the meat of it

One of the biggest problems people tend to have with a Cannon-Bard-like theory of emotional reactivity is that it can be difficult to grasp (and make sense of) the degree of separation such a framework imposes upon the emotional and cognitive processes. Once we break from a linear, causal cognition/emotion model we face a multitude of questions about the mechanic of how such a system works. One of the more difficult: “If emotional experiences happen in a way that does not necessarily involve cognition, then how do we pull up emotional memory and assigned values of experiences?” In other words, how do we “remember” for example, that something makes us sad if we aren’t pulling up that data through a cognitive process?

As previously stated, it is my intention to argue that emotional and physiological reactions are part of the same system and that differentiating between them is artificial, at best (and downright misleading, at worst). Here is where that argument comes into play. Some things we know about how the body experiences emotional states:

1. When a person experiences trauma it is recorded on a cellular level in muscle memory.
2. The cellular changes that take place throughout the body during an emotional response (e.g. a fight or flight response) occur at a rate faster than can be accounted for by our current understanding of the central nervous system (i.e. the cellular changes occur very near the speed of light and therefore cannot be the causal result of any cognitive process).
3. When a person experiences a traumatic flashback, the entire body responds on a cellular level, just as it did when the original event was experienced.
4. Muscle memory is recalled, experienced, and utilized at a much higher speed than cognitive memory.
5. Muscle and cellular memories are much harder to overwrite after they have been stored.

We have long known about muscle memory – how to build and access it. It is a basic foundation of any training program that deals with honing a physical response. Yet it is also more: a way of honing an emotional response. Consider, for example, military combat training. The military utilizes a system of training that is not just physically intense but emotionally intense. It combines the two through a regime of sleep deprivation, deliberate and controlled exposure to mild trauma, repeated execution of combat tactics, etc. to create soldiers capable of functioning under the duress of war.  This training doesn’t just rely on teaching people to function in an environment through practice, it writes into their muscle memory how to respond to the HORROR of combat.  Remember, once muscle memory is written it is much harder to overwrite.  If military training is also a form of combat emotional training, the recorded “controlled trauma” of training acts as a form of insulation against PTSD.  In order for a PTSD response to be recorded, it must first overwrite what was originally there.  In the case of military soldiers, what is already there is their training.

I contend that the mystery is in the meat – that our bodies, on a cellular level, serve as a storage medium for not just muscular and physical programs, but emotional memory as well.  Such an arrangement is only viable, however, if we surrender the notion that our bodies and emotional states are two discrete, interacting systems.  Indeed, we must also move away from the traditional, Western, Cartesian model almost entirely and discontinue our causal distinction between what is physical and what is psychological.  The only way to make sense of what seems to be a growing collection of neurological and physiological discoveries that are inconsistent with the old models, is to apply a systemic model that does not differentiate between the physical and psychological in a linear, unidirectional and causal manner.  And so we arrive at the crux of my supposition:

1. Emotional memories are stored on a cellular level throughout the body, in a manner similar to muscle memory.
2. We are able to access these memories in a holotropic manner.
3. Because emotional memories are recorded in a manner similar to muscle memory, we experience emotional responses with our entire bodies at the same time we experience the psychological “feeling” of the emotion.