The APET model: emotions come first

continued...

from the senses, once relayed to the thalamus, are immediately sent along a neuronal 'fast track' to the amygdala, arriving half a second before signals relayed by the usual route reach the neocortex. [8] That half a second is a long time in brain response terms.

In effect, the amygdala can have us reacting before the thinking brain has weighed up the evidence and planned an appropriate reaction.

As a result, some emotional reactions and consequent emotional memories can be formed without any conscious participation from the thinking brain at all. The amygdala can hold on to emotional memories and impressions that have never come to full awareness. [9] (This can explain Denny's impulse to kill and the symptoms of phobias and post traumatic shock syndrome.)

When emotional arousal is high, the emotional brain is in the driving seat. It is the nature of the emotional brain to think only in survival-type choices — fight or flight; go for it or don't. While it is the job of the conscious mind to discriminate, fill in the detail and offer a more intelligent analysis of the patterns offered up to it by the emotional brain, the 'either/or' logic of the emotional brain is its more basic pattern which goes way back to earliest life forms and still forms the foundation on which much of our thinking and behaviour rests.

The degree to which the fight or flight reflex is activated is the degree to which our thinking becomes polarised — more black or more white. As psychologist Daniel Goleman describes it, the emotional brain 'hijacks' the neocortex [9] and very quickly begins to blank out more subtle distinctions between stimuli. We can't be concerned with the finer detail when making a life saving decision.

In fact, all thoughts and perceptions are fuelled by, and therefore preceded by, emotion. We are not generally aware of this because it is often a subtle process but the fact that thoughts are carried aloft on emotion becomes clear when we examine strange exceptions to this rule.

In Capgras' syndrome, for instance, the pattern-matching process is disrupted because of minor brain damage. In these cases the neocortex can no longer draw on emotional memories from the limbic system and sufferers believe that family and close friends are impostors, because they experience no feeling for them. [10]

Some recent studies have shown that amygdala damage results in problems in recognising facial expressions of fear, anger and disgust [11] and interferes with social and emotional judgement. In one study designed to test individuals' ability to make judgements about the approachability of people they were shown in photographs, researchers found that those with damage to the amygdala were much more likely to rate people as approachable, regardless of fearsome looks. [12]

Emotion, then, appears to be a precondition for thought and perception even — in cases when we might ordinarily think that no emotion is involved.

The APET model

The discovery that emotion precedes reason and perception is the fact that turns cognitive therapy on its head. Whereas the ABC model assumes that anxiety and depression — both of which are states of high arousal — arise from faulty belief systems, the APET model takes into account the latest knowledge about how the brain works and enables it to be used for more effective therapy.

Black and white thinking, which underlies all the categories identified by cognitive therapists, is the thinking style of the emotional brain. It is the result of arousal, and the accompanying hijacking of the neocortex, not the cause.

The A in APET stands for activating agent: any event or stimulus in the environment, just as in the cognitive model. Information about that stimulus, taken in through the senses, is processed through the pattern-matching part of the mind (P) which gives rises to an emotion (E) which may inspire certain thoughts (T).

To give a simple example, Anne may be sitting reading quietly at home when she hears a loud knock on the door. Anne experiences seemingly inexplicable dread. Her thought, if she has a conscious thought at all, is: "Someone is dead!"

In the split millisecond before she experienced her fear, the amygdala in her emotional brain had pattern matched to the occasion when there was loud banging on her door and she opened it to find a policeman on the step. He had come to tell her that her son had been killed in a motorbike accident. If the memory is so emotionally charged that it cannot be processed, and stays trapped in the amygdala as a pre-verbal memory, events such as loud knocking may trigger post traumatic stress symptoms such as nightmares, exaggerated startles or panics.

Points of intervention

The APET model provides many more points of intervention in therapy than simply helping a client to alter their beliefs and attitudes. Each letter of the model represents a point of possible change. Sometimes it may be most effective, for instance, to work to change the activating agent (eg. encouraging or suggesting strategies for changing an unsatisfying job or reducing loneliness).

Very often an inappropriate pattern match needs to be changed. So a woman who unconsciously pattern matches to the mental cruelty of her first lover, and consequently sabotages every new relationship she embarks on, needs help to uncouple false links between past and present circumstances.

