"Amygdala Hijack" - Reflexive Passivity?

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An Amygdala Hijack is an immediate and overwhelming emotional response out of proportion to the stimulus because it has triggered a more significant emotional threat. The amygdala is the part of our brain that handles emotions. During an Amygdala Hijack, the amygdala "hijacks" or shuts down the neo-cortex.

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Tricycle: How does understanding the brain help us manage stress?

Daniel Goleman: There are several ways that understanding some brain mechanics and having basic neural tools at hand can help us manage stress. First of all, we have to realize that there’s no escaping stress completely; this is the nature of life. Some of what’s called samsara is what other people call “stress”. When we’re stressed the part of the brain that takes over, the part that reacts the most, is the circuitry that was originally designed to manage threats—especially circuits that center on the amygdala, which is in the emotional centers of the brain.

The amygdala is the trigger point for the fight, flight, or freeze response. When these circuits perceive a threat, they flood the body with stress hormones that do several things to prepare us for an emergency. Blood shunts away from the organs to the limbs; that’s the fight or flee. But the response is also cognitive—and, in modern life this is what matters most, it makes some shifts in how the mind functions.

Attention tends to fixate on the thing that is bothering us, that’s stressing us, that we’re worried about, that’s upsetting, frustrating, or angering us. That means that we don’t have as much attentional capacity left* for whatever it is we’re supposed to be doing or want to be doing. In addition, our memory reshuffles its hierarchy so that what’s most relevant to the perceived threat is what comes to mind most easily—and what’s deemed irrelevant is harder to bring to mind. That, again, makes it more difficult to get things done than we might want.

* "Don't have as much emotional capacity" -- this is the equivalent of your computer suddenly losing 75% of its RAM while you're working on something important -- Corboy

Plus, we tend to fall back on over-learned responses, which are responses learned early in life—which can lead us to do or say things that we regret later. It is important to understand that the impulses that come to us when we’re under stress—particularly if we get hijacked by it—are likely to lead us astray.

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ess Glenny, a British yoga teacher and yoga therapist specializing in working with people who have experienced sexual, emotional and physical trauma, was one of many who begged to differ with Kaminoff’s statements on the Jivamukti case.

“This woman is an abuse survivor in process of recovery,” Glenny wrote in an online comment, referring to Faurot.

“This isn’t about her choices. It’s about the way her neurology has responded to abuse. It’s biologically determined by her experiences. If someone has lost a leg, we don’t chastise them for not being able to run when someone tries to mug them.”

“Some of my clients are very, very vulnerable to this kind of behaviour,” Glenny said, referring to Lauer-Manenti’s harassment of Faurot.

“They often don’t have an understanding of appropriate boundaries. They can be triggered into a reflexive passivity and a need to placate in order to survive when someone makes a sexual advance on them. People with these issues are in our yoga classes, and we all need to be aware of this.”

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aminoff’s acknowledgement of individual needs, however, blends with overtones of individualism that presumes an inviolate personal agency.

“There’s stuff that happens that we didn’t choose,” he emphasized in his video elaboration.

“But then there’s how we respond – how we chose to respond to the things we didn’t choose.

“There’s nature and nurture versus free will and the choices we make.”

It’s unclear whether this seemingly common-sense philosophy will survive feminist analysis and trauma-sensitive practice, neither of which separate things that happen to a person from how a person is able to act in the world. Whether studying the propaganda of rape culture or the effects of abuse on sympathetic nervous response, both disciplines — which are changing global yoga discourse from the inside out — argue that the very capacity for personal agency is heavily if not completely socially and experientially conditioned.

Nonetheless, Kaminoff’s statements are neither unique nor fringe in the yoga world. They resonate with a core tenet of yoga faith in the new age: a belief in the personal power by which anybody, regardless of their history, can re-make themselves. The belief is rooted in ancient and medieval practice manuals – or at least contemporary readings of them – that encourage yoga practitioners to transcend their socialization and re-identify themselves with internal or transcendent sources of joy and calm.

The modern era appropriates and fertilizes this metaphysics with the gospel of American independence and the spiritualitized capitalism that has allowed yoga to globalize. Whether yoga teachers channel bygone sources to tell students to “Practice, and all is coming,” or corporate mantras of “Just do it,” the power of modern yoga marketing turns on its invitation to the individual to step out of internalized abuse and oppression into the triumph of self-sufficiency.

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As both scholar and survivor, Wildcroft doesn’t see the belief in American-style free will as an eternal tenet of yoga philosophy, nor that it refers to an essential attribute of the yoga student. For her, it’s more of a placebo – which means it’s also a resource, and perhaps the privilege of those who haven’t been affected by trauma.

“Free will is a powerful story, she said via Skype. I’d caught her after her evening classes. “It’s a story we may need. But not everyone can tell it.”

I asked her what she thought about Kaminoff’s statement that people fall prey to abusive persons or organizations because they “choose to suspend their critical thinking.”

“No-one chooses to suspend their critical thinking,” she said. “This is an idea borne from immense neurotypical privilege."

“Over time, I’ve realized that my free will is not as free as I thought it was. My ability to choose as an adult through most of my life has actually been quite crude.

“If I’m caught unprepared, I might hug someone who’s hurt me. I might smile. I’ll say whatever it takes to get them to leave me the fuck alone. So how free is that? These are both symptoms of my history, and tools I’ve developed to cope.

“If yoga culture can’t understand this mechanism, and how it complicates power and consent, it can’t allow me to develop my power of choice further.”

I wondered aloud how yoga has helped her, given that most of the culture isn’t dialed in.

“Yoga practice can radically change my ability to consent. But I have to be in one of those rare spaces where I can let go and be broken, and not be told what’s wrong with me by people who think they have the answers.

“Safe spaces are spaces in which survivors can learn to heal themselves.

“When Jivamukti pretends that trauma-sensitive training isn’t their concern, survivors are reminded that they’re only allowed to be in one of two states. Either you’re broken and you should get the fuck out of here and get fixed. Or you’re fixed – in which case you don’t have any problems, so sure – let’s do yoga together.”

“That Jivamukti response is saying: ‘Don’t come to us with your needs. They don’t fit our view of ourselves or the world. Go away and get them fixed.’”

“Trauma-sensitive yoga brings it back to the person,” she explained. “It puts them in charge. That’s what’s missing in yoga culture in general. We’re too invested in the idea that the teacher is the expert in the condition of the student. That hurts everyone on some level.”

Dusk gathered in Toronto; the night deepened in England. Wildcroft sat back in her chair. It was clear this would be an ongoing conversation.

“The trauma survivor is the canary in the yoga studio coal mine,” she said. “We’re going to react worse than anyone if you stigmatize us.”We’re asking for safer spaces, and honourable relationships, and the cultural and institutional support to help make that happen.

“We’re asking because what’s good for us will benefit everyone.”