In Praise of Panic

Ugo Bonora, August 2022

Table of contents

Let's start with fear

Real environment and virtual environment - alignment

It's the end: panic saves us... or at least try

Panic panic

Suddenly...

From unexpected guest to old acquaintance

Time and memory

The magic of codes

What is the Systemic of Human Behavior

Several years ago, I must have been twenty years old or so, a girlfriend, whom I had been courting for a long time without success, confided to me that she had gone through a terrible period, serious panic attacks, she could not leave the house, she did not know what it was, she did not know who to tell it to, she did not know how to remedy ...

At that time I knew absolutely nothing about panic attacks, I was very experienced in sadness, anguish and anger, in the sense that I was often angry, and sometimes sad, sometimes distressed, but not panic.

About ten years ago, a friend, just over forty years old, a successful professional and hard worker, told me that it had already happened to him three times to leave the hotel, where he had taken accommodation during one of his frequent trips, and to be overwhelmed, almost a fainting, rush to the nearest emergency room, in-depth and repeated investigations indicated:  nothing, nothing at all. The first time he had blamed the air conditioning, the second and the third, well, the air conditioning was not working... reconstructing the sequences of the facts, the response he had given himself, then confirmed by another couple of specialists, was: panic attacks.

At that time, I knew a little more about panic, but not enough to feel able to help my friend, I asked for directions from people I trusted, and pointed to one of the two specialists that my friend then consulted.

A few years ago, a manager, who later became my student, told me that something enormously annoying was happening to him, in the middle of a presentation, topics of his total domain, presentations made countless times, he froze, he could no longer continue ... panic. Having repeated the thing several times, now the panic came even before the presentation. We managed to solve the thing, resorting to systemics, in a short time, to his full satisfaction, I began to write about it, presentation distress.

Again, a few years ago, another manager, who also became my student, told me that he was daily assailed by catastrophic forecasts, his work of years totally destroyed, in total misery, kicked out by his wife, homeless and without resources ... in short, panic!, despite the fact, stable, that his work was going well, with a constant growth, that his wife gave daily proof of being fond and devoted to him, in short, that things were going, in truth, well, if not very well. We solved the matter quite quickly, resorting to systemics, to our satisfaction.

There were also Elizabeth, and Catherine, and Violet, and some other students, who, to a greater or lesser extent, had to deal with panic... all of them helped me to find evidence that the systemics of human behavior allows to permanently "solve" this type of obstacle to well-being, to a good quality of life, it is about "studying", for a certain period with my help, and then until they have desire, no therapy, no meds, at least not for them.

Study what? The name of the matter is Systemics of Human Behavior, some brief notes are found at the end.

So I decided to present, in these pages, some aspects of this obstacle to a good life, usually called panic, panic attack: aspects, so to speak, structural, that everyone encounters in these cases, it being understood that the specific forms, for each, are original, unpredictable, unique and non-repeatable, since they depend on the uniqueness of each of us,  from the uniqueness of the genetic heritage of each one, from the stories of each one.

In short, the knowledge of the structural aspects is a part of the "remedy", insufficient, on its own, to remove the obstacle: the other part is the result of an elaboration that can only be developed with an expert guide.

Why praise panic? For it is one of the many life-saving gifts that we received at birth.

Let's start with fear

"I don't have to be afraid. Fear kills the mind. Fear is the little death that brings with it total annihilation. I will look my fear in the face. I will allow it to step on me and cross me. And when it has passed, I will open my inner eye and scrutinize its path. Where fear goes, there will be nothing. Only I will be there." Herbert, Frank P.. Dune (Fanucci Narrative) (Italian Edition) . Fanucci. Kindle edition.

It was 1965, some will have recognized the litany against the fear of the Good Gesserit, a formidable invention of Frank Herbert ... but even without knowing anything about this monumental work, the litany is quite suggestive, we use it to start dealing with something that we all know, which every day presents itself to us, in its various degrees of intensity.

We all know what fear is, at least in the sense of having sensed, felt, experienced it, like hunger, sleep, thirst, there are not so many, among us, those who, so to speak, have ideas, at least, if not more sophisticated knowledge, even less those who have conducted studies and research of more or less scientific value and character.

I dealt with it, for me enough, for a few years, some time ago, at that time I was interested in the possible developments of emotics, a neologism that tried to indicate a discipline, a field of study and research of a practical nature, from which to draw concrete advantages for the conduct of our lives: emotion and technique, tekné, knowing how to deal with emotions and primal emotional codes.

At least one idea of what emotions were had to be found, starting from the etymological roots of the word "emotion" was a beginning like any other: an opinion shared by those who studied on it, is that the root is Latin, from e-moveo, synthetically eradicate, shake, move, gut, the e premise to moveo (move) indicates, in that language,  moving from, pulling away from...

Names are of great use, words are of great use, just do not forget, and do not underestimate the fact, that they signal, indicate interactions: it is the interactions, the ways of connecting the elements with which we are dealing, indicated by the name, by the word, to be of interest to us.

Emotion is a name, it is a word, which indicates that among the elements that make up the environment with which we are dealing, real environment and virtual environment, it is happening that something is moved, unhinged, shaken, somehow "taken away" from where and how it was.

Quite a mess. One is there, doing his things as always, and zac!, the emotion comes to you and takes you away, it guts you, it shakes you, it unhinges you... but it's the way!, I say. It would be better if it were not there, if it did not happen, and to be able to proceed, reasonably, orderly, sensibly, as far as possible, on the path of life.

On closer inspection, placing emotions (including fear) among the "disturbances", the interferences of the common and ordered living and acting is a little limiting, and, to a better observation and analysis, in the end, a very serious distortion: if it is true that the production of an emotion, any, undermines, moves, svelle, and this is impossible to deny,  it is also true that this makes sense, it had millions of years ago, when our organism found itself endowed with an emotional system and emotional codes, and it has it even today.

It is not so much a question of resigning oneself to being, from time to time, we hope as little as possible, shaken and unhinged, as inevitable as breathing, as of knowing and recognizing how many and what benefits are brought, produced, generated by emotions, by our ability to "feel" emotions.

