Show Notes:

As we open today’s topic on the avoidance dance, I want to acknowledge that avoidance is a totally normal reaction to things that are uncomfortable or actively painful. We avoid all kinds of things that we’ve had previous experience with or exposure to that has taught us that we don’t want to do it again. Avoidance is a stress reaction that comes from having learned something. We talked about this last week – if we think back to caveman times, and I go down a path and am confronted with a bear, my brain is going to take a multisensory movie that remembers the smell of sweet berries and the sound of a gurgling stream and the next time I head down a path with the same scent and sound my brain is going to be triggered in an effort to help me avoid another close call with big jaws and sharp claws. In that kind of a context, it can be a really good thing that we learn from our exposure to stressful stimuli in an effort to support our actual survival.

The challenge is that these avoidance prompts can become bigger or more generalized than is helpful to us, and if we’re not careful we can fall into the trap of learned helplessness.

For those who haven’t taken a psych class in a long time, let’s do a quick review. Back in the 1960’s Martin Seligman did research involving dogs. PETA would have a field day with this research, but at the time it was common practice. Seligman’s research was on classical conditioning, which is about the relationship that forms between two stimuli when they are consistently presented together. In this case, when a bell would ring, the dog would get a mild electric shock. After a short time of being presented together, the dogs would show a reaction as if they were being shocked whenever the bell would ring, even if the shock wasn’t administered. The bell became such a strong warning sign of the impending shock that the dogs came to assume and physiologically respond as if the shock happened simply because the bell rang. The researchers then took this one step further. They built a cage with two sections divided by a low fence that could easily be jumped by the dogs. One side of the cage was able to administer a mild electric shock, and the other side was electricity free. The dogs were placed on the side with the shock, and for any dogs who had not previously been in the bell experiment, they would quickly jump the fence and be free from the shock. Meanwhile, the ones who had been a part of the bell part of the experiment just laid down and didn’t even bother trying to find out if they could get away from the shock. This is what Seligman termed Learned Helplessness. The dogs had learned that they couldn’t escape or evade their fate…even though in this case they could have. The learning became so deeply held that they gave up trying and just stayed in it. 

Now, here’s where the research becomes interesting for our purposes. After they completed this phase of the research they asked a new question – can we break associations once they’ve been made? Essentially can we reverse learned helplessness…and the answer, is YES. In the case of the dogs, the researchers tried a number of things, including demonstrations of them stepping over the fence, bribery with reward as well as punishment to try to get the dogs to jump over to the non-electrified side of the cage. But the thing that worked was when the researchers physically picked up the dogs and moved them - when the dogs were forcibly given the opportunity to see for themselves that this side would be different. After two times of being carried over, the dogs started to regain their capacity for curiosity and were able to direct this toward their self-preservation rather than trying to conserve energy by lying down and waiting out the pain. Similarly, the researchers would ring the bell and NOT administer the shock, and while the dogs continued to have a physiological reaction as if they were being shocked for a little while, after several repetitions, the dogs learned that the bell was no longer associated with the shock. This process of unlearning a conditioned association is called extinction. We’re extinguishing the connection and the related reaction.

Ok, so what does this mean for us as humans almost 80 years later? Well, there are three key learnings I think we can draw from this that relates to stress exposure and the question of avoidance as a coping tool for dealing with triggering.

First, triggering is simply a more nuanced version of conditioning. In the Seligman studies, the conditioned stimuli are easily identifiable. Bell, shock, fear. Put those three together enough times and bell will yield fear even in the absence of shock. In life, we rarely get such a clean example. While facets of a stress-inducing or traumatic event can feel clear or obvious, others can feel far more difficult to identify. For example, in a car accident it might seem obvious that the survivor might develop a triggering reaction to driving, driving in conditions similar to the accident, like at night or in the rain, and maybe even to just being in a car or thinking about being in a car. Those are the easy ones. But there are far more subtle connections that can be made as well. For example, if the accident happened after leaving the house following an argument with a parent or spouse, the feeling of being angry can become a trigger because it was present at the time of the incident and serves as a connection to what happened. If the accident happened in a rural area with the smell of farms and manure; or near a fast food joint in all its greasy glory…these prompts can be so subtle that they are not even consciously in our awareness…but then we go to grab a burger and experience a flurry of flashbacks and feel totally insane. Remember last week we talked about why triggering exists – that it’s intention within your brain is for survival purposes, which is your brains absolute top priority and objective. While it can be extremely uncomfortable, inconvenient, and sometimes even newly dangerous (having panic attacks while driving is not safe for anyone on the road), it’s for a reason and it’s trying to do the important job of keeping you safe.

The second thing we can take from Seligman’s research is that avoiding exposure on the front end is a good idea. If we can prevent the consistency of exposure to the pairing of stimuli, we can reduce the power of the connection and the degree of damage we suffer as a result. This is where trigger prevention measures come into play. If we can work to provide ourselves with a buffer, a protective layer that helps us to keep our prefrontal cortex active during stressful events, we can reduce the consistency with which triggers are paired with events that feel significantly negative. What if, in the dog studies, the bell were paired with the shock sometimes but not all the time, AND it was paired with getting delicious food sometimes but not all the time, AND it was paired with getting pets and cuddles sometimes but not all the time, AND it was paired with getting a bath sometimes but not all the time – if the stimuli (the bell) were presented in a host of situations that evoked positive, negative and neutral feelings, it would likely become background noise. Not specifically becoming a hallmark of anything in particular. Similarly, if we can build experiences that evoke a variety of feelings with the things that could otherwise become triggers, we can be proactive at nipping triggering in the bud.

Another way we can prevent the consistency of exposure to the pairing of stimuli is by reducing our exposure more generally. I’m not saying avoid triggering here – I’m saying limit exposure to the stress and trauma to be...