The Premises Behind S.E.A.®
The vitally important guiding premise is that nothing is broken, but rather everything is working perfectly at some level, and for some important reason that we cannot fully understand from outside the system. We can know our conscious story very well, and still not find release or comfort, and conversely we can have little to no memory and still be plagued by seemingly irrational physical reactions to life.
Much as we have discovered with chaos, no matter how chaotic and random it appears from observation, at the deepest levels there is indeed an implicit order. To find that ordering among the chaos, we have to address a different, deeper, level of self to discover the misunderstanding or misinterpretation we made in a moment of crisis.
Every part of us operates in a cooperative interplay of homeostasis-even when we are out of balance. In a compensated way, it’s all working perfectly, maintaining a state of balanced imbalance. The question is why? Why is our internal unconscious (implicit) operating system choosing to work harder and less efficiently instead of the usual more efficient way?
Often it's not that we can't do it differently, it's that the system is choosing not to, and SEA® is concerned with that choice point in time. Going to that moment of choice and releasing the blocked energy of those moments, expands our ability to choose our present time response. When we change the misunderstanding, recode the experience at the visceral level, and release the repressed charge, our choices and responses become proactive. We become fuller participants in our current lives, instead of re-enacting, re-membering and re-sponding to the past as if it were now.
EXPLICIT MEMORY VS. IMPLICIT MEMORY
Explicit memory is the conscious memory system. It is made up of all that we consciously remember. Of all the billions of bits of sensory data that come into our systems every day, only about 10-15% is actually “remembered.” This is necessary. We couldn’t possibly keep track of all that data. We need to be able to sort for the most important data and forget the stuff that doesn’t matter. The explicit memory deletes, sorts and generalizes. It is our database for making flexible decisions based on previous experience and learning. The larger the data base, the better the informed decision. This is part of what gives us wisdom and good judgment. The explicit memory system is therefore, inherently incomplete.
We delete, distort and generalize based on our filtering systems. These filters are like a filing system, and they tell our senses what to notice and file, and what to disregard. Our filters are gleaned from family patterns, genetic tendencies, ethnic and religious propensities, as well as, our own life experience.
In experiments tracking 'change blindness' for instance, psychologists have demonstrated that this sensory deletion process is active in all of us, and it explains why we can miss sensory data that is obviously right in front of us but not recorded, and why one person will remember certain details, and someone else will remember others. This selective memory is our explicit system. The Monkey Business Illusion, Color Changing Card Trick, and Person Swap are all fun examples of this.
Our explicit, or conscious memory, then, is designed to be incomplete, with a filtering system that has determined what is important for us to remember based on our needs and desires, as well as what is important for us not to remember such as traumatic or overwhelming moments or events.
The implicit, or unconscious memory is different. It is held deeply within us and is massive, storing everything we have ever experienced. As the explicit memory deletes, distorts and generalizes, the implicit memory is in constant record mode, recording all the bits of sensory data the brain/body system may need to reference at future date. It is a back up file in case we deleted something that, in hindsight, was important. The implicit system is part of our learned survival system, and it is unconsciously referenced in a constant flow of expanding fields of learning and experience that is life.
The implicit memory system also retains complete learning. It is there to aid in the performance of unconscious tasks such as walking, talking, breathing, driving a car, riding a bike or anything that we have done often enough that we no longer need to remember the details of how to do it.
Implicit memory also exquisitely records traumatic events in bits of sensory data. It also records the emotional response patterns we used to survive those moments. These emotional response patterns are survival strategies. Survival is our number one priority. Included in survival is also energy conservation. So, if there is a survival strategy in place that worked well one time, it will use it again. In the ever expanding internal efficiency survival effort, these established responses get hot wired for fast response, often exhibiting as full body alerts.
WHAT HAPPENS IN A MOMENT OF OVERWHELM
In the original moment of emotional overwhelm (traums, startle, shock, etc.) the explicit system hits a pause button. We might become confused, distracted, sleepy, hungry or ill, which results in our being unable to fully and completely pay attention in the moment.
When the moment is over, the explicit memory comes back on, and we go on with what we were doing, having neatly cut and pasted our memory together, deleting and editing here and there, creating a survival strategy to calm us and return us to homeostasis.
When we are traumatized again our internal survival system will instantly search for a previously successful survival strategy. Hunting for a similar spike in our sensory survival memory, it will activate whatever survival strategy was used in that earlier moment, precisely because we survived it. From then on, any time it feels like the same, similar or close enough, the system will run the same survival strategy. The more times it runs the strategy, the more efficient it becomes. What is "wired together fires together," and a neatly bound survival strategy becomes a learned response pattern triggered from the implicit memory.
However, a strategy we created when we were 4 years old, may not be the most efficient strategy for us anymore. This is precisely why we often feel younger when we are in survival mode. Consciously we only know that we are responding to life in a certain way and are confused by our own responses especially if we desire to move ourselves in the opposite direction. It feels like self-sabotage, but truly, it’s more closely akin to old programming that has never gotten uninstalled or updated. What was useful when we were young, has become confining and limiting.
The somatic survival system is holographic, meaning any fragment of the survival constellation may trigger the entire reactive response pattern. The emotional charge we experienced in the originating traumatic moment remains suppressed in the autonomic nervous system (ANS). It is an astonishingly efficient system and can trigger in 8/10s of a second or less, far below the level of conscious comprehension. The deep somatic emotional survival response system does not have a sense of linear time. It does not sort data by the story. It only cares about the amplitude of the overwhelm, the emotional charge of the feelings, and about getting the system as a whole, back to homeostasis as quickly as possible.