In fact, we trace them on the level of "feeling", of sensations, to which we then give a name ... but what allows us to give a name to those particular configurations of sensations is another of our systems, not the emotional system, not the emotion: the distinctive sensations of that emotion, or of the other, exist independently of the thought, they happen to us even if we didn’t have shared words to indicate them.

Yes, emotions happen to us, they come to us, coming from somewhere, that now, thanks to studies and research conducted for decades, we more or less know from where, and more or less we are able to describe the distinctive neurophysiological mechanism of each emotion, resorting to neurons, neurotransmitters, hormones, the central nervous system: neurosciences,  neuroscientists have produced a lot of stuff, within the limits of knowledge and reliability of observation tools, the feedback is of great interest.

Although it is likely that, once the Theory of Everything is completed, where gravity and quantum can finally be happily reunited, such neuroscientific knowledge will have to be completely reformulated... but until then we will have to be content with what is there, and try to get by with that.

None of us can say that we want this or that emotion to happen to him, not in the sense that the emotion he feels is the effect of an act of direct volition, such as: I want to feel joy!, no more than we can "command" ourselves to be hungry, or thirsty, or sleepy.

But each of us can do a lot to get that emotion to happen to him, he can work to obtain, to realize specific configurations of environments, real and virtual, and therefore, when these configurations are produced, also for our intentional and wise act, then, and only then, the emotion sought, wanted, desired, it can be produced.

These days it is a scorching heat, I started to write, the thermometer at eight in the morning records here a temperature of 30 ° Celsius, 86 ° Fahrenheit, and does not pull a breath of wind, I feel uncomfortable, I am bothered by the heat of the air that I breathe from the nose, the sweat that begins to drip, not that I can say I feel unhappy,  but a bit 'yes ...

and then I resign myself to operate the air conditioner, I would not like to do it, I am aware of the impact that has on the environment to operate my modest cooling system, we are already in serious trouble, worsening them is not really a good idea, not to mention the impact on the electricity bill, which this month will be astronomical, but I can no longer even almost think,  the annoyance is really very intense.

In a few minutes the temperature drops to 27, then to 26 ° Celsius, about 78 ° Farheneit, the relative humidity rate has been significantly lowered, I feel a general feeling of well-being, fresh air, quite fresh, in the nose ... not that I can say happy, but a little yes, at least for a while, it usually happens to me that the happiness, more or less small, that I managed to procure, in some way, does not last long.

What is emotion, fear, happiness, and the other dozens, hundreds of emotions, after rigorous observation, study, methodical analysis and deep reflection, well, reduced to the bone, for us humans, and for species endowed with an emotional system (many, incidentally), is a "marker".

It is the result of an extremely complex process, apparently carried out incessantly by our limbic system, which, with each configuration of real or virtual environment we have to deal with, stably couples one or more configurations of our other systems (vascular, motor, lymphatic, neural, proficeptive, nociceptive ... there are many), preparing our entire organism for action, to deploy the best action that at that moment we can perform, mainly sustained action, guided, controlled by our codes, neurograms, instructions written in the language of neural code, the best action to govern our interaction with the configuration of environment, real or virtual,  with which we are dealing.

Better in what sense? Better for us, which means, basically, the one that will be successful in obtaining and stabilizing configurations of favorable real and virtual environments, supporting our survival ... Survival here means everything we think we need to live the best possible, from food to dress to the latest fashion.

Emotion is, for us, the marker that prepares our organism to perform the best redeeming action, life saving action for us, it is not a reaction, even if we could superficially call it so, it is one of the elements that for us constitute this or that configuration of environment, an extraordinary condition, which allows us to flow-with, to dance and change as they flow and transfuse,  in each other, the changes in the configurations of the environment with which we are dealing.

The competitive advantage for our species is formidable, what we could call "reaction time" results, in our perception, substantially zeroed, we are not able to distinctly and consciously perceive phenomena that occur in a time less than a tenth of a second, the time of elicitation of the emotional "response" is placed in the order of a few milliseconds : very useful to avoid the effects of the onslaught of predators, human or not, or to prey on species "slower" than us.

Pleasure and displeasure, do they have anything to do with it?

Yes, a lot. Each of our emotions is related to a specific signal, a signal that for us is part of the emotion, at least in our common feeling, we distinguish with great ease pleasant emotions and unpleasant emotions ... the term unpleasant is good that it is immediately recognized in its substance and brought back to its source, to pain, in all the degrees of intensity that each of us has experienced.

The signals of pleasure and pain are the result of the work of two distinct systems, elements of our organism, the nociceptive system and the proficeptive system, systems that plausibly preceded, in the history of our evolution, the appearance of the emotional system: although they are very complex and sophisticated, they are nevertheless less complex than the emotional system, and basically perform the task of answering two basic "questions" that we we keep constantly open while dealing with what we are dealing with.

The two open questions, which it is good to know how to answer quickly and appropriately, concern our "where", more or less: for our survival, is it good to stay where we are or is it better to move and find another where? This question is answered by the nociceptive system, the painful signal is the marking of an environment configuration, real or virtual, threatening to our survival, the answer, simple, clear, immediate, direct is: not-here, away-from-here

For our survival, in which direction is it good to go? This question is answered by the profitable system, the signal of pleasure marks, among all the possible options, those most favorable to our survival, including that of staying where we are.

The emotion that we call fear, and, when very intense, panic, is felt as unpleasant, is related to pain, triggers lightning changes in our organism, preparing it for escape actions, or attack that may have to be performed to remove or destroy what threatens our survival.

In short, it tries to save our skin.

How could we not be very happy to have such protection? If we are not, well, we should be, without this emotion we would be much slower, perhaps unable to escape what threatens our lives, our organism would be greatly disadvantaged.

But... there is a but, I think more than one.

What each of us has experienced is that this emotion sometimes happens to us when it is not at all useful to achieve our goals, none of us can feel happy to get stuck during a presentation, almost fainting as he leaves the hotel, unable to leave the house, waking up at night, repeatedly, with his heart in his throat and his head hammering,  stuck when he can finally propose to his bosses a solution that he has worked on for a long time ...

Yet, if we feel pain, inevitable when we happen to experience the emotion of fear, there is a good reason, even if we do not see it immediately, even if we are not able to identify it: of this we can be absolutely certain, when we feel sorrow, pain, somewhere there is something that threatens our survival.

