HARVEST. The hidden neuroscience of control. Vol. 1

What is an unfinished episode, and why can’t it disappear on its own? To answer this question, let’s turn to a biological fact familiar to anyone who has observed an animal narrowly escape death. A deer, having escaped a wolf chase and found itself in the safety of a thicket on the other side of a river, stops, lies on its side, and trembles for several minutes. This is a release of excess energy, unspent after the threat has passed. Bodily mobilization doesn’t automatically reset, even if you mentally say, "Now it’s all over". Release occurs through physical movement, trembling, shaking, deep and long exhalations, and any other somatic manifestation that signals the brain that the situation can be released. The deer trembles for a while, then rises, shakes itself, and calmly returns to graze, as if nothing had happened. There’s no trace in his body of the fact that an hour ago he was a step away from death. Stressful activity was completely reset by the protocol, and his nervous system returned to a state of absolute rest, as the biological cycle had already completed. A person in a similar situation behaves differently. To rise, shake, shake himself, or release pent-up primal terror for him means "losing self-control," "sinking," "showing weakness," or "failing to cope". From early childhood, a child is systematically weaned from such behavior through commands: "Don’t cry," "pull yourself together," "calm down," "pull yourself together!" The body internalizes this as a program. The next time, without the participation of conscious will, it stops the trembling at its very inception, swallows the scream, locks in the sob, and pushes all the accumulated, mobilized energy back inside. Unable to express itself, the impulse settles in the form of muscle tension, which will accompany a person for years and decades. All the emotions not fully processed leave a trace in the body in the form of a compression bundle, a displaced vertebra, tension in the shoulders and jaw. The bearer no longer perceives this as discomfort or anomaly, as it has become natural. Such somatic markers tend to accumulate. By the age of forty, the average city dweller has hundreds of them; by fifty, thousands. The body in which the reader of these lines now resides stores a dense, tangible archive of everything that was once only half-experienced and has yet to find the opportunity to resolve. This preservation has a specific physiological cost. Each clamp and center of tension requires a considerable energy supply to maintain itself. In the case of a single clamp, the expenditure is minimal, but if there are thousands, the figures become colossal. Much of the chronic fatigue now considered a natural companion of adulthood is the overhead of maintaining a "library of unlived memories". It’s difficult for people to comprehend this because they have nothing to compare it to: their memory is devoid of a state free of blocks. And so, current vitality is accepted as the norm, while true health lies buried somewhere within, several stories below, and hasn’t manifested itself in a long time.

Beyond energy depletion, this trauma repository leads to another destructive consequence: it completely distorts the perception of the present. Every past trauma locked away in the memory basement remains sensitive to stimuli similar to the circumstances in which it was formed. A person who experienced a sharp shout from their father as a child will cringe for the rest of their life at any male voice resembling their father’s. And even if a colleague makes a completely neutral remark in the context of work, they instantly activate a defensive reaction. Consciousness can only find a plausible excuse: "I don’t like him," "he’s arrogant," "he’s being aggressive". Such connections, entangling thousands of everyday events, mean that a person never lives in the present. Their existence unfolds as a layering of the past on the present, with the past always setting the affective tone, and the present providing a convenient pretext for its activation. The presence of a hidden archive gives birth to the powerful machine we deal with. All news content and advertising are compiled to guarantee control through the system’s vulnerabilities: fear, anger, envy, the thirst for recognition, longing for the lost, or anxiety about the future. In a person free from such a repository, such impulses would trigger a short-lived reaction and immediately fade, like waves crashing against a rocky shore and rolling back. But for a person burdened with the rubble of the past, content clings to pre-existing hooks formed over the years. The external signal activates entire clusters of unlived fragments, stirring up such filth from the subconscious that it clogs all channels of perception for a long time. And until the storm subsides, the carrier will remain in a deep dormancy, and sober thoughts simply won’t reach it. The farm exploits this weakness of the mind. She doesn’t have to create reactions from scratch, she just pulls on old hooks, which is why her efforts are so economical and effective.