In my last post, I explored how complex trauma shapes our sense of self through early relationships. Today, I want to delve deeper into why these early experiences have such profound effects by looking at how our brains evolved to survive. The answer lies in understanding some fascinating research about how all mammal brains, including ours, are organized.
Your Mind's Emotional Roots
Consider how a tree grows. Above ground, we see the trunk, branches, and leaves reaching toward the sky - the visible part that most people think of when they picture a tree. But everything we see above ground depends entirely on what lies beneath: an intricate root system that anchors the tree, draws up nourishment, and makes all visible growth possible. Without these roots, even the mightiest oak would topple in the first strong wind.
Our brains are organized in a similar way. Our conscious thinking and planning - like the visible branches and leaves - represent our most sophisticated capabilities. But these capacities rest firmly on a foundation of emotional systems that we share with all other mammals. This emotional foundation isn't primitive or simple; it's highly refined by millions of years of evolution to handle essential survival needs. The neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp spent his career mapping these emotional root systems, showing how they provide the foundation for all our more complex experiences and behaviors.
The Basic Emotional Systems
Let me walk you through these fundamental emotional systems that shape our experience and behavior.
The SEEKING system serves as our brain's explorer and forager, generating curiosity, anticipation, and the urge to investigate and understand our world. This system drives us to explore both our physical environment and our internal landscape, creating feelings of interest and eager anticipation. It's what makes us want to learn, discover, and engage with life.
The FEAR system is our primary defense against danger, but it's more complex than just feeling scared. This system orchestrates our flight, freeze, and submit responses when we face threats. When activated, it can cause us to run from danger, freeze in place hoping to avoid detection, or submit to make ourselves appear less threatening. These responses can become conditioned by early experiences, shaping how we react to perceived threats throughout our lives.
The RAGE system manages our fight responses and boundary defense. When activated, it generates not just angry feelings but a full mobilization for self-protection. This system responds strongly to restraint or frustration, helping us defend ourselves and our resources. In relational trauma, this system often becomes either overly sensitive or suppressed, affecting how we handle conflict and set boundaries.
The CARE system represents our innate drive to nurture and protect others. This is our caregiving instinct, the one that makes us want to comfort a crying child or help someone in distress. It's crucial for understanding both how early caregiving affects us and how we develop our own capacity to care for others and ourselves.
The PANIC/GRIEF system, also known as the attachment system, monitors our need for connection and responds to separation from those we're bonded to. This system generates the distress that babies feel when separated from caregivers, and in adults, it produces feelings of loneliness and the urgent need to reconnect when important relationships are threatened.
The LUST and PLAY systems, while also fundamental to mammalian experience, play less central roles in understanding trauma responses. The PLAY system facilitates social bonding and learning, while the LUST system drives reproductive behaviors. Both can be affected by trauma but are less directly involved in the core patterns we're discussing.
Now that we understand these individual emotional systems, we need to look at how they work together - or sometimes fail to work together - in our daily lives. While the tree metaphor helps us understand the basic organization of our emotional systems, we need a different metaphor to understand how trauma affects their coordination. Think of your mind like a theater production, where a director coordinates the whole show while actors embody and express the raw emotional truth of each scene. When everything works smoothly, the director guides the overall vision while the actors bring emotional depth and authenticity to their roles, creating a coherent and moving performance.
When Systems Become Dysregulated
When children face persistent relational trauma or neglect, the natural coordination between their emotional systems breaks down. Instead of working together, these systems begin operating in isolation, like actors who have stopped following their director's guidance and instead begin performing their own separate scenes, each lost in their own emotional world regardless of what's happening on the rest of the stage.
Let me share two examples from my clinical practice (details changed for privacy) that illustrate how this dysregulation shapes people's daily experiences.
When Care Becomes Dangerous
James came to therapy struggling with relationships. As a nurse, he excels at caring for others - his CARE system operates seamlessly in his professional life, allowing him to provide thoughtful, attentive support to his patients. But when others try to care for him, his FEAR system activates intensely, causing him to shut down and withdraw. In his personal relationships, he oscillates between intense emotional caretaking and complete withdrawal, never finding a balanced way to both give and receive care. It's as if he can only perform one role at a time - either the caring nurse or the frightened child - with no way to integrate these parts of himself.