Before setting out in search of remedies and solutions, it is good to know and remember some things, of our history and the history of our species.

The first, and perhaps most important, concerns time, when, in our evolutionary history, the emotional system and emotions have become part of the heritage of our DNA: although we do not have certain evidence, a research of this type has not yet been carried out, however, at least as far as we humans are concerned, this property of our biological system should have appeared as a hereditary trait at least one hundred million years ago,  year plus year less.

One hundred million years ago it was certainly a considerable competitive advantage, from the point of view of the survival of the individual and the species, compared to the configurations of the environment of that time, compared to the configuration of the habitat, as they say, in which the progenitors of our species, already endowed with opposable thumb, tried to survive.

The emotional system made it possible to have better answers to the problems of that time, better answers than organisms not equipped with an emotional system: what problems were they? Although we cannot know for sure, we can still get an idea of it by perhaps observing how lemurs manage to survive and reproduce today.

But even not knowing what kind of life our ancestors led a hundred million years, we know two things: the first is that their habitat was totally different from today's habitat, from the configurations that today's environments, in which almost eight billion human beings live, present to each of us.

The second is that, among the most extraordinary diversities that we can identify, we find the one that concerns our having to deal, in every moment of our lives, with environments to which our ancestors could not in any way access, since, for them, they did not exist.

Our species, the evolutionary branch of the primate species, which appeared on the planet about a hundred million years ago, has not only profoundly changed the real environment, within a few thousand years, nothing compared to the times of our evolution of living beings: a lemur could perhaps get away with having to deal with the jungle of a city,  although enormously different from the tropical jungle.

But he has no chance of getting away with dealing with the environments with which each of us has to deal in every moment of our life: what for us undoubtedly exists and that requires a lot of work, and that for a lemur does not exist, are our extraordinary virtual environments, those that everyone finds inside his own skull.

The emotional system is a precious gift, a precious endowment, even for us, of course, when we are dealing with real environments: it is not good, for us, to resort to this endowment as our ancestors did, things are very different for us, we need to use it selectively.

And it is a precious endowment also in having to do with our virtual environments, also in this case it is good for us, that is, it is of support and help to our survival, to resort to this treasure in an even more selective and wise way.

In short, they are instructions to survive, codes that help to survive, winning genetic traits compared to the time and environments in which we were so long ago: now they must be adapted, to allow us to obtain what today can help us survive.

Another thing to remember is that we cannot get rid of this legacy, in any case, not without seriously compromising our possible good functioning: we can only try to "manage" this inheritance.

Real environment and virtual environment - alignment

What the real environment is we all know, it is that out there in which our body is also located, what is a virtual environment, for us systemic, it is the environment with which a couple of our systems have to do, those that "produce" thought: both, virtual environment and thought systems are as real as the real environment is,  Emergent properties of our amazing neural system, and as such necessarily and irretrievably placed inside our organism, inaccessible to anyone who is out there.

We use our multifaceted, almost infinite virtual environment to identify and fine-tune the best possible actions, to choose or write the best codes that we can write at all times and then send them to the motorial system, so that the guided, controlled action has the greatest possible success for us ... success means being able to survive, of course.

It is not a metaphor, we are splendid, incredible, wonderful biological machines, enormously complex, the actions that allow us to survive are guided by our codes, even when we try to use random combinations, known as proceeding by trial and error.

An almost infinite laboratory, where to experiment and try to predict the effects, an amusement park to entertain us, crystal balls to guess, try to guess the future, a crazy "archive" of our history (on memory we will have to return, in its time, memories are not photographs preserved in albums), in short, a property of our biological machine that constitutes a huge competitive advantage over all other living species.

As a survival device, since it is, it is subject to continuous monitoring, it is vital for us to be able to be relatively sure that it is working properly, we can use it with enormous flexibility provided that we return frequently to verify that our virtual environment is aligned, sufficiently similar, to the configuration of the real environment with which we are dealing,  moment by moment.

When "the worlds" are misaligned, our alarm system, precisely the nociceptive system, triggers, generating a signal, generally, of intensity proportional to the severity of the detected threat, simultaneously with the "wired" emotion, the emotional marking related to the configuration of the misalignment, one of the many variants of fear, and remains "on" until we solve, in some way,  misalignment.

That the misalignment of the worlds is interpreted by our systems as a threat, more or less serious, is very reasonable: either there is a threat out there to neutralize, and it is time to get busy, or there is nothing threatening out there, which indicates that something of our systems is not working as it should,  we are not working as we should be, and this puts us in danger, again, it is time to get busy.

It took millions of years to develop this survival device, and we have proof that it worked with some success, given where we have come compared to other living species, we can trust it... and in fact we trust it enormously, having also managed, in the course of our lives, to modulate its functioning a little, to guide it, adapting it to "keep an eye" with greater effectiveness some misalignments, modulating differently, here and there, where appropriate, the intensity of the alarm signal, the intensity of pain.

So we all manage, or almost, to ride a bike, and to do a lot of very dangerous things every day.

Aligning the worlds and obtaining continuous confirmations of good functioning is a primary "need", an essential necessity of our biological machine, such as breathing, eating, drinking... better not to underestimate the weight, in dealing with others and with ourselves.

Misalignments, for each of us, are daily events, each marked by a different degree of "unpleasantness", generally related to the level of threats of the configuration of the environment, real and virtual, with which we are dealing: from the small annoyance, related to having to answer the call of that troublemaker, to the much more intense concern related to the irrefutable evidence that our business,  our work is not going well at all, to the even more intense agitation related to having learned that a person very dear to us could die at any moment, the list could go on, almost endlessly.

With respect to these misalignments we are capable, more or less, of having to deal with it, we know that it is quite possible, and perhaps it has even happened to us, that the configurations of the environment with which we are dealing are even more, much but much more serious and threatening than those we have summarily indicated. To say that genetics, our genetic code, has prepared us for events close to catastrophe may seem exaggerated, but we are not far from the truth: the decomposed movement that occurs immediately when we feel we are falling, is only apparently decomposed, in truth it is the best possible attempt to find something to cling to, and certainly we have not learned this,  we call them reflexes.

