emotional flashback
No content on this page itself — see linked references below.
4 linked references
October 13th, 2022
- > I have also learned that when I am being rigid and inflexible, I am usually in the grip of an emotional reaction. The rigidity is a compensatory reaction to an uncertainty I am not able or willing to experience.
- —A Trackless Path by Ken McLeod
August 1st, 2021
What are the components or dimensions required for collab… › current/new model as of sometime in 2021
- 3. emotional flashback management / Unlocking the Emotional Brain
- Suppose that someone deeply understands the principles of 1. brain hemispheres / McGilchrist's brain hemisphere model and 2. control systems / Perceptual Control Theory...
- what else might make it difficult to collaborate with them?
- one might be if they've temporarily contracted their awareness around something impersonal, such as when I'm having a Deep Work day coding, and I've recruited all of my brain for modelling the codebase
- this usually requires a bit of meta-awareness and context-shifting, but as long as something isn't treated as load-bearing when it's not, and nobody takes it personally, it's usually a fairly minor issue
- a different element though might be that some aspect of what you try to talk about with them activates some emotional flashback to some moment of unsafety, which generates an acute contracted awareness and then often a compulsion to engage in some defensiveness = protectiveness rather than feeling able to listen or dialogue
- see Dream Mashups for a discussion of this and how to work with it in the moment
- less in-the-moment, there's a need to do some sort of therapeutic process to untangle the system that is hyperactively generating a panic response in a given situation
- some such situations might still be threats of some kind, but the current response heightens the threat rather than neutralizing it
- some such situations might not be threats, but are being tagged as threats by an emotional brain that can't tell the difference (or eg the "same situation" would have been a threat in childhood but isn't now) and it can learn to differentiate
- at any rate, someone who is triggered is going to tend to have trouble being curious
- (although might be able to anyway if they can hold the activation within the expanded awareness of their right hemisphere)
thinking that rejects other thinking
related stuff › Joel & Diana have a bunch of stuff on this in The Guru Pa… › then ch2 (which is Belief)
- huh, they also seem to think that "knowing something firsthand" doesn't cause closed beliefs, but that seems patently false and emotional flashbacks are a very obvious example of that!