Root and Rise

The Science of Shrinking

Fear and doubt cause things to appear more powerful than they really are. When we fear a person or an outcome, they/it feel like they have all the power in the dynamic. And sometimes, they do. But in most instances, it is our perception that gives them more power. We shrink and cut ourselves into tiny pieces to accommodate ridiculous behavior and expectations because we felt trapped and could not see beyond the fog that surrounded me when we live in fear. A chronically alert threat detection system overrides our reality and make us susceptible to manipulation.

We have all heard the saying: “Death by a thousand paper cuts.” It is true. Small cuts gathered over time collectively bleeds us into exhaustion until we give up and feel powerless. Even brief periods of peace and calm allow a reset for the nervous system. That reset lets us think from a place of serenity and assess every situation and person for who they truly are. Unreasonable people intuitively know this. That is why they keep their victims on high alert, always in survival mode so it is easy to control them. The same applies to corrupt politicians and dictators who constantly churn the public’s psyche to keep people in a state of fear and doubt about the future, keeping people pitted against one another and in turmoil so they can control the masses and continue their greedy spree.

The science: The amygdala hijack is real. When a person lives in chronic fear, their prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the brain that says, "Wait, this person is actually small and insecure" goes offline. The amygdala is your brain's smoke detector. It does not think. It reacts. When it detects a threat, whether it is a raised voice, a slammed door, or a certain look, it bypasses your prefrontal cortex, the rational, planning part of your brain, and activates your sympathetic nervous system in milliseconds. The result is immediate and physical: your pupils dilate to see the threat better, your hearing sharpens, and your peripheral vision narrows into tunnel vision. The abuser fills that tunnel. They become the only thing you can see. In this state, people consistently overestimate the size and physical proximity of a threat. A man of average height can feel seven feet tall. A normal-sized room can feel like a cage. This is not imagination. This is your visual cortex being modulated by fear. This is not weakness, this is biology. But the good news is that biology can be retrained.

Reprogramming the Nervous System : How to Shrink the Giant that is in front of us?

If abuse stems from mental manipulation, then it can be counteracted by reprogramming our thoughts. Just as abuse planted false beliefs about us, we can plant positive beliefs about ourselves in our minds.

I recently came across a very useful meditation series taught by Dr. Jose Silva, the book was available at a local library as an e-book that I could listen to and practice the guided meditation. The book taught me that we can challenge our patterns and replace negative assumptions with repeated, higher, positive thoughts. The brain does not know if something is good or bad for the human being. It learns that if a person uses a particular information repetitively then it must be important. So it carves an easier pathway for retrieval. When these pathways are ingrained, they become beliefs.

Here are some of the YouTube videos that are associated with the mind control mediation practices: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYbaE9natFA&list=PLKAc6BAnW9PO6EbiY_-o2VGENqxvdySCe

Here is the website with more information: https://silvamethod.com/

The body knows

Observe your body during stressful situations. The same feelings and sensations can be triggered by even thinking of a stressful situation. If this is true, then the inverse of this relationship is also true. The good news is that we can reverse-engineer the stress that our mind experiences. When we use tranquil visualizations, breathing exercises, and even gently observe our thoughts as they happen and distance ourselves from them for even a few moments, we can change the biochemical reactions within our body that can produce a stress response. This in turn aligns our subconscious mind with the new sensations our body feels during a stressful situation. This new belief system for the same old situation helps us manage our fears and doubts in a healthy manner, which in turn expands our comfort zone and naturally leads to positive growth.

The ‘tap method’ is another way to soothe our nerves. Just like we tap children gently on their backs to put them to sleep. We can do that to ourselves by tapping gently with the tips of my fingers on our face, head, shoulders, hands, torso, and legs to bring a sense of groundedness that soothes our nervous system. Allowing for these small pockets of haven to down-regulate our cortisol helps us assess our circumstances with better clarity and arrive at decisions with strength.

“One day the mountain that is in front of you will be so far behind you, it will barely be visible in the distance. But the person you become in learning to get over it? That will stay with you forever. And that is the point of the mountain.”

-Brianna Wiest

Stephen Porges’s Polyvagal Theory introduced the concept of ‘neuroception‘ that is the body’s ability to detect safety or danger without any conscious input. Your nervous system constantly scans for cues: tone of voice, facial expression, body posture, even micro-movements. When you are living in chronic abuse, your neuroception becomes calibrated to over-detect threat. You become exquisitely sensitive to the smallest sign of his dysregulation. And because your system is primed for danger, it becomes the primary cue. Your abuser’s mood becomes your weather. They do not even have to do anything dramatic. Their simple presence in a room can trigger a full sympathetic response; racing heart, shallow breath, muscles bracing. And in that state, the threat feels omnipotent. Because your body has handed the threat the keys to your nervous system.

