I’m wondering how to use the model in the situations when feelings come before a thought. Here are the three major ways I see that happening:

1) When we experience something frightening (e.g. an unexpected loud noise, my son jumping out at me saying ‘boo’, the car in front of us stopping suddenly and we’re forced to react in an instant). In all of these situations there is no activity in the pre-frontal cortex. There are plenty of scientific studies that show us that when we’re faced with a threatening situation, the thalamus sends sensory information to both the amygdala and the neocortex. If the amygdala senses danger, it makes a split-second decision to initiate the fight-or-flight response before the neocortex has time to overrule it. Basically there is no thinking, we are filled with feelings before any thinking can occur.

2) When our body’s sensations, hormones and neuro-transmitters are creating the feelings. As in example 1, but also other situations, we have an illness and our body is tired, and lethargic creating the emotion of sadness, or when we’re sleep deprived the chemical imbalance in our system creates depression, or when we’ve just done an aerobic workout and our body is pumped with feel good chemicals giving us the feeling of happiness. The feeling is created at a biological level not via thoughts.

3) When old unprocessed emotions are triggered. For example: someone that once got attacked by a dog might be filled instantly with fear if they meet a barking dog. No thinking happens, instead their body is experiencing a flashback from an earlier situation. Again this is a well researched phenomenon in trauma healing and the polyvagal theory. The feeling comes before a thought has a chance to form.

In these situations, do you put the feeling in the C-line?

Thanks