When Anger Meets Shutdown
David's story shows a different pattern of dysregulation. His RAGE system became disrupted through childhood experiences of being chronically dismissed and invalidated. At work, he maintains careful control, like an actor who can stay in character during rehearsal. But in close relationships, where early attachment patterns are most likely to be triggered, he alternates between explosive anger when feeling unheard and complete emotional shutdown when feeling vulnerable. It's as if two different actors take turns occupying the stage - one performing a scene of righteous anger, the other a scene of frozen withdrawal - with no director to help them work together.
These patterns of dysregulation appear so consistently in trauma survivors that researchers have developed a theoretical framework to understand them. The concept of structural dissociation, described by van der Hart, Nijenhuis, and Steele in their book The Haunted Self, helps us understand how these emotional systems become organized into distinct parts of the mind.
Understanding Internal Division
By "parts," I mean functional units in the brain that have different capabilities, different ways of processing information, and different jobs to do. Some parts are primarily emotional, driven by Panksepp's ancient survival circuits - these become what we call Emotional Personalities or EPs. They carry raw emotional experiences and survival responses, expressing our fundamental needs and reactions. Other parts are more cognitive, connected to our brain's more recently evolved capacity for context, planning, and social functioning - these form what we call the Apparently Normal Personality or ANP, which tries to coordinate daily life and maintain normal functioning.
When I talk about dissociation here, I'm describing a situation where these different parts of the mind lose their normal coordination and begin operating independently. Each part carries its own distinct perspective and way of experiencing the world. When you're operating from one part, the world looks and feels fundamentally different than when you're operating from another part.
According to structural dissociation theory, people's minds tend to lose coordination between parts under stress, and there are distinct levels of dissociation, with increasing fragmentation as you go down the levels. At the first and simplest level, we see a basic division between a single ANP handling daily life and one or more EPs carrying different emotional states and survival responses. These EPs often feel younger than the ANP and may be frozen in past traumatic experiences.
The Apparently Normal Personality (ANP)
Focuses on daily functioning and present-oriented tasks
Often disconnected from or minimizes emotional pain
Tries to maintain normalcy and competence
May deny or doubt the impact of past trauma
Primarily uses logical thinking and planning
May attempt to manage or contain emotional reactions, often struggling to maintain control
The Emotional Personalities (EPs)
Carry the direct experience of trauma memories
Express raw, unfiltered emotional states - impulsive, intensely motivated, and unable to step back and reflect
Hold intense feelings, body sensations, and survival reactions
React to perceived threats based on past experiences
May experience the past as if it's happening now
Often feel young, vulnerable, or overwhelmed
May emerge suddenly when triggered
Think of the ANP as the director trying to guide and coordinate the show, and the EPs as the actors who embody and express the raw emotional intensity of the play's dramatic moments. In trauma, it's as if the actors stop listening to the director and begin performing their own separate scenes, creating chaos instead of coherent story.
Why This Understanding Matters
Understanding how our emotional systems naturally work together, and how trauma can disrupt this coordination, helps explain many common experiences in complex trauma:
Why we might feel like different people in different situations
How we can be highly functional in some areas and struggle intensely in others
Why our reactions sometimes feel out of our control
How we can have conflicting feelings and impulses
Most importantly, it helps us understand that these reactions aren't random or crazy - they're organized around ancient survival systems doing their best to protect us.
Moving Forward
This understanding leads us naturally to the next question: How do these systems show up in daily life? How can we recognize when different parts are active, and what can we do to help them work together better?
For now, I encourage you to notice times when you feel like different aspects of yourself are in conflict. Remember: these conflicts often reflect different survival systems trying their best to protect you.
In my next post, I'll help make these concepts more concrete by sharing a personal story about how I first came to recognize these different parts in myself.