I think since my feelings and thoughts guide my actions, and feelings come from the primitive area, the amygdala Amygdala and the thoughts are "controlled" by the frontal lobe http://voices.yahoo.com/frontal-lobe...y-361802.html; it's a bit of a life's work trying to figure out how to balance the two. I think I started out with loss and my fears being in the forefront, so I overcompensated and got "intellectual" and worked mostly out of my frontal lobe.

I went to therapy every week for years and years because I knew that was what I was "supposed" to do. It was scary and, despite going for years and years, it didn't get a lot easier in some ways, T going away on vacation got me to the very end, for example. Once in the habit of working out of my frontal lobe, it gets difficult to let go of that and pay more serious attention to what my amydala might be saying, to let it have its say instead of trying to immediately shut it down?

They talk about stress and how humans don't "let go" of the stress and let it leave the body but I think some of that is that we try to shut it down, ignore it, pretend it is wrong/bad/crazy-making/inappropriate. We talk about how we don't trust but we don't talk about how we don't acknowledge the rightness of our fear/panic/feelings we don't "like" to feel.

I've only had one true panic attack in my life and I was able to use my frontal lobe to look around and evaluate my surroundings, think about what was being required of me backwards and forwards in the immediate time period to see there was no genuine threat but I did not belittle how I felt. I took how I felt seriously (as they were some powerful serious feelings happening! :-) but I used my head to evaluate those feelings and, eventually, everything came out all right. I use some of what I learned from that panic attack to this day; when I am having trouble breathing (I have asthma) I don't like it at all but I do not panic, I note all my physical sensations and try to work with my body to help it feel better. I don't let my thinking carry me further in the "wrong" direction. I am not Pollyanna, telling myself "It's okay, nothing's wrong, you are breathing fine" but I am also not, "I cannot breath, I'm gonna die" and run around in a panic, making it worse.

I think the frontal lobe is there to remind us which direction we would like to go in. I get the feelings (can't breathe) and my frontal lobe thinks, "What can I do to help make it better?" The frontal lobe is trying to take the feelings and turn them into words/a path for action that will help this organism called Perna. But, if we are still hostage to the feelings we let habitually tell us to run, hide, play dead :-) all the time, then the frontal lobe is going to go along with that and panic, warn, give directions on how to run, hide, or play dead. It is going to be a slave to the feelings.

I think trust is like faith a bit; one has to decide to trust and choose to move in that direction.