when the new creature was dangerous, because it protected the reptile from harm. But not every change or new creature was dangerous. Let’s imagine that an apatosaurus showed up. Being a vegetarian, the apatosaurus posed no threat to another reptile. Yet the amygdala still fired off stress hormones, and with no thinking part of the brain to deter this urge, the reptile followed the urge and ran away.
This primitive system, which Porges calls the mobilization system, produced a lot of false alarms. These were costly to the creature. Running away burns calories. In searching for food to replace those calories, Porges points out, the creature had to expose itself to additional dangers. Also, escape itself could result in injury — for example, the creature might fall over a cliff or be attacked by a more dangerous predator. The mobilization system’s protection was less than ideal.
As mammals evolved, they developed larger brains. Their capacity for thought provided more sophisticated protection. When a mammal’s amygdala released stress hormones, the hormones still produced an urge to run. But the stress hormones also activated the thinking and decision-making part of the mammal’s brain — the part we now refer to as executive function. The mammal’s executive function inhibited the urge to run and assessed the situation to determine whether escape was necessary. If it found that the change the amygdala was reacting to was not a threat, it signaled the amygdala to end the release of stress hormones.
Fast forward to humans. When you see a stranger, your amygdala-based mobilization system produces the urge to escape, just as it did in prehistoric reptiles. Simultaneously, the stress hormones activate your executive function, the high-level thinking that makes decisions. To give you time to look the stranger over, executive function overrides the urge to run. Tension develops as one part of the brain — the amygdala — tells you to run, and another part — executive function — tells you to hold on.
Meanwhile, something else is going on. You are exchanging unconscious signals with the stranger. If these signals indicate that the stranger is not a physical threat, your brain stimulates the vagus nerve to some degree. This slows your heart rate and overrides the effects of the stress hormones, causing you to relax. These signs that you are physically safe end the sense of alarm and set the stage for cooperation with this new friend (assuming that your brain interpreted the exchange of signals correctly).
This system, which Porges calls the social engagement system, allows two people to feel comfortable together. Down-regulating signals from our social engagement system helps us work together, live together, and mate. To understand how the social engagement system can override stress hormones, think of being in a car with an automatic transmission, with one foot planted solidly on the brake pedal. If the other foot presses on the accelerator and sends more gas into the engine, the brake keeps the car in place.
Porges refers to this overriding by the vagus nerve as vagal braking. Just as the brake pedal can slow your car down — even when gas is being pumped into the engine — the vagal brake can calm you down even when the amygdala is pumping stress hormones into you.
When you receive signals that the person you are with is not a physical threat, the vagus nerve causes you to feel physically safe. But when you receive signals that you are emotionally as well as physically safe, profound calming takes place. You feel your guard let down. This response is unconscious, a result of maximum vagal braking. We can use this response to prevent panic.
When psychology was a new science, the central importance of relationship to human development was not understood. “Nobody then anticipated how dependent the infant’s brain was on the mother’s caregiving and social interaction,” wrote the psychiatrist James Grotstein. Gradually, as psychology matured, researchers demonstrated the importance of bonds with others, particularly in early childhood. In the mid-twentieth century, the psychologist Carl Rogers founded a therapy movement aimed at adults that was based on “unconditional positive regard.” In the 1960s, experiments by Harry Harlow showed that baby monkeys preferred soft dolls they could cuddle with over hard dolls made of wire that provided milk. Following that, research by John Bowlby showed that infants need relationship and are genetically programmed to seek it. The theorists Anthony Bateman and Peter Fonagy now tell us that every child is “constitutionally primed to find a version of their internal states mirrored by their caregivers.”
It’s easy to see your physical self: just look in a mirror. But how do we get a sense of who we are as a person? Our psychological self develops based on the way others respond to us when we express our thoughts, our ideas, our needs, and our feelings. Their response is like a mirror. It tells us who they think we are, and whether — to them — we are valuable or not. While the way others respond to us as adults has an effect on us, the way parents respond to a child early in life forms the child’s sense of self and the child’s emotional regulation. These develop in tandem, and both are relationship dependent.
Our identity and our emotional regulation develop based on relationships during our formative years. Good emotional regulation cannot develop if a child cannot count on physical and psychological safety. The need for physical safety is obvious, but parents may fail to understand how to provide psychological safety. If the child’s need for safety is not met, the child may develop into an adult who controls hyperarousal by trying to control the situation he is in. If he is not in control and things don’t go well, he cannot control his arousal. To regain control, he must fight to regain dominance or escape.
When a child is not afraid of the caregiver, the child feels safe in the caregiver’s presence. But children also need to feel secure when their caregiver is not physically present. When the caregiver is absent, a secure child knows — because of the nature of their relationship — that the caregiver has him in mind, values him, and therefore will return to him. An insecure child, by contrast, is unsure about being valued or even wanted. The child feels abandoned when the caregiver is absent: out of sight, out of mind. Insecurity arrests the development needed to learn to regulate emotion and to prevent panic.
Fortunately, those of us who did not develop adequate emotional regulation during childhood can now pick up where its development left off. We can activate our calming parasympathetic nervous system by linking challenging situations that cause arousal, and the onset of arousal itself, to a person who — to use Carl Rogers’s term — holds us in unconditional positive regard.
Think of being in an elevator surrounded by people you don’t know. Your amygdala is sounding the alarm. Stress hormones create the urge to escape. Your primitive emotion-regulating system, the mobilization system, is saying, “Get out of here!” But your more sophisticated executive function pushes back as if to say, “You think you need to escape, but you don’t. Just wait. We’ll be out in a minute.” As the elevator trip grinds on, the tension between the mobilization system and executive function, between the messages to flee and to stay, intensifies. We call this feeling claustrophobia.
Which system seems to be winning may depend on how crowded the elevator is. But — and this is important — it may also depend on seeing someone in the elevator who is not a stranger. Imagine that as you warily look around, you see a friend, the special friend who never judges you in any way. He or she is not just smiling, but beaming at you. Maybe you unconsciously picked up the signal from that special face. Maybe that is why you felt comfortable enough to look around. Now, as you see each other, your friend is activating your social engagement system, the advanced system humans have that overrides the effects of the stress hormones when we receive signals of physical and emotional safety.
Your friend’s presence changes everything. Strangers in the elevator become irrelevant. The urge to bolt disappears. The feeling of claustrophobia subsides.
In an elevator or anywhere else, the amygdala reacts to the presence of strangers and triggers the release of stress hormones. Just as they did two hundred million years ago, stress hormones produce an urge to escape. But until the elevator stops and its door opens, we
