Jaak Panksepp and Affective Circuits

I'm on my way into Seattle today to meet with the brilliant neuroscientist, Jaak Panksepp. Author of Affective Neuroscience (2004, 1998) and countless articles and other publications, he has done more than any other scientist to identify and articulate the fact that we humans (and animals) have basic circuits in our brains, hardwired, for various emotions. We come to this world with the systems in place to experience anger, fear, sadness, panic (infant separation panic), play, seeking (like curiosity), lust, and shame (more complicated, more social, more cortical, but still....). Then we add a complex learning history on top of that and voila! Either adaptive, resourced high functioning, or incapacity, emotional pain, mental illness, to oversimply an extremely complex matter.

We're going to talk about a novel finding in leading edge EMDR practice, the Early Trauma Protocol developed by Katie O'Shea (see O'Shea & Paulsen, 2007 EMDRIA conference tape, or O'Shea's two chapters in Robin Shapiro's EMDR Solutions II book (2009). In step 3 of that important protocol, it appears that we actually are able to reset, or reboot, or clear the affective circuits. Then, subsequent trauma processing goes easier, because the client is not riding the emergency brake. That is (I think, we'll see what Dr. Panksepp thinks) the subcortical affective circuits are freer to conduct data to and through cortical processes without the inhibitory effect of maladaptive cortical learning exerting downward pressure on that data conduction.

Now, after I meet him, maybe I'll have to take that all back. We'll see. More later!