experience to make their statement valid. For example, when a child is traumatized for coming into power in the terrible twos, a typical way in which the child might hold power back is by hyperconstricting or hypoconstricting its diaphragm to stay out of trouble. A child experiencing a threat to their existence in the pre- and perinatal period of development might constrict their eyes to hold back the emotions of terror and rage.8 In both of these examples, these defenses are specific to the emotions and the situations they arise in, making them useful in diagnosing and treating clients with power and existential issues.
In the next section of this chapter, we’ll elucidate seven categories of psychological dynamics that could be involved in generating or defending against emotional experiences. These categories offer body psychotherapists a comprehensive framework for developing theories of physiological defenses against psychological experiences, including emotions, in specific life situations. They can also help psychotherapists guard against mistakes some might make in always treating physiological states such as constriction as defenses that need to be gotten rid of.
For the majority of psychotherapists who are beginning to work with the brain and body physiology and who might find this framework too complex, there is no need to be concerned. They can follow a simple rule: when working with an emotion in a situation, they can assume that the emotion is defended against in the places wherever the emotion is not a conscious experience in the brain and body physiology. This is because an emotion, especially an overwhelming one, has the potential to be present throughout the entirety of the brain and body physiology. One does not have to know what specific physiological dynamic, constriction or arousal, is involved in blocking the emotional experience in a part of the brain and body physiology. They can simply work with the usual tools such awareness, intention, breath, self-touch, or therapist’s touch where possible, to undo the defenses in that area to expand the emotional experience to that area.
Now, let us turn to detailed discussion of each of the seven categories of physiological dynamics that might be involved in generating or defending against emotional experiences: constriction/deconstriction dynamics, arousal/charge dynamics, movement dynamics, function dynamics, biochemical and bioelectrical dynamics, dynamics of stress, regulation, and dysregulation, and electromagnetic and quantum mechanical energy dynamics.
When I set about developing a framework for classifying all possible physiological dynamics or changes that could contribute to generating or defending against emotional experiences, I intended for the framework to be of as much practical use to clinicians as possible. I used the physiological dynamics that have been already identified in the literature on the physiology of emotions, body psychotherapy, and energy psychology as a place to start and build from. To the extent possible, I wanted a chosen physiological dynamic to be as observable as possible in the awareness of therapists and clients so that they are manipulable in clinical work.
To be clear, the term “physiological dynamics” refers to general categories of physiological changes in the brain and body physiology that result from implementing any of the five coping strategies—mechanisms (a) through (e) discussed earlier—in a situation, and the direct physical impact of the situation on the body and brain physiology. We will see that the categories are not mutually exclusive but rather are overlapping and interdependent. For example, movement, a separate category of observable physiological changes, cannot occur without constriction/desconstriction dynamics in the musculature, another category of observable physiological changes in our framework.
All things in our brain and body physiology, from the muscle at the macro level to the cell at the micro level, constantly constrict and deconstrict to facilitate a variety of functions: movement, breathing, moving food through the digestive tract, and so on. From the body psychotherapy point of view, constriction and deconstriction are often, if not always, involved in implementing one or more of the five strategies (a) through (e) involved in coping with a situation or in the direct physical impact of the situation on the brain and body psychology.
I have found that the easiest way to demonstrate the role of the body in generating and defending against emotional experience when I am teaching is to have people in the class collapse their upper body to the front, which deconstricts some muscles on the back and constricts some muscles in the front in the upper half of the body. I then ask them to say aloud, “I am feeling confident now,” to notice their bodies feeling exactly the opposite because of the collapse of the upper body to the front. I follow this up with having them put their upper body in the opposite position, upright and even leaning backward slightly, and have them say “I am not feeling confident now,” to have them experience their body countering their statement and generating exactly the opposite emotional state. The collapsed state supports the generation of the emotion of diffidence and defends against confidence; the upright state does the opposite, supporting confidence and countering diffidence. This shows clearly that, in order to answer the question of whether a constriction/deconstriction dynamic is contributing to generating an emotion or defending against it, we need to specify the emotion first. This is also true for every one of the six other physiological dynamics we will discuss below.
