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One no made her seven again
The one-word no
Early in dating Ryan, dating coach Sabrina Zohar asked if they could go somewhere, and he answered with one word, no, and left. Her body went into heat mode and her thoughts spiraled into rage. A trigger is a neutral action or inaction, and it doesn't have to be a big moment.
How old do I feel
She recognized protest behavior, the things people do to reconnect when they feel a connection slipping. Then she asked the two questions from her book: how old do I feel, and where did I learn this? The answer was seven, and her father, who could walk off and leave her feeling dismissed.
The conversation
When Ryan came back she asked to share something. She told him the no had sent her into a tailspin, that he didn't need to change anything, and asked whether in the future he could say why he didn't want to do something so she wouldn't invent stories. The issue has never come up again.
How can a small moment set off a big reaction?
In studies on rats in the 1980s and 1990s, neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux of New York University showed that sensory information can reach the amygdala by a fast route straight from the thalamus, skipping the cortex. This quick route is crude, but it arrives before the cortex has finished interpreting what happened. The body can start responding with a racing heart and tension while the thoughts are still catching up. LeDoux described the pathway in his 1996 book The Emotional Brain.
Why do separated children protest so loudly first?
In the 1950s, psychiatrist John Bowlby and social worker James Robertson observed young children separated from their parents in hospitals. They described three stages: protest, despair, and detachment. In the protest stage, a child cries, searches, and demands the parent's return. Robertson's 1952 film A Two-Year-Old Goes to Hospital documented the sequence and helped change hospital visiting rules in Britain.
Why does naming a feeling calm it?
In a 2007 study in Psychological Science, Matthew Lieberman and colleagues at UCLA showed people pictures of angry and fearful faces. When participants put the emotion into words, activity rose in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex and fell in the amygdala. Simply seeing the faces without labeling them produced a stronger amygdala response. The researchers called this affect labeling.
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