When we feel threatened either physically or emotionally, the “survival” part of our brain activates an automatic fight, flight, freeze response.
It shuts down our cognitive reasoning brain and prepares our body to fight, flee or hunker down. Our heart rate and blood pressure increases, hearing and vision becomes more acute, and blood is directed away from our extremities to our large muscles to prepare for action. Simultaneously, a burst of adrenaline inhibits many normal body functions like digestion, tissue repair and immune responses and focuses all our attention on self-preservation.
At this point, we’re no longer able to make cognitive choices. Our whole body is on auto-pilot. All these physical changes may give us a dry mouth, cold hands and feet or a racing feeling inside us, but all we’re aware of is the need to get out of harm’s way.
Many people figuratively “put up their dukes” at this point. If they have traditionally found that anger and fighting can get them back to safety, their brain activates this course of action. Others have learned that their best hope comes from outrunning any real or perceived danger. Their brain says “get out here.” They do whatever they need to do to remove themselves from the situation. For many of us, that running isn’t physical, it’s an internal “running” to anything we’ve learned will help us avoid facing that threat head on. We begin to have strong cravings for whatever has helped distract us before. At this point there is nothing else in the world, but our intense, but often subconscious, desire to find relief.
Most people don’t understand why addicts don’t make better choices. Why don’t they just stop their problematic behaviors. Why don’t they “just say no?” They don’t realize that in that moment the cognitive brain has been hijacked and choices are gone.
The only way we can get our choices back is to dig deep into our hearts and minds and discover the beliefs, lies and fears that keep creating situations that make us feel emotionally vulnerable, helpless, and unsafe. Is it the threat of rejection? Is it the feeling of not being good enough? Is it a fear of not being heard or acknowledged. Whatever it is, God can replace it with truth and freedom. And, as we gain freedom from these dark internal triggers, we will find our ability to make different, healthier choices strengthening. Regaining the freedom to choose allows us to choose freedom from the addiction that has enslaved us.
“It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.” — Galatians 5:1 (NIV)
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