And we discover that these reflexes, at least many of them, can be partially modified: he is not afraid of falling, or at least not so much, and does not show at all decomposed movements, who even throws himself into the void, from a platform ten meters high from the surface of the water, and performs a 5337D, that is, a deadly jump and a half reversed with three and a half screws,  in an open position.

The catastrophic event, for any living being, is only one, exactly what corresponds, for each one, to the total cessation of one's systemic integrity, in short, to the cessation of one's life: any event, to occur, requires time, a more or less short time, more or less long, the cessation of our existence coincides with the instant in which a process ends,  which can have lasted even less than a second, or much, much more, hours, days, months, years.

And it is not at all strange that, in our daily life, in general we do not feel fear, much less panic, in the face of the evidence that our existence, our life, inevitably, will cease: our wonderful emotional system acts in the present, it works in the present, there is no past, there is no future, time, for our emotional system, does not exist,  there is only the here and now, and it is a lot.

It's the end: panic saves us... or at least try

Palpitations, a sense of breathing poorly or suffocating, dizziness, chest tightness, nausea, abdominal pain, need to urinate often, diarrhea, tremors, feeling of skidding, dizziness, paresthesias... these are the "symptoms", the signals that many, specialists and non-specialists, have observed manifest themselves in panic attacks, in my small way, in my limited experience and direct observation, I can confirm a good part of these distinctive manifestations.

How is it possible to argue that this conduct, related to that upsetting emotion that we call panic, is useful for something?

Yes, I admit, it is not really intuitive, it takes a few steps and some more knowledge, to be able to respond, and to reach the conclusion that panic, paroxysmal manifestation of fear, supports the triggering and instant execution of life saving actions.

To try to understand the vital, lifesaving sense of panic, we must be able to identify, in some way, with the condition in which we are complex organisms yes, but primitive, devoid of thought, less than monkeys, and we are suffering a total attack, on all fronts, from inside our body and from outside our body.

The end of our life is fast approaching, and it is possible that this is happening in relation to something that is inside our body: in this case, one of the first things that can save our lives is to expel, to throw out everything that we can throw out ... to each the task of finding, in the list of symptoms, those corresponding to the salvific attempt to throw out what perhaps is killing us.

It is also possible that the attack on our life comes from outside, but evidently we have not succeeded and we cannot escape, if it had been or was possible we would have given it to ourselves, we would have tried to neutralize the threat, and we would find ourselves engaged in a completely different type of action: no, at this moment we cannot identify any way of escape,  in no direction. What to do? Contracting all the striated muscles increases the possibility of resisting blows , shocks, it mitigates at least the damage to other parts of our precious body ... again, it is up to each one to find, in the list of symptoms, those corresponding to the salvific attempt to be ready to receive and resist the blows of what is perhaps killing us.

The other salvific effect of activating the striated muscles should not be overlooked, in case any escape route is opened.

Finally, a specific variant of the type of attacks that come from outside our body, it could be a predator: being excluded escape routes, and being ineffective the "counterattack", the last possible action remains, immobility: the sensory systems of many predators have to do with the detection of movement, other predators do not feed on dead bodies,  to immobilize is still to do something ... again, it is up to each one to find, in the list of symptoms, those corresponding to the salvific attempt to resort to immobility.

If we look at it in this way, we cannot deny the evident richness of this genetic gift, and imagine how many times this systemic device saved the skin of our ancestors... nor can we avoid noting, once again, that "unfortunately", this ancient lifesaver, very suitable for the conditions of tens of millions of years ago, today is much more an obstacle than a help.

Panic for panic

Still resorting to the observations of many, specialists and non-specialists, and also to my modest direct knowledge of these events, another phenomenon is very frequently related: the manager, whom I mentioned in the introduction, described several times, with great precision and richness of details, his almost continuous "keeping an eye" on the clues , the hints that could be linked to the reproduction of the unpleasant "block", recognizing his conscious fear that the thing could be repeated again.

And every time the thing was repeated, he made the search for clues even more intense and the fear stronger, becoming more and more evident the damage to his work, to his career, even more insurmountable the obstacles to the realization of his projects and his desires.

Also for this manager, they risked triggering and being adopted what are generally called avoidance behaviors, in short, fleeing, staying away, from the conditions in which he had found himself "suffering" a panic attack the first time.

This is not easy for our manager, given that he was, and is, an important part of a prestigious and well-paid job, to which he had also dedicated himself supported by an undoubted "natural talent", doing it with satisfaction, with pleasure and with excellent results ... but that's another story.

From what we have elaborated before, we can now accept that the definition "panic attack" is totally misleading: panic is the "remedy", at most, certainly not the source of the threat to our lives.

And even the "panic attack" is misleading, it is not, again, panic that constitutes itself as a threat, but the set of actions that panic is limited to triggering and accompanying, actions that millions of yearsa go saved lives, and that today also have, very often, a ruinous effect on the effective governance of our interaction with what we are dealing with:  emotion is not the action deployed and then accomplished, it is only the pre-trigger, an accelerator of the possible execution of the action.

To the so-called "avoidance behaviors" is attributed, generally, a negative connotation, those who adopt such solutions do not receive, socially, testimonies of appreciation, but, more or less openly, blame, contempt: this is an interesting track, which we will not follow on the "social" side, not here and not now, but only on the side of the effects that this has on the unfortunate one, who had the fate of being attacked, attacked, on all sides.

Who among us, being able to do so, would not immediately escape a total attack? Who among us would not stay away from the places where, and the conditions under which, it would become the object of a total and devastating attack?

We all do it, constantly, and for very good reasons, the same ones that found the wise choice of the so-called "avoidance behavior": different matter are the costs, the deprivations, the energies that are necessarily absorbed to stay away from trouble, items present in the daily budget of every living being.

Undeniable the sorrow, intertwined with sadness, anger, humiliation, despair and other emotions, that accompanies being unable to perform relatively simple tasks, certainly not the 5337D, which although we see performed by our fellow human beings, and that perhaps, often , we too, until recently, were perfectly able to perform: the search and obtaining daily tests of good functioning does not stop,  and the limitations related to avoidance behaviors are inevitably encrypted as part of the evidence that something is wrong, even if we cannot understand what, even if we do not know why, while trying and striving we continue to get the feedback that the "thing" continues to happen to us, and that, for the moment, the only truly effective remedy is to stay away.