Much as we have discovered with chaos, no matter how chaotic and random it appears from observation, at the deepest levels there is indeed an implicit order. To find that ordering among the chaos, we have to address a different, deeper, level of self to discover the misunderstanding or misinterpretation we made in a moment of crisis.
Every part of us operates in a cooperative interplay of homeostasis-even when we are out of balance. In a compensated way, it’s all working perfectly, maintaining a state of balanced imbalance. The question is why? Why is our internal unconscious (implicit) operating system choosing to work harder and less efficiently instead of the usual more efficient way?
Often it's not that we can't do it differently, it's that the system is choosing not to, and SEA® is concerned with that choice point in time. Going to that moment of choice and releasing the blocked energy of those moments, expands our ability to choose our present time response. When we change the misunderstanding, recode the experience at the visceral level, and release the repressed charge, our choices and responses become proactive. We become fuller participants in our current lives, instead of re-enacting, re-membering and re-sponding to the past as if it were now.
EXPLICIT MEMORY VS. IMPLICIT MEMORY
Explicit memory is the conscious memory system. It is made up of all that we consciously remember. Of all the billions of bits of sensory data that come into our systems every day, only about 10-15% is actually “remembered.” This is necessary. We couldn’t possibly keep track of all that data. We need to be able to sort for the most important data and forget the stuff that doesn’t matter. The explicit memory deletes, sorts and generalizes. It is our database for making flexible decisions based on previous experience and learning. The larger the data base, the better the informed decision. This is part of what gives us wisdom and good judgment. The explicit memory system is therefore, inherently incomplete.
We delete, distort and generalize based on our filtering systems. These filters are like a filing system, and they tell our senses what to notice and file, and what to disregard. Our filters are gleaned from family patterns, genetic tendencies, ethnic and religious propensities, as well as, our own life experience.
In experiments tracking 'change blindness' for instance, psychologists have demonstrated that this sensory deletion process is active in all of us, and it explains why we can miss sensory data that is obviously right in front of us but not recorded, and why one person will remember certain details, and someone else will remember others. This selective memory is our explicit system. The Monkey Business Illusion, Color Changing Card Trick, and Person Swap are all fun examples of this.
Our explicit, or conscious memory, then, is designed to be incomplete, with a filtering system that has determined what is important for us to remember based on our needs and desires, as well as what is important for us not to remember such as traumatic or overwhelming moments or events.
The implicit, or unconscious memory is different. It is held deeply within us and is massive, storing everything we have ever experienced. As the explicit memory deletes, distorts and generalizes, the implicit memory is in constant record mode, recording all the bits of sensory data the brain/body system may need to reference at future date. It is a back up file in case we deleted something that, in hindsight, was important. The implicit system is part of our learned survival system, and it is unconsciously referenced in a constant flow of expanding fields of learning and experience that is life.
The implicit memory system also retains complete learning. It is there to aid in the performance of unconscious tasks such as walking, talking, breathing, driving a car, riding a bike or anything that we have done often enough that we no longer need to remember the details of how to do it.
Implicit memory also exquisitely records traumatic events in bits of sensory data. It also records the emotional response patterns we used to survive those moments. These emotional response patterns are survival strategies. Survival is our number one priority. Included in survival is also energy conservation. So, if there is a survival strategy in place that worked well one time, it will use it again. In the ever expanding internal efficiency survival effort, these established responses get hot wired for fast response, often exhibiting as full body alerts.
WHAT HAPPENS IN A MOMENT OF OVERWHELM
In the original moment of emotional overwhelm (traums, startle, shock, etc.) the explicit system hits a pause button. We might become confused, distracted, sleepy, hungry or ill, which results in our being unable to fully and completely pay attention in the moment.
When the moment is over, the explicit memory comes back on, and we go on with what we were doing, having neatly cut and pasted our memory together, deleting and editing here and there, creating a survival strategy to calm us and return us to homeostasis.
When we are traumatized again our internal survival system will instantly search for a previously successful survival strategy. Hunting for a similar spike in our sensory survival memory, it will activate whatever survival strategy was used in that earlier moment, precisely because we survived it. From then on, any time it feels like the same, similar or close enough, the system will run the same survival strategy. The more times it runs the strategy, the more efficient it becomes. What is "wired together fires together," and a neatly bound survival strategy becomes a learned response pattern triggered from the implicit memory.
However, a strategy we created when we were 4 years old, may not be the most efficient strategy for us anymore. This is precisely why we often feel younger when we are in survival mode. Consciously we only know that we are responding to life in a certain way and are confused by our own responses especially if we desire to move ourselves in the opposite direction. It feels like self-sabotage, but truly, it’s more closely akin to old programming that has never gotten uninstalled or updated. What was useful when we were young, has become confining and limiting.
The somatic survival system is holographic, meaning any fragment of the survival constellation may trigger the entire reactive response pattern. The emotional charge we experienced in the originating traumatic moment remains suppressed in the autonomic nervous system (ANS). It is an astonishingly efficient system and can trigger in 8/10s of a second or less, far below the level of conscious comprehension. The deep somatic emotional survival response system does not have a sense of linear time. It does not sort data by the story. It only cares about the amplitude of the overwhelm, the emotional charge of the feelings, and about getting the system as a whole, back to homeostasis as quickly as possible.
