With traumatic experiences like that, it’s easy to understand how those
emotions can become unconscious, memorized responses to reminders from
your environment that you lost a loved one. You know by now that when
you think about that experience, you create the same emotions in your brain
and body as if the event was occurring all over again. All it takes is one
stray thought, or one reaction to some event in the external world, to
activate that program—and you start feeling the emotion of your past grief.
The trigger could be seeing a dog that looks like yours, or visiting a place
you once took him as a puppy. Regardless of the sensory input, it activates
an emotion. Those emotional triggers can be obvious or subtle, but they all
affect you at a subconscious level, and before you can process what has
happened, you’re back in that emotional/chemical state of grief, anger, and
sadness.
Once that happens, the body runs the mind. You can use your conscious
mind to try to get out of that emotional state, but invariably you feel like
you’re out of control.
Think of Pavlov and his dogs. In the 1890s, the young Russian scientist
strapped a few dogs to a table, rang a bell, and then fed the canines a hearty
meal. Over time, after repeatedly exposing the dogs to the same stimulus,
he simply rang the bell, and the dogs automatically salivated in anticipation.
This is called a conditioned response, and the process occurs
automatically. Why? Because the body begins to respond autonomically
(think of our autonomic nervous system). The cascade of chemical reactions
that is triggered within moments changes the body physiologically, and it
happens quite subconsciously—with little or no conscious effort.
This is one of the reasons why it is so hard to change. The conscious
mind may be in the present, but the subconscious body-mind is living in the
past. If we begin to expect a predictable future event to occur in reference to
a memory of the past, we are just like those canines. One experience of a
particular person or thing at a specific time and place from the past
automatically (or autonomically) causes us to respond physiologically.
Once we break the emotional addictions rooted in our past, there will no
longer be any pull to cause us to return to the same automatic programs of
the old self.
It begins to make sense that although we “think” or “believe” we are
living in the present, there is a good possibility that our bodies are in the
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