Almost all body psychotherapy approaches have focused on the role of the voluntary muscular system in generating and defending against emotional experiences. Earlier systems, such as Reichian Therapy9 and Bioenergetic Analysis,10 focused on its defensive role; later systems, such as Bodynamic Analysis, emphasized its defensive as well as its generative functions in relation to all psychological experiences, including emotions. In the empirically derived psychology of muscles in Bodynamic Analysis, the major muscles are assigned their psychomotor functions as well as their psychological functions.
The ability to constrict and deconstrict a muscle over its range is theorized as optimal for the muscle’s availability for its psychomotor and psychological functions. Habitual constriction or desconstriction toward the extremes, leading to hyperconstriction or hypoconstriction of the muscle, are considered to be defensive in nature in relation to psychomotor functions and the generation of psychological experiences. Hypercontraction is associated with holding back the impulse, and hypoconstriction is associated with the loss of impulse toward the psychomotor functions and psychological experiences of cognition, emotion, and behavior associated with the muscle. For example, hypoconstriction or flaccidity in the triceps muscle group can inhibit the psychomotor action of setting boundaries by pushing people or things away. Hypoconstriction in the triceps can also inhibit cognitive, emotional, and behavioral experiences and memories in relation to boundary setting. For this reason, when we have clients push us away with their arms, cognitive, emotional, and behavioral experiences around boundary setting often emerge. The work done by Ekman and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, in the tradition of academic research that started with a multicultural study of the role of facial muscles in emotion by Charles Darwin, has established how different patterns of constriction/deconstriction of facial muscles can contribute to generating and defending against different emotional states.11
Earlier body psychotherapies, such as Reichian Therapy and Bioenergetic Analysis, focused on breaking down rigid or highly constricted muscles that were deemed as physiological defenses against access to emotions and other psychological experiences the clients needed to work with. Later body psychotherapy approaches, such as Bodynamic Analysis,12 focus on restoring a wider range of movement possibilities in hyperconstricted or hypoconstricted muscles that are deemed as defenses against psychomotor and psychological functions of cognition and emotion, and of behavior associated with the specific muscles.
It makes sense that many body psychotherapy approaches focus on the muscular system. The voluntary nature of the skeletal muscular system and its availability near the surface of the body make it more accessible for manipulation through touch or voluntary movement. The sensations of the muscular system are also more available to introspective awareness than those of the viscera or the nervous system. The viscera (organs, glands, and blood vessels) depend on the voluntary muscular system to carry out vital biological functions, such as breathing, circulation, and digestion, on which the survival of the central nervous system areas of the brain and spinal cord depend. Therefore, working with the voluntary muscular system can facilitate physiological and therefore psychological changes in the viscera and the central nervous system.
Of the five dynamics (a) through (e) involved in coping with a situation, the first two—recalling emotional experiences in similar situations, and generating instinctual emotional reactions—can be thought of as having more to do with the brain than the body, even though it is likely that they affect the body to some extent. The three other coping mechanisms that have more bearing on the body are behavioral changes initiated internally to generate energy, external behavioral changes enacted to deal with the world, and physiological defenses initiated throughout the brain and body physiology to manage overwhelming emotional experiences to ensure survival and reduce unbearable suffering. The constriction/flaccidity dynamic, and indeed any of the other physiological dynamics that will be discussed in this chapter, can occur in the execution of any of these three coping mechanisms; they can also result from the direct physical impact of the situation on the brain and body physiology.
Most, if not all, of the coping strategies, as well as the direct physical impact of the situation on the brain and body physiology, are likely to be present in every situation. Because of this complexity, it is difficult if not impossible to determine which coping strategy or strategies an observed physiological dynamic such as constriction might be contributing to, and whether it is contributing to the generation of or defense against an emotional experience.
