Why does intense breathing cause intense feelings?
One explanation for the dramatic results
that can often be achieved through intensive breathing can be found in the fear
centre of our brain: the amygdale. This small organ with the size of an almond
seed situated deep down in our brain is developed in the third month of
pregnancy and works as an accurate storage of all events, which have caused
fear and emotional overwhelm throughout our lives. It works totally
unconsciously and has no reference to time. This means that the amygdale stores
the memory of a barking dog, which I perceived as dangerous at the age of one
without taking a note about the time. So the same fear with the same intensity
as I had experienced it in early childhood is produced when meeting a barking
dog in an adult age.
The task of the amygdale is to react
within very short time to sensory data coming from outside, which indicate a
dangerous situation. This is why the connection from the ears to the amygdale
is extremely short: a signal that is coming in from the ears needs to jump over
only three synapses to reach the alarm centre in the brain, and these three
jumps do not need more than eight milliseconds.
After that, the amygdale is able to set
off the complex stress reaction immediately by activating other brain centres,
mainly the hypothalamus. Thus an overall change in the whole body including
intense breathing is triggered and all the body’s resources for fight or flight
are mobilized so we can face challenges in an effective way.
Intense Breathing and Fear
In a Breathwork session, we usually start
with relaxing the body. It is important for the client to let go of obvious
muscular tensions, so that the breath can start to flow easier and deeper as
usual. Then the breathing can be intensified by will and encouragement up to a
point, where the amygdale is reminded of danger in which this form of breathing
had appeared spontaneously in any former time of the history of the person. So
the amygdale starts the stress reaction in the body similar to a past traumatic
experience. The client experiences strange body sensations, bizarre movements
and intense feelings of fear, anger or sadness up to the point of cathartic
release.
The amygdale also connects to the other
memory storages in the upper regions of our brain, the cortex. The connection
is mediated by the hippocampus, which is our unconscious organizer for
conscious memories. In this way, sensual memories from the past are activated
and can be experienced as images, sounds or body sensations which come along with
the intense feelings created by the amygdale. Past situations of traumatizing
power arise, can be faced consciously until we are ready to integrate them.
We can understand the fact that memories
come up often far beyond the range of our conscious memory storage, because the
memory capacity of the amygdale reaches back to the early times of pregnancy.
The visual impressions that come with it may not always be accurate, as they
are formed by the associative cortex under the governance of the hippocampus. Their
production does not follow a strict rule and principle. Yet it can provide a
lot of relevant details. Our brain does not work like a historical scientist
who clearly separates facts and fiction but more like a poet who creates images
with complex meanings. (This is the place where the false memory syndrome comes
in.)
The memories from the fear storage are
provided in a different format, which is simple and accurate. This information
is far from being complete or objective. It is like a database with very few
parameters and it focuses on detecting dangerous signals in the environment
quickly and precisely. When I got hit by a red car years ago, the same colour
in a tiny spot in my vision can trigger the original panic reaction.
Just bringing up the fearful information
would not help to heal them. On the contrary, it would intensify and strengthen
them in the sense of retraumatisation. But the relaxed state, in which the body
receives the traumatic memories, and the safety, which is provided by the therapist,
help to integrate the memory. Integration means that the fear which is stored
in the amygdale is strongly linked to a time frame from the higher regions of
the brain so that we are able to allocated the fear far back in the past and to
experience the present as safe and trustworthy.
Here, another important centre of the
brain comes into play, the prefrontal cortex (PFC). This is our agent for
reality check and responsibility. It matures during adolescence. The PFC is
able to quiet our fearful amygdale when we bring old memories to consciousness.
It says, that old experience was very frightening for us, but now we are grown
up and we are no more in danger. (This is called a top-down-control.) But the
PFC needs calm circumstances, because when anxiety prevails, its reasoning is
set aside by the alarm centres.
One client of mine came to a breathwork
session because she felt highly disturbed after a breathing session in a group
where the person who was assisting her, became unsafe during the process and could
not give her the support she would have needed to integrate the emotions that
came up. So she needed careful attention and relaxed breathing to work through
and integrate this disturbing experience.
When the right circumstances are
provided, the client experiences the intensity of the emotion and feels safe
enough to face it and to cope with it. She stays consciously focussed on the
breathing, so she cannot be totally overwhelmed by the emotion as in the
traumatic situation of the past. The therapist is present and aware of the
needs of the client, encourages the client to experience the feelings and to
stay aware of the breathing. He serves as a grounding anchor and a connection
bridge to present reality.
In case that daily life provides another
situation, which could trigger the pattern of fear which came up in the
session, it is much less likely that the fear will arise as intense as before
and after some time, it will happen that the person can stay calm and does not
even think of being afraid.