Stay away that it is, and for very good reasons, to hide from us and from others, as much as we can, as long as we can, what we rightly classify as an impairment, a deficit, and, not infrequently, apparently paradoxical, a fault: we will have to resume the issue, shortly.

Suddenly...

The first time is a total surprise, a bolt from the blue, totally unexpected and for no reason; and then, after the "crisis" has been overcome, it is impossible to understand its meaning, to find the reason, the possible reasons, the "thing" remains there, mysterious, and, we discover over time, invincible, indomitable, uncontrollable, we can do nothing about it.

Already the sensations we feel during the panic attack are extremely unpleasant, to this is added, later, everything else, and the evidence of what happened to us remains unchanged for us, for no reason, without reason: of course this is not the case, even if it is not simple and immediate to find what led us to that infernal condition.

The pain, the sorrow, never lies: this "suddenly", invariably, it turns out that it comes from afar, that it has been on the march for some time, of course excluding cases of poisoning of food, air, and attack of predators that cannot be contrasted, cases that it has not been possible for me to observe, and that, frankly, do not have significant interest for me.

Such is the variety of "what has been on the march for a long time" for each one, to induce me to abandon any attempt at classification or grouping: invariably, these are reasons closely related to the punctual, unique and unrepeatable history of each one, even if common roots are recognizable, for example abandonment, or (or inclusive) the attack on the rank conquered,  or the impediment to natural development, or the check of a significant part of the codes that make up the "internal house" (here the thing becomes complicated to explain in one line, I have to postpone), in all their multiple forms, and they are really many, and for each they are presented in original and non-repeatable configurations ... roots that sometimes present themselves as "solitary", sometimes in the company of others, in combinations of different and always unique configuration.

Events, events that frequently unfold "far", apparently, in space and time, from the framework in which the panic attack is then produced, on which the most easily accessible remedies are grafted, panic for panic and avoidance behaviors ... ah yes, of course, panic for panic is a remedy, primitive and not entirely adequate for a good quality of life, it is one of the many ready-to-use solutions.

Connecting those events, finding the links between those events and what happens much later "suddenly", is what was not possible, from this comes the surprising characteristic of "suddenly", stably related, in the story of those who suffered it, to the production of the panic attack.

The simple truth is that we are not prepared to recognize the nature and meaning of what happens to us in a sufficiently accurate way, we record our "reactions" to the forms of abandonment, of the attack on rank, of the blockage of our development, we try to remedy as best we can, without knowing well what they are, without knowing the reasons, accepting as obvious and natural,  obvious, that it is so and that it must necessarily be as it is.

And, "suddenly", trying to run the 5337D, without knowing much about the 5337D, we take a terrifying belly: you do not die for this, but it is very likely that at the next dive, continuing not to know much, we resume another belly, and then we try to stay away from the platform.

From unexpected guest to old acquaintance

Unwelcomed anyway, but much less difficult to deal with it: old acquaintance not in the sense that it has happened to us over and over again, but in the sense that we are in a position to know what it is and where it comes from.

The young manager, John, has before him a good career, excellent prospects, damnation, the presentation is blocked; the young professional, Rebecca, won her degree, won a prestigious position in a large company, healthy, beautiful, intelligent, also conquers her home, where she will be much freer than she is in the house of her liberal parents,  but you know, no?, not true that in her new and beautiful house come the attacks? And does she have to go home to mom and dad?; the solid professional, Catherine, who has managed to get rid of a very cumbersome partner, and to get out of serious trouble the young daughter, who has traveled around Europe far and wide, damn, can no longer move away for more than twenty kilometers from home, when she tries she finds panic waiting for her ... and must go back, or have un escort ... what a nuisance; the young employee, Elise, of excellent ability, very pretty, of lively intelligence and great sensitivity, multi-trimmed, literally goes crazy (read: breathing difficulty, dizziness, fainting, inconsolable crying, irrepressible nausea) when her boss threatens her not to assign her assignments, or when the boyfriend does not invite her to accompany him to a party, or to join the company of his (his) friends for a barbecue...

As we said, the pictures in which the so-called "unexpected guest" arrives are many, and all different from each other, which may even seem incredible, to us systemics not so incredible, in truth, having continuous feedback and evidence of the constant diversity of neurograms, of the "machine instructions" of each: yes, we also see that the roots are common,  as living systems we are similar, our systems are very similar, the basic codes are similar.

But we have learned that it is useless to try to "explain" the flower by studying only the root, neglecting its unique and specific history.

"To date we have not yet developed a complete and consistent theory that combines quantum mechanics and gravity; however, we now know with sufficient certainty at least some of the characteristics that such a unified theory should have. One is that it should incorporate Feynman's proposal to formulate quantum theory in terms of a sum on stories.

THE SUM OF THE STORIES

According to this approach, a particle moving from A to B has not only a single story, as in a classical theory, but must instead follow every possible trajectory in space-time. Each of these stories is then associated with a pair of numbers, one of which represents the size of a wave and the other its position in the cycle, that is, its phase.

To calculate the probability that the particle, say, will pass through a certain point, we must add up the waves associated with every possible story that passes through that point. But when we try to actually calculate the value of these sums, we come across a series of serious technical difficulties, and the only way to circumvent them is to follow this peculiar prescription: we must add the waves for stories of particles that are not found in the real time we experience, but that take place in an imaginary time ".[1]

To most of us, these steps should sound little less than crazy, if it were not that when it comes to quantum and gravity, we are cautious to shoot judgments, if then the author of the steps is Hawking, well, better to be cautious, you risk making the figure of ignorant donkeys.

I know nothing about quantum, nothing at all, I read contributions from others through which I try to understand what the hell they can see using these visions (for me they are visionaries, and therefore the term visions is appropriate), and I take away what I think I can serve.

That a brilliant quantum physicist, so at least Feynmann is considered, proposes to use, to predict the movement of a particle from A to B, the sum of the stories of the particle itself, to me it sounds formidable, for me now it does not matter how the hell they succeed (and it seems that they succeed), it is formidable just to have thought about it.