The physiological dynamic of arousal/charge, which can also be made conscious as an experience, is an important component in generating and defending against emotional experiences. When something, such as arousal, contributes to an emotional experience that can be made conscious within or observed from the outside, it becomes possible through awareness or other means, such as medication, to alter the emotional experience. According to the dimensional theory of emotions,13 arousal and valence are the two basic dimensions of all emotional experiences. Arousal refers to whether the property of arousal is high or low, and valence refers to whether an experience feels good or bad. For example, anxiety and thrill are both high-arousal emotions, but they differ in that anxiety feels bad and thrill feels good. Depression that feels bad and calmness that feels good are both low-arousal emotions.
Variations in arousal or charge, the sensations of which become an input into the construction of emotion in the brain, arise internally in the brain and body physiology as the brain goes about generating arousal in some places and then distributing it to other places where it is needed as fuel for the execution of external coping behaviors such as expression and action. Arousal and its variation can be experienced throughout the physiology in the brain, spinal cord, nerves, organs, glands, blood vessels, muscles, fascia, and skin. For example, in order to supply the energy for a vigorous manual effort, the aroused brain guides the autonomic nervous system to generate energy through organs, glands, and blood vessels and distribute it to the muscular system so it can carry out the effort. The increase in arousal can be felt as a conscious experience in each of the places involved, and it can be interpreted as motivation when one is favorable toward the act and as pressure when one is unfavorable to it.
Arousal is a slightly ambiguous term that can also refer to the increase in the tone in the nervous system, without a clear understanding of whether such arousal implies an increase or decrease in energy. The tone is defined as the rate at which a nerve is firing. An increase in tone in the sympathetic nervous system, often referred to as an increase in arousal in the sympathetic nervous system, often implies an increase in charge or energy. An increase in the tone or arousal in the parasympathetic nervous system, on the other hand, often implies the opposite—the lowering of charge or energy. “Charge” is therefore a clearer term, with low and high charge corresponding to lower and higher energy states.
As we saw earlier, increase or decrease in charge can be consciously experienced in every part of the physiology. And, as with constriction dynamics, charge dynamics in the physiology can contribute to the generation of an emotional experience or to the defense against it. If an emotional experience could be challenging survival or is simply too much to bear, the brain might manipulate the energy dynamics to increase or decrease charge in order to defend against the emotional experience. For example, it might increase charge to create mania to ward off the pain of depression, or it might decrease charge to generate depression to defend against an unbearable experience of anxiety characterized by high charge.
Please note that, as with the constriction/deconstriction dynamic, one cannot determine how an arousal/charge pattern in the physiology is contributing to the generation of emotion, or to the defense against it, unless we specify the emotion, as well as the situation the emotion is a response to. We might need to know the situation in order to know whether the emotion is a defense or might be reasonably expected in the situation. For example, if we repeatedly encounter anger in relation to a loss with no vulnerabilities on the horizon, and we find a high charge in the physiology associated with it, then it would be reasonable to conclude that the arousal contributing to the habitual anger is serving the purpose of defending against the painful and unbearable vulnerabilities that usually go with a loss.
Charging the physiology through breathing or movement has long been used to break through defenses against emotional experiences in some therapy approaches. Breathing, especially rapid breathing, increases charge. Movement, especially when vigorous, compels increase in energy mobilization and charge in the physiology. Both breathing and movement that increase charge challenge the inhibitions against emotional experiences in organs involved in cardiovascular and respiratory functions, such as the lungs and the heart; muscles involved in breathing and in movement in the rest of the body; and inhibitions in the nervous system against breathing and movement.
Movement is essential for our survival. One kind of movement or another is involved in our actions and expressions that help us cope with situations in the world; in our vital biological functions, such as breathing, cardiovascular function, and digestion; and the exercises we do to maintain our health. Therefore, it makes sense that movement dynamics plays an important role in generating our emotional experiences and in defending against them.
This is a good place to pause and point out that the seven physiological dynamics we are exploring in this chapter are not independent of each other. For example, movements of skeletal muscle and smooth muscle are brought about by constriction and deconstriction dynamics in the muscles involved. Arousal or charge dynamics involve movement or constriction dynamics. For example, for blood to be diverted from digestive organs to skeletal muscles to charge the muscles for action, blood vessels have to be dilated or deconstricted in the muscles and constricted in the organs.
