AUGUST 21, 2015 BY by Robert Schwarz, PhD, DCEP
In a recent blog titled “The Amygdala Is NOT the Brain’s Fear Center”, neuroscientist Joseph Ledoux laments that the amygdala has “gone from an obscure area of the brain to practically a household word, one that has come to be synonymous with ‘fear’.” He goes on to say, “It is not a scientific finding but instead a conclusion based on an interpretation of a finding. “
In my opinion, what Ledoux goes on to describe fits very well with the experience of treating people with energy psychology. More on this in a moment.
Ledoux says that the conscious feeling of fear is not the same thing as the non-conscious detection of threats and control of the body’s reactions to that threat. The amygdala is responsible for the latter, but it does not by itself produce the emotion of fear. Ledoux describes a much more complex process that underlies the construction of the feeling of fear. It includes attention, perception, memory, arousal, appraisal and so on.
What does this have to do with energy psychology? Whether TFT, TAT or EFT are employed, the usual experience for someone being treated for trauma is that, after a few rounds of treatment, the client who had a fear level of “9” thinks of the event and for “some strange reason” no longer feels in danger. The fear is gone. This has nothing to do with changing the client’s logic or cognitive appraisal. The detection of threat is removed and mobilization of the body to deal with the threat ceases.
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