The Detection Of Safety and Danger

By Lynn L. West, PhDc, BCETS, LCPC

Lynn L. West & Associates, LLC

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The Detection Of Safety and Danger

Understanding the behavioral expressions associated with detection of safety and danger involves understanding the brain and the central nervous system (CNS) have distinct neural circuits that activate alert status and prepare the individual to deal with threat. When the biopsychology in a mammal detects threat, a biophysiological state is triggered. Defensive response reactions have distinct neurobiological profiles underpinning the physical expression of particular behaviors.

Mental health criteria detail these symptoms in distinct diagnostic criteria that are used by clinicians to convey repeating clusters of clinical symptoms and facilitate treatment. The biophysiology of the brain and CNS cannot be understood by reading the symptoms lists.

Neuroscientist and neurobiologist researcher Stephen W. Porges, PhD has developed the Polyvagal Theory, which details three separate brain circuits that have developed phylogenically and are associated with defensive response reactions that regulate behavioral and physiological adaptation to safe, dangerous and life-threatening environments.

The states of calm and metabolic stability are governed by the ventral vagal complex. The state of alert and mobilization of focused attention and fight/flight/numbing out and freeze behavior is governed by the sympathetic nervous system. The state of immobilization includes dissociation, fainting, and death feigning behaviors, and is governed by the dorsal vagal complex. Thus, biologically based perception, detection and evaluation of threat and danger are not an intellectual process; it is a biodirectional neural internal communication process involving calls and the brain and CNS.

When an individual's metabolic activity has raised their physiological state to mobilize to an alert state of defense response, as well as to an immobilization state as a coping mechanism to life threatening danger the individual will not process verbal or intellectual or rational discussion, but they will respond to comforting and supportive behaviors. Thus lecturing and interrogating someone, including children, to explain about when they did something or question and talk about why they are upset will lead nowhere, because their relative states of defensive response precludes their ability to do this.

You have to wait until their physiology has enabled them to return to a state of calm and balance, before using words to explain anything or talk about why they are emotional.

In psychology the time out is used to allow a child time to restore biophysiological calmness.