When we move our muscles, we allow them to participate in generating, enhancing, and processing our emotional experiences. As we saw in the experiments conducted by Paula Niedenthal at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, preventing facial muscles from movement during emotional experiences compromises the processing of emotional experiences in the brain.14 Inhibition of movement can contribute to emotional experiences as well. Emotions such as helplessness and despair are often associated with the inability to move, caused by inhibition of movement. Movement during sexual acts usually enhances the pleasure derived from it. However, inhibition of movement is not always associated with decrease in emotional intensity because other physiological dynamics, such as charge, in combination with inhibition in movement can bring about greater intensity in emotional experience. For instance, we can hold ourselves back by holding back movement in the muscles even as we continue to charge them with energy, creating an explosive charge of the emotion of desire.
As with constriction and arousal dynamics, we can only determine whether movement or inhibition of movement is contributing to an emotion or is a defense against it after we specify the emotion and the situation associated with it. For example, if we move our facial muscles into a smiling position, we cannot know whether we are doing so to counter and defend against the rage we have brewing within us or to genuinely express our liking for a person, without knowing what the relationship situation is at the moment and what emotion we are referring to with respect to the movement of the facial muscles toward a smiling position.
Movement therapy and dance therapy are therapeutic modalities that use movement itself to undo defenses in the brain and body physiology against movement, to increase the range of possibilities in movement and thus to increase the range of possibilities in our cognition, emotion, and behavior. Psychomotor therapy uses movement informed by knowledge of specific psychomotor movements of different muscle groups to undo defenses against those very movements to enhance specific cognitive, emotional, and behavioral possibilities. Because the functions of the viscera and the central nervous system are quite dependent on the voluntary muscular system, movement of these muscles has also been found to be effective in increasing the health and range of function in those systems.15
Functions performed by the brain and body physiology can be classified into purely biological functions measurable through physiological metrics, such as heartbeat and breath rate, as well as psychophysiological functions such as posture, gesture, and facial expressions that, in addition to their role in biological functioning, have psychological purposes. The three layers of the brain and body physiology—the central nervous system, the viscera, and the muscular system—are involved in a large number of biological functions. In fact, each of the seven physiological dynamics presented in this chapter, such as constriction, arousal, and movement, are biological functions that can also be used for psychological purposes. The purpose of having an additional category of function dynamics is to capture some of the other major biological and psychophysiological processes that are worked with in psychotherapy to facilitate psychological processes.
Breathing: Breathing is perhaps the biological function that is most often manipulated in therapy to regulate emotional experiences in both body-oriented and less body-oriented psychotherapy approaches. The evidence-based cognitive behavioral therapy of systematic desensitization often uses a relaxation protocol involving the breath to treat symptoms of PTSD. Relaxation protocols that involve conscious breathing patterns are commonplace in the treatment of anxiety. Meditation and yoga often use conscious awareness and manipulation of breath for various purposes, including regulation of psychological experiences of cognition, emotion, and behavior.
Patterns of breathing, such as rapid chest breathing, are used to break through physiological defenses against psychological experiences, including emotions, in therapeutic approaches such as Reichian Therapy, Bioenergetics, Rebirthing Therapy, and Holotropic Breathwork.16 A person might use breathing consciously or unconsciously to generate an emotional experience, regulate it, or defend against it. Slowing down one’s breathing and making it more measured can help in combating the emotion of anxiety or serve as the basis of the emotional experience of calmness. Again, one cannot really say whether a breathing pattern is contributing to an emotion in a situation or is in the service of regulating or defending against an emotional experience unless we know the emotion and its context.
