understand her words, the baby’s parasympathetic nervous system responds to the quality of her voice. In addition, touch — being held or caressed — activates the young child’s parasympathetic nervous system. So there is your answer. The parasympathetic nervous system is activated by face, voice, and touch, provided that the signals being sent are calm, attuned, and caring.
We don’t need to go back to infancy: we don’t remember that far back. But we can use any memory we can recall of being with a close, trusted friend, ideally at a time when we felt our guard let down. Note that when you feel your guard let down, you don’t cause it consciously: it happens unconsciously when the vagus nerve, fully stimulated, releases all the tension present in your body.
In most social situations, we receive signals that we are physically safe. But because people are often competitive and judgmental, the signals they unconsciously send, and which we unconsciously receive, can keep us from feeling emotionally safe. We remain careful about what we say; we do not reveal our private thoughts or genuine feelings. We may even employ a facade to hide behind and protect our real self from being judged by others. But with a good friend, who does not judge us, we may at times feel our guard let down. This happens, according to Porges, when the signals we unconsciously receive are optimal, and cause us to feel physically and emotionally safe.
This was the experience we wanted to evoke when Carole took her drive. To make sure her vagus nerve would be stimulated repeatedly, she linked landmarks along the way to memories of a time with a friend with whom she felt her guard let down. First, Carole remembered being with her friend, and then she imagined that her friend was holding up a photograph of one of the landmarks. By picturing her friend’s face juxtaposed with the photograph, Carole established a visual link between the calming face and the landmark. Next, Carole imagined that she and her friend looked at the landmark photograph together and exchanged a few words about the photograph. This linked her friend’s calming voice to the landmark. Finally, she imagined that as they looked at the photograph together, her friend gave her a reassuring touch, which was also linked to the landmark. Carole continued this process until each landmark had visual, auditory, and physical links to her friend’s calming presence. As Carole took her trip, each landmark she passed, linked to the memories of her friend, activated vagal braking and kept her calm.
This technique can help you regulate arousal in situations that have previously caused anxiety or even panic. Like Carole, you can break the challenging situation down into a series of events or steps and link each of them to a memory of a time when you felt both physically and emotionally safe. This activates your vagus nerve and calms your mind and body.
CHAPTER 5
If you are skeptical about the power of Carole’s memory of a friend’s face, voice, and touch, you might be persuaded by some research on smiles. There are two kinds of smiles. First, there is an intentional “social smile.” In a social smile, a person consciously activates muscles at the corners of their mouth. Second, there is a genuine smile that happens spontaneously. In a genuine smile, the muscle that surrounds the eye — the orbicularis oculi — contracts. This muscle cannot be operated intentionally. Since contraction of the orbicularis oculi is strongly associated with delight, returning a spontaneous smile causes you to feel delight. A spontaneous smile is called a Duchenne smile, after the nineteenth-century French scientist Duchenne de Boulogne, who discovered the physiological and emotional differences between a social and a genuine smile.
When someone smiles at you, you reflexively return the type of smile you received. When someone flashes you their best social smile, the smile you reflexively return — lacking operation of the orbicularis oculi — produces no delight. If you have just gotten Botox injections for smile lines around your eyes and feel less pleasure when greeted by friends, now you know why. Botox can keep those delight-linked muscles from contracting. By contrast, when a friend is delighted to see you, muscles surrounding their eyes operate spontaneously. You reflexively return their spontaneous smile with a spontaneous smile of your own.
If you can think back to the feeling of delight you experienced when seeing and reflexively returning a genuine, spontaneous smile, you may begin to trust that unconscious processes involving the face can change what you feel in other ways. This chapter examines the neurological mechanisms that govern our responses to our world and make these changes possible.
The sympathetic nervous system, the system that increases arousal, does not require development. It works naturally. Every newborn baby is fully capable of getting revved up and screaming bloody murder (a state known as hyperarousal). But newborns cannot calm themselves by activating their own parasympathetic nervous system: it can be activated only by others. Babies are genetically programmed to be calmed by others who present an attuned face, a calm voice, and a loving touch.
As the child’s brain develops, it retains memories of the caregiver’s face, voice, and touch. If a caregiver responds consistently when the child is upset, the child comes to expect that the caregiver will appear to calm her. Anticipating this response, she imagines the caregiver’s face, voice, and touch. This imagination immediately activates the calming parasympathetic nervous system. The child is calm before the caregiver even reaches the child.
What happens next is important. If the child’s caregiver follows through with a calming response, the child’s expectations are reinforced, and a program begins to form in her unconscious procedural memory. The program has four steps. First, hyperarousal causes her to wish for her caregiver. Second, because her caregiver is dependable, she expects the caregiver to appear. Third, she imagines her caregiver’s face, voice, and touch. Fourth, imagination activates her calming parasympathetic nervous system. In other words, hyperarousal causes expectation, which causes imagination, which activates calming.
If these four steps are established as a program in the child’s unconscious procedural memory, hyperarousal will be automatically down-regulated to alertness throughout her life. She will not be subject to panic. Automatic down-regulation will allow her to think clearly under stress.
If, however, the caregiver does not respond as the child expects, there is no reinforcement, and automatic down-regulation is not established. Paradoxically, it is also possible that the program may not be established if the caregiver acts too quickly. The psychological theorist Heinz Kohut believed that “the most important aspect of the earliest mother-infant relationship is the principle of optimal frustration.” Automatic down-regulation develops when a child meets with some difficulty, acts to deal with the difficulty, and is successful. When things work too smoothly, there is no reason for a child to act. For example, if a caregiver calms a child before the child is frustrated enough to need the caregiver, summon her, imagine her response, and thus trigger the parasympathetic nervous system, no program to automatically down-regulate arousal will develop. On the other hand, if the child meets with too much frustration, the child learns that action is futile, and automatic down-regulation does not develop.
In any case, a child who does not develop automatic down-regulation is likely to fear hyperarousal. As an adult, they may need to be in control of every situation so that no hyperarousal takes place. They may need to avoid situations unless escape — a basic way to down-regulate hyperarousal — is available as a backup strategy if they lose control of the situation.
To understand how emotional regulation evolved, Stephen Porges suggests we look back two hundred million years, long before mammals arrived on the scene and even longer before humans made their entrance. At that time, the most highly evolved creatures were reptiles. The reptile’s amygdala monitored the environment for any kind of change, such as the presence of unfamiliar creatures. On encountering a new creature, the amygdala triggered the release of stress hormones that caused an urge to run away.
