Danger, Lies, and Underhanded Deeds

Is There Real Danger In Our Lives?

 

What moves us to fear? Studies of our fear system have increased in past years, informing us of how fear is generated within our brain, affecting our body and affecting our behaviors.  When we react with a fear response, the brain system that is operating is the Limbic System.  This portion of the brain is above the Reptilian Brain, which functions through instincts and basal types of behaviors.  But the Limbic System serves us through managing elements of memory and recall, as well as functions to activate the fight, flight, or freeze responses. This system keeps us from danger and perceived danger.  When we sense danger, without control of our cognitive thinking brain, we resort to protective actions and behaviors to keep up safe, to keep us from harm, to keep us from dying.  What would a man, woman, or child be willing to do to preserve their life?

 

Most humans want to preserve their lives.  Some have actually experienced valid situations in which they have had to preserve their lives when another or others have wanted to bring harm to them.  Accidents involving vehicles or motorcycles, trains or planes, or Acts of God, such as weather events have caused situations of prospective death.  Violence in city streets, violence in the home, and violence between nations has created arenas where men, women, and children are experiencing fear of death, sometimes daily.  So, fear is purposeful.  It alerts us to impending danger; it sets physiological responses in the body on alarm mode in order to prepare us to fight for our lives.  But some situations only call for freezing, staying still and calm, in order to save us.  And others require us to flee, run for our lives.

 

 

Sometimes our memories that have caused us to be afraid, to be anxious, to be frightened as a child, stay imbedded in our brain circuitry and cause us to continue, as we get older, to react as though those events were still taking place.  We continue to be anxious and hyperviligilant, reacting to new situations as though it was the old.  Therefore, we remain in a state of self-preservation, protecting ourselves from being wounded, harmed, or killed.  What this means in every day relationships is that we are willing to compromise the other person in order to preserve ourselves.  We are willing to lie, maim, harm, kick, and fight our way out of the event that is unfolding before us, even if we no longer have to use these behaviors.  It is likely that we have a difficult time filtering out what is really worth using that type of energy to guard us from harm.

 

How is it that we are so willing to compromise our integrity by fibbing, lying, and fabricating information in order to avoid negative consequences? Is it that we are unable to behave with mature thinking? Is it that we are unable to behave with thought-fullness? Is it that we are unable to operate in relationships without consideration of the other, only in respect to our self-survival? We lie to bosses, to parents, to children, to constituents, wives and husbands, to ourselves, and even to God – if that is possible.  It is a common belief in substance treatment circles that we are truly unable to lie to ourselves, and unable to lie to God.  Just recall those moments when we are on the verge of releasing false information, it feels in our body as if we were regressing to childhood, standing in front of our parents, and claiming not to have hit our sister or broken the vase or stolen the gum from the store.  But even with the negative physical and emotional effects of lying, we still do it.