Heart rate: The heart rate, the number of times the heart beats per minute, plays an important role in all of our emotional experiences. The heart rate is an important, if not the most important, contributor to arousal or charge, which characterizes all pleasant and unpleasant emotional experiences along a continuum from low to high. We cannot manipulate the heart rate as directly as we can regulate the breath rate, the number of times per minute we breathe in and out. But we can indirectly manipulate the heart rate to some extent through the breath. Research has shown that those who are more capable of being consciously aware of their heart rate and can report the number of times their heart beats per minute are more aware of a larger range of emotional experiences than those who cannot report their heart rate.17
Heart rate variability (HRV), a computation based on the difference in the rate at which the heart beats during inhalation (more) versus exhalation (less), has emerged as a measure of heart health and as an indicator of balance between the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches of the autonomic nervous system. HRV is now being used clinically to measure outcomes in the treatment of PTSD. Because HRV can be tracked relatively easily with applications on smartphones, it is used in biofeedback to manage stress and unpleasant emotions. Higher HRV scores are associated with pleasant emotions, such as love, and lower HRV scores are associated with unpleasant emotional experiences. This may be caused by the fact that unpleasant emotional experiences, by definition, involve more stress and dysregulation in the brain and body physiology. As with the breath rate and heart rate, variations in HRV can be involved in generating as well as defending against emotional experiences. Again, HRV’s exact role in a situation can only be known when we know the details of the situation and the specific emotion involved.
Posture: Posture, the particular way in which we hold our bodies, can tell the world a lot about who we are. We consciously or unconsciously communicate our mental states to the world all the time. Whether we sit with our chest open and our arms at our sides or with our chest closed and our arms crossed in the front of us can communicate to the world how open or closed we are to the person and the communication we are engaged in. Such a posture also affects our ability to be open and communicate with the other person nonverbally, electromagnetically, or quantum mechanically through interpersonal resonance. Postural analysis is a formal tool in body psychotherapy approaches going back to their beginnings, in the psychology of Wilhelm Reich.18 It is used to determine a person’s character—their habitual ways of thought, feeling, and behavior—from their usual body postures in different life situations. Postural analysis is something we do all the time unconsciously or consciously to some extent. For those who wish to delve more deeply into this subject, the book Embodying Experience: Forming a Personal Life by Stanley Keleman is a good beginning.19
Posture not only communicates our thoughts, feelings, and behavioral intentions to others; it can also generate, constrain, and defend against them. The use of posture, gesture, facial expressions, and other body expressions to generate and embody suitable cognitive, emotional, and behavioral tendencies is common in acting classes. Forward-leaning postures are associated with emotions of attraction, and backward-leaning postures are associated with emotions of aversion. Putting people into forward-leaning postures and having them process situations that involve emotions of aversion and into backward-leaning postures to process emotions of attraction significantly alters the brain’s ability to process the emotions as well as the situations in which they arise.20 Again, as with all other dynamics, whether posture is being used to generate an emotion or defend against it depends on our knowledge of what the emotion is and the situation we find it in.
Gesture: Gesture, like posture, can communicate our cognitive, emotional, and behavioral dispositions to others as well as generating them or defending against them. Often, I bring this point home to participants in my classes by having them reach out with both their arms and say “I hate you” or “I do not want you.” This gesture usually communicates longing for another person and is used in the psychomotor act of reaching out to the other person to fulfill that longing. The class participants laugh when they realize that what their body is doing generates a strong emotional state that overrides the emotional state they are trying to generate in their brain by saying “I do not want you.” It is also good exercise to convince people of the role of the body in emotional experience. Please note that gesture, posture, facial expressions, and other body expressions can also be used to conceal our inner states or deceive others. For example, we might be able to convince others of our confidence with an upright posture, which usually communicates confidence, while hiding the diffidence we might feel deeper in our body. The extent to which we actually end up believing our manufactured confidence depends on the degree to which we can shut down the cries of diffidence from deeper within us.
Dennis Slattery, a professor specializing in imaginal psychotherapy at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Carpinteria, California, where I earned my PhD in clinical psychology, is the author of the book The Wounded Body: Remembering the Marking of Flesh. One morning Slattery woke up with an inspiration that important gestures in dreams could be the portals through which one could access the core emotions in the dreams.21 He then went about having his clients identify gestures they thought were important in their dreams, enact the gestures, and hold them in place while they processed their dreams. Lo and behold, his inspiration proved to be right, and another method of working with dreams was born.