For us systemics, the "stories" that have value, and that allow us to hypothesize aid operations, perhaps not really of sum in imaginary time, whatever this means, are not so much the stories of the events, the chronicles themselves, as the stories of the constructions of the codes that each one uses to deal with what he has to do with,  stories that certainly need the chronicle, but that are not identified at all in the chronicle.

For us systemics, each living human subject is a biological machine, an enormously complex system that acts, interacts with its reference environment, with the ultimate aim of surviving, and employs, to modulate, govern its continuous interaction with its reference environments, neural codes: we recognize the neural network, the neural system, identifiable in our organism,  subsystem of our organism, the property of identifying which plexus-sequences of neural codes are "suitable" to govern our punctual interaction with the configuration of the environments with which we have, moment by moment, to deal, and to send them to the motorial system, an extremely complex system, also a subsystem of our organism, which will try to "execute" the instructions received.

For the moment it is not good to proceed in the direction of trying to identify punctually which and how many are the neural codes, corresponding to the activation of specific plexuses of our neural network, which we can legitimately consider hereditary, for example the herculeal reflex of newborns, how many and which of these must be considered unconditioned and unconditionable reflexes , how many and which are those that can be conditioned, and how the processes of conditioning, deconditioning and reconditioning of these hereditary reflexes "work".

Or, better to say, how we manage to reconfigure the plexus sequences of neural codes that we use in every moment of our lives, within the limits allowed by the potential of "reconfigurability" of each code: hunger, thirst, rest, breathing, evacuation, appear as little "reconfigurable", others have much wider degrees of freedom of reconfiguration, if not for a specific aspect,  which concerns, precisely, the stories of the constructions of the codes that everyone uses to deal with what he has to do with.

And therefore, it is better not to trust at all even the similarity of the "flowers", since they can have different roots, but above all because they are certainly "fruit" of different, unique and unrepeatable stories.

So, reconstructing the stories of the codes, at least pieces, are fine, pieces of their history after they came out of the belly of the mother, and also of much older pieces, those inherited from our ancestors through DNA, immense library, stories that go back thousands, millions of years, we can turn the unexpected and very unwelcome guest into something different,  in the fruit of a long history.

Thus, for example, we find, among the primary codes, the one that "pushes" to stay close to our fellows, and the pain related to their absence, among the greatest mortal dangers when our life begins, and then, in history, the codes built to obtain closeness with our fellows, made of pieces partly found among the primary codes,  genetically inherited, partly cloned or copied by those around us at that time, partly "updated" with new pieces, built by trial and error...

... and then we find, in the history of the abandonments suffered, the codes built to have us to deal with, made of other pieces, also partly found among the primary codes, partly cloned or copied by those who at that time were around us, partly "updated" with new pieces, built by trial and error,  until today, and discover, as has happened in some cases, that we are "responding", without knowing it, to the inevitable abandonments of today, to not being welcomed, or being rejected, removed, expelled, with the codes "written" decades ago ...

..."forgetting", (but it is a very special type of forgetfulness, it is not a memory deficit, and it must be treated wisely... we will resume it later),, that our abilities, our adult resources are very different, and that we can adopt, or build, codes more suited to today.

We all know, in part, our history, but we are not sufficiently prepared to read, in our history, the history of our codes, no one has taught us, we have been taught to study, and relive, history as a concatenation of events, what happened before and what happened after ... and this is not enough, it does not allow us to identify, step by step, what has brought us good, life-saving (yes, we are dealing with life and death, with really vital issues) each of the codes that we have "built", at the time in which we have built it.

That study of history does not allow us to use other knowledge, and enormously precious, necessary to be able to "graft" the new codes, more effective and suitable for today, the needs and desires of an adult, on the "old" ones, even if often some idea of how-you-must-do-instead we have it very clear, is that it does not work, we can not use it, we can not use it,  a kind of rejection, and we continue as before.

Among this valuable knowledge is that relating to the "protection" of the codes that have worked for us, a kind of block to rewriting, as the system files of our personal computers normally have, as well as they have the property of being "hidden", so that those who use the PC cannot, inadvertently, randomly, send the operating system into a tailspin.

Our codes, and their history, are "hidden" in our history, and until we see them we certainly cannot modify them, even if we have what it takes to modify them... and even once "seen", we cannot change anything before we have recognized that they are "protected from overwriting or modification", and without knowing how to "remove protection": among the necessary operations there is that of identifying and recognizing the benefits that that code, through that code, we have obtained ... and that, almost always without knowing it, without being able to notice it, we continue today to try to obtain.

History cannot be rewritten, that is and that remains, but accessing these stories in the stories, the stories of our codes, makes it possible for us now to write another, makes it possible for us now, certainly in part, but to a greater extent than sufficient, to permanently modify the codes, so that panic is no longer the only and last response we can give to those circumstances of our lives , so that we can recover and "repair" something of what has been damaged in the past, if it has value for us, and proceed on new and good paths.

So it was for my students, all different reconstructions, and in many respects extraordinary: in the constancy of irreducible diversity, some aspects seem to converge towards directions, towards nearby focus or similar, and it is of these few aspects of "convergence" that I would like to tell a little.

Time and memory

I know, hundreds, thousands of books have written about these two things, here we will be essential, if not really brief: the fact is that, or at least so the findings indicate, under panic attack time and a good part of memory disappears.

Time and memory disappear even well before arriving at the paroxysm of panic, they often disappear even in many other circumstances ... to avoid unnecessary effort, it would be better to understand what we indicate with the two terms, time and memory.

What time and memory are we all experience, and then, all right, everyone has, or does not have, his own idea of what the hell they are, this is not important, for us here.

It is a little more important to understand each other on the specific point: under panic attack, and in many other circumstances, time disappears and memory disappears.

For us systemics, time is a side effect, related to the functioning of our symbolic thought system and our operational thought system: time, basically the container of before, now and after, we do not find it in the real environment, whatever it is, except after having found it in our virtual environments.

