If you have read the earlier pieces in this series — on FEAR, PANIC/GRIEF, and suppressed RAGE — you have a picture of how neuroplastic symptoms are generated through the miscalibration of the brain’s protective systems. Ordinary stress or ordinary sensation is being read as more dangerous than it is. Symptoms arise as the brain’s output of what it takes to be a genuine threat.
In this Insights article, I use the word sensitization to describe the calibration of your brain’s threat appraisal system and its tendency to appraise ordinary situations as calling for protection. Sensitization is malleable rather than static, where each time a response pattern runs, the calibration is updated. Which is precisely why there is something to work with.
The natural next question is: what do we actually do about it?
The good news is that the answer isn’t one thing. There are three distinct moments in the cycle of sensitization where recovery can be worked with — three points at which functional change can occur — and each of them does something unique.
Below is a brief description of each followed with an example from clinical experience or from my own life.
The stress response
The first moment is where stress arrives. Because the brain’s sensitization is continuously updated by what passes through it, changing how the nervous system meets ordinary stress shifts the calibration itself. Many people with chronic pain and symptoms report that during times in life when stress is lifted — when on vacation or doing something enjoyable — their symptoms also dissipate. And the natural thought emerges from these experiences: if only I could remove myself from life stress, I wouldn’t have to live with the pain. Unfortunately, life is not like that. We come home from vacation and the old stressors are still there. So when we work at the level of the stress response, we aim to increase the resilience of the nervous system so that it can calibrate life stressors differently.
In my early twenties I was struggling more with chronic symptoms than I am now, and I had found the philosophical writings of Zen Buddhism compelling. I remember reading Katsuki Sekida’s Zen Training, which among other things describes the method of Zen sitting meditation and its use of diaphragmatic breathing. Before I took up Tai Chi Chuan, I effectively practiced diaphragmatic breathing and sitting meditation together.
The thing with meditation is that it takes time to feel the benefits: the stilling of the mind, and the drifting away of habitual mental and physical noise. But the diaphragmatic breathing has an immediate soothing effect on the nervous system. In my recollection, the time I spent practicing diaphragmatic breathing shifted my automatic responses to stress — from the quality of urgent reaction to patient waiting. I reconditioned my response pattern and learned to first observe the stimulus, then practice several cycles of diaphragmatic breathing, and then reassess the sense of automatic urgency that my nervous system had become habituated to.
The effects of this simple practice can be quite profound. The brain learns — through the simple act of breathing — that there are other possibilities available for thought and action than the automatic escalations the mind has habitually followed. Each time an ordinary stress arrives and is met with breath rather than escalation, the sensitized calibration is subtly updated. Not through any grand insight, but through a small, embodied diversion from the old stress response.
Diaphragmatic breathing is one path. Others include mindfulness practice, structured somatic work, contemplative movement like Tai Chi Chuan, or any consistent practice that teaches the nervous system that stress can be met with pause rather than with reaction. Consistency of practice is what matters the most. It’s the accumulated repetitions of the soothing practice that recalibrates the system.
The emotional completion
The second moment is where the protective system fires — where the FEAR, PANIC/GRIEF, or RAGE circuit runs, and where we can learn to complete emotional circuits and teach the brain that the emotions are okay.
Many clients arrive at chronic pain treatment having spent years avoiding the felt sensations of their emotions. This makes sense. The emotions have felt too big, too dangerous, too shameful, too much. Avoidance was learned as a form of protection. It kept things manageable. It also, unfortunately, kept the underlying protective circuits from completing their process.
In Brainspotting sessions, or in other forms of emotional processing work, clients often discover something important about emotions that they had not understood before: emotions have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Emotions are an embodied process. They arise, they intensify, they peak, and — if given room — they subside on their own.
Emotional processing that augments recovery occurs when we ride the emotional wave rather than jumping off it. When a client stays with the felt sensation of grief, or fear, or rage, without trying to suppress it or fix it or explain it or escape it — the emotion runs its natural course. It completes.
Something specific happens when this occurs enough times. The brain learns, at a level below conscious thought, that the emotions are safe — not as an idea, but in the deeply felt somatic sense that matters. The threat appraisal system learns that it does not need to maintain its urgent protection. It stands down a little. And the next time the emotion arises, it does so with less accompanying protection.
Although emotions will continue to rise again as the conditions of life keep producing them, they arise without the same weight of protective firing. Learned completion of emotions means less resistance to them. And over time, this alleviation of resistance recalibrates the brain’s threat detection. Life can once again fill with more care and joy, as the automatic patterns of fear, grief or anger continue to resolve.