Facial expression: The role of facial expression in emotion has been extensively researched. Charles Darwin was the first to scientifically establish that facial displays communicate our inner emotional states to others.22 The understanding that facial expression also plays a role in generating and defending against emotional experiences came later.23 We can infer the emotional states of others not only by observing their facial expression but also by mirroring their facial expressions with our own faces and generating corresponding emotional states in ourselves. More than other parts of the body, the face is programmed to mimic the faces of others from immediately after birth. Inhibition of involvement of facial musculature in emotion has been shown to disrupt the brain’s processing and recall of not only the emotion but also its context, i.e., the details of the situation that gives rise to the emotion.24 Making sense of an emotional experience in the body by connecting it with the face is considered to be an important milestone in our development from childhood to adulthood.25,26 Because the facial muscles generate a wider range of expressions than the rest of the body, facial expression helps to bring greater clarity to the physical or emotional experience in the body and to differentiate it further; for example, physical pain can become emotional anguish.
The polyvagal theory of the autonomic nervous system shows us that the facial muscles can be more quickly energized and moved than other muscles in the body through the ventral vagal nerve’s action on the heart’s natural pacemaker.27 This makes it possible for the facial muscles to act more rapidly in generating or defending against emotional experience. Research with people who have had Botox treatments that immobilize parts of the facial musculature for cosmetic reasons shows that such treatments can reduce depression by reducing the ability of facial muscles to generate negative emotions.28 So, given the face’s special place in the physiology of emotions for all of the above reasons, it makes much sense to work with the face in therapy.
Vocalization: In addition to body expressions such as twisting, turning, pushing things away, or pulling others toward oneself, children express their emotions early on primarily through facial expression and vocalization of sounds before they learn to express their emotions through words. Vocalization, in addition to its function of communication, provides the child relief and regulation by discharging some of the arousal fueling the emotion. Vocalization serves all the purposes that are attributed to facial expression. Mothers can distinguish different emotions in the cries of a child from very early on. Through mirroring their cries, mothers can generate the corresponding emotional states in themselves. Vocalization, like facial expression, helps to integrate the head and neck area and the rest of the body in emotional experience. It can also help in clarifying and differentiating emotional experiences in oneself and others.
We can tell that vocalizations generate and enhance emotions by observing the obvious pleasure children derive from vocalizing. Inhibition of expression of one’s experience through words or vocalization inhibits the physiology in the throat and can be a powerful physiological defense, not just against the expression of emotional experiences but also against generating them. We can see this in our everyday experience of being able to come into our emotions as soon as we start to share our experiences with others. The throat musculature is similar to the facial musculature in its ability to generate and defend against emotions. According to the polyvagal theory of the autonomic nervous system, the actions of the face and throat musculature (forming what Porges refers to as the “social engagement system”) are highly coordinated with the functioning of the heart and the lungs through the ventral vagal nerve in emotional and other experiences.29
Research on psychophysiological symptoms has shown that they are driven by a combination of adverse experiences in childhood and a low capacity for sensing and expressing one’s emotions.30,31 In human development, nonverbal vocalization and facial expression of emotion precede verbal expression of emotion through words. Therefore, I decided to experiment with the following intervention in the treatment of psychophysiological symptoms: imagining someone else or oneself expressing the discomfort in the psychophysiological symptom in the body through vocalization or facial expression, and then actually doing the vocalization or facial expression if necessary, with the therapist mirroring and supporting both modes of expression. It worked! I found that this intervention can offer many benefits. It can give the person relief, help them understand the more differentiated emotions involved, integrate the head and neck area and the rest of the body in emotional experience, and help to expand the emotional experience throughout the body to increase the person’s ability to tolerate the emotional experiences to resolve the symptoms.
Vocalization of emotion is a rudimentary verbal as well as nonverbal expression of the emotional experience. Because 95 percent of any expression is said to be nonverbal, vocalization offers the possibility of initiation of nonverbal expression and expansion of emotion throughout the body.
