In my blog on Peripheral and Focal Vision (read here) I wrote about the very different qualities of focal and peripheral vision, and how they each contribute to our balanced capacity to orient. In my last blog The Psychobiology of the Planes of Space (available here), I explored how our awareness in the different planes of space couples to our sense of time, and how focal and peripheral vision respectively, relate to the sagittal and coronal planes of space.
I also wrote about how when we balance the way that we inhabit these planes of space, we may access our capacity for contralateral movement as well as a sense of time that carries simultaneously a deep quality of presence in the here and now and in the continuum of past to future.
In today’s blog, we will investigate how our understanding of focal and peripheral orienting capacities and our presence in Planes of Space can be used to renegotiate traumatic memory, and to live our daily lives in such a way as to support our well being and balance, in terms of autonomic function and movement.
Some Aspects of Defensive Orienting
The way that we orient through all of our sensory systems varies according to how we experience our surroundings. Stephen Porges, in his work with the Polyvagal Theory, speaks of a special quality of perception that we have, which he calls “Neuroception”.
Neuroception is a continuously active function of our brains that determines whether we are safe or not. With our neuroception, we comb the signals that come in from the outer world for signs of safety and danger – and our whole system will respond according to what our neuroceptive sense determines.
Trauma is a situation in which we experience immanent life threat. Our entire nervous system and body alert to danger and our perception switches into defensive orienting. In defensive orienting our attention is focused exclusively on the information from the outside world that is pertinent to our survival. Our senses organs go into high focus mode, and information that is not survival-oriented is inhibited. The high focus mode of our senses and our sympathetic nervous system converse with each other.
Sympathetic activation–activation of our nervous system for fight and flight, causes our sense organs to focus intensely, and intense focus in our senses activates our sympathetic nervous system. This is a highly adaptable condition when we are in danger. However, when we are no longer in danger, if highly focused sensory activity continues, this will tend to entrain our system to ongoing sympathetic activation, which keeps us from returning to our healthy autonomic nervous system baseline where we are able to rest and where our restorative functions come back online. Not ideal in the long term!
Renegotiating Traumatic Memory
Often, when working with clients with Somatic Experiencing® to renegotiate a traumatic experience, I will find that their memory of the traumatic event carries a highly focused imprint. A classic example is someone who has had a high impact trauma, such as a car accident. As we begin to move into the renegotiation, they will have a clear and sharp memory of the oncoming car in a collision that they suffered. And as they access this memory their sensory memories will become focused on the sights and sounds involved in the accident. Other sights and sounds, while present in the memory, will be
disregarded or inhibited.
A simple, and highly effective strategy in working with this memory is to invite the client to re-connect with the other sensory stimuli that were present in their memory at the time of the accident.
We often say, in Somatic Experiencing® that we renegotiate trauma in Dream Time. Dream Time means that while, in the actual situation, there may not have been time to respond to the danger that came from the environment, now, as we move into the renegotiation, we can slow things down and explore other avenues that were not available in the urgency of the moment.
So, as our client remembers the sight of the car with which they collided, we can ask them to pause, in their memory of this accident, and tell us what else they saw. What was present in the periphery of their attention? What sights and sounds did they register that did not have to do with the immediacy of the accident?
The magic is that our brains record it all. The memory of the song that was playing on the radio, of the passerby wearing a yellow shirt, of the quality of the light and the temperature of the air, are all there, waiting to be recalled. And as we take our time and recall the non-survival related sensory memories, something amazing begins to occur.
Our memory of the accident loosens from overfocus, into a more balanced sensory memory, in which we access both focal and peripheral information. And as we do so, our system down-regulates from high sympathetic activation and overfocus, back into safety mode. The memory releases its charge and our whole body and being respond with a greater state of ease.
Long Term and Daily Applications
Unresolved trauma in the nervous system, that left a high sympathetic imprint (hyper-activation as opposed to dissociation) and just the urgency of living in a culture that values doing over being, production over pleasure, will tend to induce us into a state of constant overfocus and sympathetic predominance.
Not only do most people that I know (with the exception of my 100 year old mother-in-law and my 93 year old father) express a sense of urgency about time, but it is somehow culturally frowned upon to not be time-pressured.
In this environment, it is easy to develop a habit of moving in straight lines, heading for the goal and not noticing our surroundings. My Ki-Aikido teacher, Koichi Kashiwaya Sensei, talks about having the quality of vision where, when you look at a tree, you see the whole tree. He says that when we focus on a leaf, we see that leaf when it falls, but miss what is happening with the rest of the tree.
If, however we allow our visual field to be wide, we see, not only the whole tree, but in seeing the whole tree, we notice when a leaf falls and thus we are able to encompass both qualities of vision.
So, what is a day-to-day perceptual remedy for our hurried existence? It is to open our peripheral senses. It is to be aware of our surroundings, and to be curious about stimuli that are off our beaten path–stimuli that could be labelled as “distractions” by the task-oriented, overfocused brain, but could also be considered enrichments to our experience.
It means taking time to smell the roses, to notice beauty, and to be kind to others. My husband has a practice when he is driving that I try to emulate, whenever possible. He counts how many times per day he can be generous in traffic, leaving space for other cars to go in front of him, making sure that he notices pedestrians and gives them ample time to cross. Since the most hurried, directed, goal-oriented side of ourselves tends to come out when we are driving, being generous to others automatically shifts us into a state where we are opening our peripheral awareness and living more in the coronal plane and in a time perception that honors the path taken as well as the goal.