Limitations of Catharsis
Cathartic breathing has some limitations
we should be aware of when using it as a therapeutic method. One limit is that
strong emotions from past trauma can arise too quickly for the organism to
integrate them. This brings the danger of overstretching and damaging a fragile
ego structure and cause severe desintegration and decompensation resulting in
psychosis. So persons with a fragile personality structure and a weak social
background should not be guided into intense breathing sessions. They have to
become acquainted with their body and their breath in the first place. When
they have learned to feel grounded in their bodies and to relax with their
outbreath, then they can slowly be lead to towards increasing the volume of the
inhalation.
The other limitation can be found in the
learning abilities of the amygdale. We know about the mechanism of extinction
from classical conditioning as researched by Iwan Pawlow a hundred years ago.
For a person who is exposed to frightening signals over a period of time
without anything dangerous happening, the signal loses its scaring character.
When we hear a car alarm going off every two minutes, we stop to listen to it.
Similarly, after some experiences with
intense breathing, the amygdale stops to get anxious when the breathing rhythm
intensifies and the pauses of relaxation are omitted. It has learned with the
help of the prefrontal cortex, that there is no real danger in the situation.
So the client has learned to integrate her fears to a certain degree and has
strengthened the top-down control to tame the lower emotional centre to fire
off unnecessarily all the time.
We observe that most clients who come to
breathwork sessions on a regular basis, reach a level where they can breathe
strongly and intensely in a connected rhythm without producing intense
emotional responses or outbreaks. Their system gets adjusted to the “strange”
breathing pattern. This does not mean that all their traumas are healed, but
that their body including their brain has managed to cope with the intensified
breathing pattern and is ready to move on from that level.
At this point, the method of cathartic
breathing has reached its purpose and needs to be changed. Working with
relaxing the breathing combined with a full volume can provide deeper levels of
healing. Still, not all issues and causes of suffering can be eliminated by
conscious breathing. We need complementary approaches to access these ailments.
This can be emotional level breathing, systemic breathing, interactive
breathing or any other approach in complementary breathwork, which opens the
door to the different levels of our soul other than by cathartic breathing.
The drama-resolution-cycle
Some therapists and some clients become
disappointed at the point when cathartic breathing fails to produce remarkable
and sensational results.
As we know from wave theories, even the
strongest waves cool down and disappear after some time. When the client and
the therapist associate therapeutic success with high waves, they think after a
smooth and quiet session, that something essential is missing. When dramatic
breakthroughs are considered as the core of therapy. intensity as such is the
marker for success, and the lack of intensity the sign of failure.
The therapist will transfer his concept
to the client whether it is shared verbally or not. Both, therapist and client
become addicted to a drama-resolution-cycle: a drama is needed to obtain
freedom so dramas have to be created to gain the benefit from the feeling of resolution.
This is like seeking the experience that we never feel as good as after
recovering from a severe disease. But it would not be considered as normal to
acquire intense illnesses for the sake of the nice feeling after recovery.
If the therapist feels stressed for
delivering dramatic results, she will look for new means of producing such.
There are several tools to provide a high level of excitement and dramatic
tension, mainly with interventions on the physical level. Applying pressure on
certain points of the body will inevitably produce strong emotional
reactions.
Some breathworkers claim that more
breathing is better breathing. So they motivate their clients for intense
breathing and assume automatically that less intense breathing indicates psychological
resistance. More breathing is equated with more life energy and this is stated
like a dogma.
But those therapists do not consider that
the level of energy which the body can take from our breathing metabolism does
not depend on the quantity of air taken in but on the ability of the body to
take in the oxygen. Simple measurements can show that strong and rapid
breathing takes more energy from the body as it adds to it.
So the question is whether any further
healing can happen under such manipulative and ideological circumstances.
Healing cannot be measured by the quantity of dopamine in the brain, which is
likely to be high at the end of a cathartic session. Becoming addicted to
emotional arousal is bound to create more suffering and to deepen neurotic
patterns. When therapy turns into a sportive exercise, it would be better to
tell the client to do an hour of running instead of the session which would
probably give him the same or even a healthier result.
Good breathing is relaxed breathing
In many cases of therapy, catharsis is
useful to open up the blocks, which are in the way of gaining more relaxation.
So it is an episode on the way. Learning to intensify the breathing is needed
and can be used up to a certain point, which is different for each person. When
this point is missed, the deepening of relaxation is blocked and the craving
for tension becomes an addictive pattern.
Therapy should result in weakening and
dissolving patterns of dysfunctional behaviour, in reducing underlying fears
and in enlarging the areas for relaxation in daily life. A healthy life can
have its intense aspects and times but they should not arise from stress, fear
or craving but should be associated with joy and pleasure, as the playful side
of relaxation.
A good breathing pattern is a sign of a
healed body-mind-system. In my view a good breathing pattern can be measured by
the amount of relaxation in the breathing muscles and not by the quantity of
air flowing in and out. A relaxed breathing rhythm is flexible and can adjust
to different situations, calming down to slow breathing when the circumstances
are pleasant and free of challenge, and speeding up when things need to be
done. It provides the minimum of breathing activity which is needed to fulfil
the actual demands of reality.