Biochemical and bioelectrical dynamics are the very basic dynamics that drive all other physiological dynamics identified in this chapter, with the exception of some electromagnetic and quantum mechanical energy dynamics that we will discuss at the end of this chapter. The brain, the spinal cord, and the somatic and autonomic nerves that regulate the body communicate through bioelectrical impulses that are both preceded and succeeded by biochemical changes. There are a large number of biochemical agents produced in the brain and the body. Neurotransmitters such as dopamine, hormones such as insulin, steroids such as testosterone, and a large number of peptides are examples of biochemical agents or “information substances” that are constantly coursing throughout the brain and body physiology to initiate all kinds of physiological changes.
Biochemical and bioelectrical dynamics happen largely outside of our conscious awareness. What we are aware of as physiological changes are the effects of these biochemical and bioelectrical dynamics. It is seldom the case that we can change biochemical and bioelectric dynamics by bringing them into our conscious awareness. We can, however, influence them by becoming aware of the physiological changes they cause. For example, we can affect biochemical and bioelectrical dynamics in our brain and body physiology by regulating our breathing patterns. Even though we can seldom influence these dynamics by direct observation, there are a couple of reasons why we are including them in the discussion of physiological dynamics. First, I want to provide a comprehensive list of physiological dynamics that contribute to generating and defending against emotions. Also, there are therapeutic interventions that do try to influence biochemical and bioelectrical dynamics, such as psychoactive medication in psychiatry, psychoactive agents such as DMT in psychedelic therapy, and nutrition in naturopathy.
The role of biochemicals (neurotransmitters such as dopamine and serotonin, and hormones such as testosterone and estrogen) in emotional experiences is well documented, as is their role of activation or inhibition of bioelectrical activity in the brain and the rest of the nervous system in generating, altering, and defending against emotional experiences. For example, the research done by Helen Fisher and her colleagues at Rutgers University has shown that emotions of lust, love, and attachment involved in experiences of romantic love appear to be driven by different sets of biochemicals.32 Lust is driven by increases in the sex hormones of testosterone and estrogen, love is driven by increases in dopamine and norepinephrine and decreases in serotonin, and attachment is driven by increases in oxytocin and vasopressin.
Bilateral dysfunction of the amygdala (which is part of the emotional brain), as measured by reduction in electrical activity in the area, is associated with the lack of conscious experience of fear. Transcranial magnetic stimulation therapy (in which magnets are positioned on opposite sides of the skull to change the electrical activity in the areas of the brain in between them) and craniosacral therapy (where the therapist’s hands are placed on opposite sides of the skull or one side of the skull to change the dynamics in specific brain areas through the electromagnetic and quantum energy fields created by the therapist’s hands) seek to increase, decrease, or otherwise influence the bioelectrical functioning of the targeted areas for the better.
As with all physiological dynamics discussed earlier, the role of biochemistry and bioelectricity in an emotional experience, whether it is facilitating or inhibiting, requires knowledge of what the emotion is and the context in which it has risen.
The physiological dynamics of stress and the physiological dynamics of regulation and dysregulation are aggregates of a large number of individual physiological processes that break all the way down to biochemical and bioelectrical dynamics at the cellular level. One reason why they are included in this framework of physiological dynamics involved in generating or defending against emotional experiences is because all pleasant and unpleasant emotions can be characterized by levels of stress, regulation, and dysregulation. That is, unpleasant emotions are characterized by higher levels of stress and dysregulation, and pleasant emotions are characterized by lower levels of stress and higher levels of regulation.
Another reason to include these aggregate dynamics is because they are amenable to introspection as conscious experiences in our physiology that we can then manipulate through awareness and other tools such as self-touch. We can track higher levels of stress and dysregulation in our awareness as something that feels bad, not okay, and overwhelming—and lower levels of stress and higher levels of regulation as something that feels good, okay, and manageable—as meaningful sensorimotor emotions in relation to situations. Tracking body experiences at such aggregate levels can often be more efficient, not only in capturing any possible meaning but also in regulating or transforming the experiences, than when we track the individual physiological dynamics that contribute to them. This is analogous to the difference between trying to lift a table by grabbing opposite sides of its top or by one of its four legs.