The instinct to pattern match can be used productively by offering positive nominalisations — positive abstract nouns which have no concrete meaning, such as resourcefulness, insight, capacity, happiness, confidence — to a deeply relaxed client, so that the client unconsciously does the work of pattern matching to their past to find times when they have experienced or exercised those qualities.

(Doing this while the client is in a trance state is highly effective because the state of hypnosis is akin to the state of REM sleep, during which pattern-matching templates are first programmed. [13] It is therefore a natural learning state, when the brain is most receptive to new information.)

Similarly, the use of metaphor and storytelling directly address the pattern-matching propensity of the mind, enabling a client to draw from what they hear whatever is most relevant and meaningful for them personally.

Emotion (the E of the model) always needs to be calmed down before a client can learn to think in a less black and white fashion. It is impossible to communicate fully with anyone who is overly emotionally aroused, as very many of us will know from experience of arguments. However, depression is just as aroused an emotional state as anger, even if it is not so apparent to the onlooker.

We maintain, unlike in cognitive therapy, that it isn't individuals' faulty thinking which is causing the problem but the fact that emotional arousal, with its black and white logic, is blocking access to the more subtle reasoning of their higher brains. (Thus the depressed person thinks everything always goes wrong and no relationship will ever work, because there are no greys in black and white thinking.)

High emotional arousal locks people's focus of attention into a negative trance state where they are confined to viewing the world and their own circumstances from a limiting viewpoint. Teaching relaxation techniques and working with them while in a state of deep relaxation reduces the emotional brain's paralysing hold over the neocortex.

Finally, as every good cognitive therapist knows, it is highly important to work with any unhelpful thoughts or belief patterns (T) which may be holding clients back, diminishing their confidence, arousing distress or placing too great demands on them. When people are relaxed and their focus of attention is taken off their emotions, the neocortex can feed a new pattern back down to the emotional brain.

Cognitive therapy holds that a thought may sometimes itself be the activating agent which is interpreted by the belief system and which may then trigger off an emotional response. We would contend that there is no such thing as pure thought. A thought always subserves an emotional agenda.

Even Einstein struggling with his theory of relativity had to be motivated by some emotional need, whether the need for fame and fortune or the emotional satisfaction of discovering the rules by which the universe operates. Thought is an evolutionary adaptation that ultimately serves to help us get our needs fulfilled. A thought, therefore, is always the end, not starting, point of APET.

Dreaming is a clear example of how the brain is always serving an emotionally driven agenda. Humans experience about five periods of REM sleep a night, during which we dream. As explained earlier, dreams are exact pattern matches to emotionally driven agendas which have not been completed during the day. By providing the pattern match to the emotional arousal the dream deactivates it, freeing up our thought processes to deal with whatever the new activation agents of the next day will bring.

A swift approach to change

Incorrect or inappropriate pattern matching is at the centre of most psychological disorders. The most effective treatments for anxiety, depression, addictions, inappropriate anger, obsessive-compulsive disorders, phobias and post traumatic stress all involve detaching old unhelpful patterns and cementing in new empowering ones.

Changing the P (pattern matching) changes the E (emotion) and the T (thought), and, swiftly, the patient's life.

Whereas cognitive methods are laborious and slow and involve clients in adjusting to the therapist's reality (learning to identify the many categories of faulty thinking), the human givens approach, based on the APET model, requires therapists to enter their clients' reality, and enables them to offer diverse meaningful interventions simultaneously, effecting powerful positive change from the very first session.

We hope that the APET model will help provide a useful theoretical understanding for why human givens therapy is so effective.

© Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell (2001)

References

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This article first appeared in Volume 8, No, 1 (2001) of the Human Givens journal.

JOE GRIFFIN and IVAN TYRRELL are both psychotherapists who, together, developed the human givens approach.

The APET model is a highly effective model which human givens therapists use and which is taught on Human Givens College's training days, such as the
Stress to Psychosis: How to prevent people having breakdowns one-day course

The APET model and its practical application are explored in more detail in Joe Griffin's and Ivan Tyrrell's book: Human Givens: A new approach to emotional health and clear thinking

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