Our systems of thought, operational and symbolic, have the property of being able to place the now (configuration of the current virtual environment) in the before, and the after in the now, trying to get answers to the question, for example, what could happen if I do this, to test the chances that what I would like to achieve I can then get it, to try to find what I could do in that case ... or the before in the now, looking to the present in the future in order to find out what the hell may have ever happened to obtain the cracked egg right in front of my eyes now in the ral environment... and the now in the after, even in the much after... in short, all combinations are possible, but, for us humans, it remains comforting to be able to count that out there, compared to the real environment, there is a time for everything and everything has its time, there is a before that remains before, there is a now that remains now, and an after that remains after.

Here, time disappears in the sense that there is no longer a before quite recognizable and distinct from the now, and there is no longer an after quite recognizable and distinct from the now, everything happens now.

John no longer knows what comes after what he just said, the after is gone, if we could ask him how he got there he would almost certainly not know how to answer, Rebecca must absolutely run away from his house, immediately, what she thought she would do, once in his new home, canceled, Catherine can not continue,  she must stop, maybe try to go back, any importance of reaching the goal disappears, very clear in the before, Elise is in the after that it is now, they send her away from work, the boyfriend does not want her, disappeared the before and now, as it seems.

Formidable.

The same happens when our dentist is clumsy in performing truncular anesthesia, and we must remain motionless despite the excruciating pain, otherwise it is worse, isn't it?, or while we are having an orgasm ... and in many other "circumstances".

Coming out of those situations, to what they tell me, and for what I could directly find, time returns, we get the comfortable confirmation that the before is still a before, our now a now, and the after ... well, then let's see.

Why does this happen to us? Which, or what explanations we can give ourselves, consistent with the fundamental law, inviolable, indispensable for any scientific thought: if it happens there is a reason, a good reason, some kind of benefit that is related to this functioning of our biological machine.

For the moment I have only one hypothesis, good, in my opinion, but nothing more ... we deal with it later, perhaps, "now" we take a look at the memory, as much as possible.

Honestly I could not say if it is something "spring", or if it is a side effect of the disappearance of time, or if it is, why not?, in turn an effect related to something else to which "then" the disappearance of time is correlated, and so far I believe that no one knows ... but even on these uncertain and unsteady bases, we can try to move a few steps, better than nothing.

Memory and remembrance, along with other terms, such as thought, time, indicate something that we all "know" what they are... we systemics, humbly, refuse to claim to really have this sure knowledge, finding at every step to grope, if not in the dark, in the partial semi-darkness ... if reality is action (said a bit 'tightened, I realize), then the memory is "memory" of one or more actions (very ancient thesis, dates back to about the mid-1800s), and memory is, more or less, the name of the process that is activated (note well, it is activated, although we can consciously solicit this activation .... it seems a simple thing,  for us in truth it is frighteningly complex) and brings us back that "memory" of actions, more or less complex and articulated ... the memory of actions should coincide with the activation of those neural network plexuses related to neurograms, specific instructions written in neural code, which at "time" constituted our grip on that configuration of environment, real or virtual, neurograms that are now embryonic with what we find in our virtual environments,  ready to be sent to the rest of our motorial system...

I know, put like this it is difficult to understand, it takes a certain time to solve the problems of the descriptions of others, and I understand "from the inside" the feeling of impatience that we feel when we are struggling with a description, made by another, of what happens to us and that we think we know well what it is, and given that it is different,  it is not ours, we have not "done" it, it is either incomprehensible or wrong ...

I remember perfectly, in my opinion, Maria, a girl of my age, sixteen years old, very pretty and curvy, of whom, like Romeo, for two weeks I felt and declared myself hopelessly in love, for Romeo she was Rosalinda, more or less it is the same, the names count little ... it is not easy for me, and it is not easy for anyone, as far as I know, to recognize in this memory the enormous variety, richness and complexity of the interweaving of the actions that, literally, constituted Mary, fifty years ago ... some of the things that "I could do", with Mary, are all too easily imaginable, many others are not so easy to catch.

The actions, all those consciously and unconsciously available to me, constituted for me Mary... what or who Mary was, I certainly could not know then, nor could I now, the "reality-in-itself", for centuries we have known that it is and remains, for us, precluded knowledge, impossible, with considerable commitment and effort we can know something of what reality-for-us is.

Mary was, and is, the set of all the actions that it is possible for me to deploy to have to do with her, to have to do with that configuration of environment, real and virtual, constantly changing (whether we know it or not, it is irrelevant ... nothing ever stands still)... from the obvious erotic fantasies to the less obvious attempts to "understand its interiority".

Memory of actions, memory of "abilities", which seem to be nothing more than "stable" groupings of neurograms, of instructions written in neural code, which allow me to obtain what I want, what I need, from the proof of potentia coeundi and the achievement of orgasmic ecstasy, to the proof of the effective execution of the smash, the defeat of the opponent and the exultation of victory, to the proof of the expert execution of the procedures and distinctive protocols of my job, the success of the service and the collection of the parcel.

Here, this memory is no longer there, having to do with what I have to deal with, now all my skills, abilities, competences, knowledge seems to disappear totally.

On the one hand we find ourselves timeless, specific traces of dangers, of past and future threats, of future and past catastrophes are all here, in the present time, in a time that has melted all times, and have the same threatening power as the real ones, which could be there now, in our present, to which they are added ... we find ourselves deprived of the memory of our abilities, of our abilities, of how we have managed in the past to solve the great difficulties we have encountered, and of how those and other abilities will allow us to face and solve what we will encounter in the future, from the simplest to the most complex and complicated things.

And on the other hand we find ourselves, at least apparently, at the mercy of what many, if not all, call symptoms, palpitations, a sense of breathing badly or suffocating, dizziness, chest tightness, nausea, abdominal pain, need to urinate often, diarrhea, tremors, feeling of skidding, dizziness, paresthesias ... a hell from which we want to get out immediately, at any cost, at any price, but immediately ... while time does not seem to pass at all, the few minutes (they usually say a dozen, fifteen ...) that pass between the beginning of the attack and its end are for us an eternal, infinite present, without beginning or end.

And even when the symptoms subside, and we recover memory and the ability to distinguish past, present and future, the tension does not abandon us, it subsides, but does not go away, often leaving us exhausted, emptied, devoid of energy.