Tracking body sensations associated with individual physiological dynamics, such as heartbeat, can be very helpful in regulating physiological and psychological experiences. However, the meaning of such microlevel experiences and whether they are contributing to or detracting from emotional experience in a situation are not always clear, unless we know what the emotion is in that situation. Because tracking of microsensations tends to downregulate the physiology from dysregulation to regulation, we run the risk of regulating away unpleasant emotional experiences that are, by their nature, states of stress and dysregulation. Tracking the stress, regulation, and dysregulation dynamics at the aggregate or macro level, as opposed to tracking the more meaningful states they might be contributing to, also poses this risk but to a much lesser degree than tracking them at the micro level of their constituent parts or components.
As we saw earlier, when we track the level of stress, regulation, and dysregulation at the aggregate level, we track the qualities of feeling good or bad, okay or not okay, and agreeable or disagreeable. These can be meaningful experiences in relation to the situation we find ourselves in, and they therefore qualify as emotions in themselves—sensorimotor emotions at a very basic level. They could be contributing to more complex emotions such as companionship or loneliness. When they are unpleasant states of stress and dysregulation, they could just be psychophysiological symptoms arising from the person’s inability to cope with and tolerate emotional experiences. They could also be defenses against more appropriate emotions in the situations wherein they arise. For example, it is possible for a person to become thoroughly disorganized or even go crazy to avoid facing the reality of a painful situation.
For all these reasons, when tracking aggregate experiences of states of stress, regulation, and dysregulation, one has to be careful not to always treat them as psychophysiological symptoms to be regulated downward and away through medication or by other means such as detailed tracking of body sensations. One has to use discrimination, in relation to the situation wherein the experiences arise, to determine whether they are emotions in themselves, whether they are contributing to more complex emotional states, whether they are defenses against appropriate emotions, or whether they are psychophysiological symptoms. We will return to this topic in chapter 9 when we look at different types of emotions.
Please note that states of apparently decreasing stress and increasing regulation can also be defensive in intent. For example, it is not uncommon for what appears to be a state of low stress and even great regulation to arise in the physiology in the face of an overwhelming experience through the secretion of biochemicals such as opioids and endorphins as a defense.
Energies of the electromagnetic spectrum that are produced in one place in the physiology, such as the heart, have been observed to affect another place, such as the liver, by traveling directly between the two locations outside the nervous system.33 Biomagnetic and bioelectric energies from the heart and the brain are also known to affect each other directly, communicating outside the nervous system through the connective tissue matrix. Such energies have also been observed to travel between two bodies to influence each other. These energies from outside of the body are certainly capable of playing a role in our emotional experiences as part of the impact a situation is having on us, because they have been known to affect even gene expression at the cellular level.34
The therapeutic method of transcranial magnetic stimulation involves placing two magnets on opposite sides of the skull to stimulate bioelectromagnetic energy patterns being generated in the brain, to improve physiological and psychological functioning. Methods and devices for working with other parts of the body, such as organs and muscles, through manipulation of their electromagnetic fields have also been developed.35 Bodywork and energy work modalities also work with these energies to facilitate or change physiological and psychological experiences. The experiences of the brain and body physiology resulting from the stimulation of these energies by other parts of the brain and body physiology or coming from outside it can contribute to generating or defending against our emotional experiences.
Our brain and body physiology also exists at the quantum level of subatomic particles, and physiological dynamics at the quantum level can contribute to the generation of and defense against our emotional experiences. Energy and energy psychology models, especially from the East, have numerous theories about how changes in quantum energy patterns affect our brain and body physiology. They offer a number of methods for working with such quantum energy patterns to facilitate various psychological experiences, including emotion.36 For example, in one theory, quantum energies concentrate toward the center of the body along the spine to regulate and defend against unbearable emotions and other experiences in the brain and body physiology.37 Expanding and balancing the quantum energies throughout the brain and body physiology can undo defenses in them against emotions and other psychological experiences, thus making our physiological and psychological experiences more regulated and bearable.
In the next chapter, we turn to a discussion of factors that play a role in affect tolerance—our ability to tolerate and stay with difficult emotional experiences—and we examine why expanding the brain and body physiology to expand emotional experiences within it can help to increase our capacity to tolerate and stay with even higher levels of difficult emotional experiences for longer periods of time, without forming psychophysiological symptoms.