Fear and doubt are not just emotions. It is a neurochemical state. Chronic abuse elevates baseline cortisol, which over time damages the hippocampus which is the part of your brain responsible for contextual memory and accurate risk assessment. This means you begin to doubt your own perceptions. Did that really happen? Am I overreacting? This doubt further disables your prefrontal cortex. You lose access to the very part of your brain that could say, “Wait. This is just a man. You have survived the threat before. You can leave.” Without access to rational perspective, the abuser’s power inflates. The abuser feels not just strong, but inevitable like gravity, like something you cannot fight because you cannot even see around them.

According to Stephen Porges, when the threat feels too large to fight or flee, your nervous system can shift into the dorsal vagal state: freeze, collapse, or dissociate. This is an ancient survival strategy, think of an animal playing dead. In this state, you may feel physically heavy or numb, unable to speak or move, overcome by a sense of resignation or giving up. The abuser feels enormous, and you feel tiny. The freeze response is not consent. It is not cowardice. It is your nervous system saying, “This threat is too big. I will survive by becoming invisible.” But the side effect is that the abuser’s perceived power becomes absolute. You feel like a mouse under a cat’s paw.

Abusers do not constantly display cruelty. They alternate between warmth and violence, kindness and cruelty. This is called intermittent reinforcement, this is the same psychological mechanism that makes slot machines addictive. In your brain, the moments of kindness release dopamine. The moments of fear release cortisol and norepinephrine. Your brain becomes locked in a cycle of craving the “good” version of them. And to protect that possibility, it exaggerates the danger of leaving them. They feel stronger because your brain has convinced you: They are the only source of relief from the very fear they create. In your neurochemistry, the abuser become both the storm and the shelter.

Here is what the science reveals, and what abusers rely on you not knowing: They are not strong, but rather your fear is stronger. Your nervous system is doing exactly what it evolved to do, which is surviving a predator by making the predator seem too big to challenge. But that perception is not reality. It is a survival hallucination, useful in the moment of actual attack but disastrous as a long-term lens. When you are safe, when you have slept in your own bed, eaten good food, felt the sun on your skin, the abuser’s image shrinks. Not because you are pretending. But because your nervous system is no longer in threat-detection mode. Your prefrontal cortex comes back online. Your pupils relax. Your peripheral vision returns. And you see them for what they always were: a human. Flawed. Small in ways they will never admit and powerful only because your body believed they were.

That same nervous system can learn to make them small again. Healing is not about becoming “braver.” It is about regulating your body so that your perception returns to accuracy. You are not broken for having believed they were stronger. You were accurate to your biology, and now, you can retrain that biology. The body may keep count, and that could show as tightness in your jaw, pain in your neck, back ache with no underlying anatomical reason, sleeplessness, autoimmune conditions, and mental fog. But it also keeps the capacity to recalibrate. Safety, rest, good food, a hand on your own chest, a friend who buys you a headboard, these are not luxuries, but rather they are the tools of perceptual repair.

So here’s a small breathing techniques called ‘Nadi Shudhi’ or alternate nostril breathing. Notice your breath, feel the in breath and outbreath. You would notice that one nostril breathes clearer, and more deeper than the other, and that this shifts alternately between the two nostrils every 90 minutes. In Indian yogic practices, the right side of the body is considered the masculine side and the left side is considered the side with the feminine energy. Every human being is an amalgamation of both masculine and feminine energies. I am not talking about male and female, but rather about the masculine forms of energy like action, assertion, logic, etc. that are outward directed, and feminine forms of energy like intuition, nurturing, compassion, etc. that have an innate receptive quality. All of us are a combination of these energies. Society molds us so different genders are primed to show more of one type of energy when compared to the other. In India, the masculine form of energy is called ‘pingala’ and the feminine energy is called ‘ida’ and the spine (the shushumna nadi) is the central channel that connects the two sides. This is akin to the Chinese tradition of Yin (feminine form) and Yang (masculine form). The alternate nostril breathing technique, balances the two sides, and calms the nervous system. It is a very effective method, give it a try, and notice how you feel before and after the practice.

Here is a step-by-step guide:

1. Sit in a comfortable position, relax your shoulders, and close your eyes.
2. Bring your right hand up to your nose.
3. Press your right thumb against your right nostril to close it. Slowly and deeply inhale through your left nostril.
4. Remove your thumb and use your ring finger to gently close your left nostril. Exhale slowly and completely through your right nostril.
5. Keeping your left nostril closed, inhale through your right nostril. Then, close the right nostril with your thumb and exhale through the left.
6. Continue this cycle for 5 to 10 minutes.

In short, think of your breath in the shape of ‘n’, breath goes in on one side and comes out the other, then draw an inbreath on the same side and exhale on the other side. When you are ready for the switch, open the nostril that is ready for exhale. It sounds complex, but if you practiced a couple of times, it will become second nature to you. Happy Breathing!!

Here is a YouTube video that might be helpful to learn the technique from the epilepsy foundation (https://www.youtube.com/@EpilepsyFoundationNational)