Memory and time need energy, to be able to actualize, and a good part of our energy has been consumed by our primitive and powerful response and solution to the total attack that we have just suffered... in order to have back our memory and our "normal" time, past, present and future, we will have to recover energy, in some way ... resting, sleeping, breathing deeply.

This is, roughly, the idea that came to me to make it possible to explain the disappearance of time and memory: we had to consume a lot of energy to resist and overcome a total attack, the primary codes that guided our defense, our response, "hijacked" a large amount of energy to be able to realize the response to the attack,  there is not enough left, at this time, to fully restore memory and time.

Panic is, no more and no less, this: a primitive defense to an attack, panic is not the enemy, it is the response to the enemy's attack.

And we can be sure that, when that answer appears, there is an enemy, a serious threat, a serious danger, even if we cannot consciously "see" it: our biological machine is not wrong, and adopts the solution, the best answer it has.

But, as shown by the stories with which I have had to deal, and of which I have mentioned, it is not at all said that the best answer, the best solution we have must necessarily remain panic: at least there is a way, to be able to have better solutions and answers, probably more than one, I have found this.

The magic of codes

Sometimes it came in handy, to try to make myself understood, to resort to a magnificent metaphor that I found in one of the episodes of a famous saga for children (also appreciated by adults, it seems), that of Harry Potter: boggarts and dementors.

Both magical creatures, capable of terrorizing to the point of annihilation, the boggart able to take the exact form of what we are most afraid of, the dementor a flying corpse species capable of extracting from the human body every drop of energy, causing its death: very fearsome, devastating.

To defend himself from these devastating creatures, Harry is taught two spells, one capable of neutralizing the threateningness of the boggart, formula: "ridiculus", the other capable of repelling any dementor far away, formula: "expecto patronum".

True, you have to have the reflexes ready, to act promptly, to block in time the attack of the boggart and the dementor, and it is essential to have a good magic wand at hand ... which means being trained to bring immediate attention to the signs that indicate the approach of the threat... and don't leave the magic wand around.

When we are not prepared to deal with our boggarts and our dementors, in short, with panic, the symptoms of panic immediately become our most brutal enemies, it is because of them if we are so bad: after the first attack we are almost constantly afraid that panic will take us back, that that horrible thing that happened to us will happen again.

I take the metaphor for a moment, the first panic attack is our dementor, and then comes the soggy, the fear that panic will still occur: until we discover that panic is an inefficient magic wand, and that we have no spells to cast.

Out of metaphor, and returning to our codes, it happens until we discover that panic, with its painful (and temporarily disabling, compared to our "normal" lives) does not threaten our lives, but is a very powerful and ancient response to something that is seriously threatening our lives, and that the pain we feel is not related to emotion,  to panic, but to being, for us, present, now and here, a serious threat to our lives.

We must therefore try to identify, as precisely as possible, what is so seriously threatening us, and find a way to neutralize the threat in a timely manner, before it can trigger our response, our archaic defense.

Easy, isn't it?

Not always, in my experience almost never, sometimes it is enough to search, to take a look, in the direction indicated by the question: what is threatening me now?, to find the answer, but it is quite rare, since even if it seems "obvious" to us that it is that, most of the time it turns out to be an ineffective answer; if the answer we find,  and the remedies that we can identify, do not prevent panic from coming, we have proof that, at a minimum, the answer found is not complete and the remedies identified are not sufficient to reverse the seriousness of the threat to which we are exposed.

Sometimes the answer we find is ridiculous, seemingly senseless, or even, yes, nothing at all, no answer, better, there is just nothing that is threatening us in a deadly way, just as the specialists responded to the friend who had collapsed at the exit of the hotel and then taken to the emergency room.

Again, if there is pain there is threat, of this we can be sure, our machine never makes a mistake on this.

Searching and finding the source is possible, as it is possible to find the codes, almost all already available, some to be built, but it is little, "magical", that is, those codes that we can use to divert or remove threats and dangers at our will, making useless the "intervention" of panic ... and enjoying life as much as we can.

That's it? Well, not really, for example, a glance, in general, it is better to give it, for safety, to how what we can call "our Ego" is configured, also this an amazing and wonderful "magical" code, certain neural code, but truly magical.

What is the Systemic of Human Behavior

It is a form of knowledge of how we function, capable of helping to understand the meaning of what happens to us, especially when it seems to us that it makes no sense, both when we take care of ourselves, and when we are dealing with interactions and relationships with our fellow human beings, two of the most difficult things in anyone's life.

Through this knowledge it is possible, for everyone, to obtain positive effects on their well-being, on the quality of their performance.

In the Systemics of Human Behavior come together elements from other disciplines and from the work of many different authors, including Darwin, James, Freud, Bateson, Watzlawick, Maturana, Damasio, Mayer, Rizzolatti, integrated into a conceptual framework consistent with the distinctive criteria of systemic epistemology and methodology: it is an original and innovative synthesis, which focuses on the history and development of our neural codes,  the functioning of our emotional system, our virtual environments, our thought systems, the systems that "produce" our thoughts.

It is not, nor does it intend to be, a therapy, although undeniable and proven are the positive effects on personal and collective well-being, on the quality of performances: these effects are not distinctive of the only therapies, however understood, but also of multiple, other and different human activities, from sports exercise to walks in the woods.

The method of acquiring this knowledge, which includes readings, consultation of multimedia materials, support of an expert in the subject, observation and analysis of the professional and / or personal events of those who intend to learn, configures the Systemics of Human Behavior as an element of the education of adolescents and adults: to my knowledge there are currently no content and educational programs dedicated to early and second childhood,  recognizable as belonging to the Systemics of Human Behavior.

Multimedia materials and numerous writings can be freely consulted from the website https://humansystemics.net/

Note

[←1]

Hawking, Stephen W. La teoria del tutto (Italian Edition) (pp.78-79). RIZZOLI BOOKS. Kindle edition.

Table of Contents

Let's start with fear

Real environment and virtual environment - alignment

It's the end: panic saves us... or at least try

Panic panic

Suddenly...

From unexpected guest to old acquaintance

Time and memory

The magic of codes

What is the Systemic of Human Behavior