Neuro Linguistic Programming

Chapter 3: Discovering Who’s Directing Your Life 41

Figure 3-1:
Finding your
way around
the human
brain.

Smell pathway

Touch, pain,

temperature,

sense of position

pathways

Taste pathway

Thalamus

Amygdala

Hippocampus

Medial

lemniscus

Ventroposterior

lateral and medial

nucleus of thalamus

Prefrontal cortex

Somatosensory cortex

Hypothalamus

PTSD occurs when the amygdala receives input with a very high emotional

value, gets in a panic, and can’t send the information to the hippocampus.

Because of this, the traumatic event gets trapped within the amygdala and

the hippocampus is unable to present the memory to the neocortex for evalu-

ation, which means the brain can’t make sense of the event. Because the

amygdala is the organ primarily involved with your survival, in PTSD suffer-

ers it stays in a constant state of arousal, causing flashbacks and high levels

of anxiety.

Virginia Woolf wrote the novel Mrs Dalloway in the early 1920s and her

portrayal of Septimus Smith clearly identifies him as suffering from post-

traumatic stress after the horrors of World War I. Unfortunately, at the time,

conventional medicine was relatively inexperienced at dealing with psycho-

logical problems. Patients like Septimus Smith were advised to have plenty of

rest in order to recuperate and were given useless advice such as ‘pull your-

self together, man’.