In the hostage situation that I encountered, I was only using the reptilian part of my brain. In a life-and-death situation, transcending a fight-and-flight response is almost impossible, as humanity has yet to establish a good foundation and practice of other responses that issue from higher brain functions. In essence, I had not developed neuron pathways to the frontal lobes of my brain in situations that were not life threatening. As an example, if I encountered a challenging work problem that brought up feelings of low self-esteem and I did not respond in fight or flight reactivity to threat modes but transcended this typical response to threats and engaged my frontal lobe part of my brain, then I would have had access to many creative solutions.
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In the hostage situation, I am reacting from flight or fight mode, and the only options I had were from the power and control structures of survival. Typically, coming from a control scenario, this would involve thoughts of how I could manipulate this situation or this man into giving me what I wanted, which was to walk out of there alive. Yet he would perceive my moving toward power as an act of having power over him, leaving him vulnerable in his powerlessness. His only action at this point was to counteract my attempt to have power over him, and that would mean he would react from fight-or-flight responses. Since he had the gun…my guess was he would react from a fight response.
Movements toward power are fight scenarios. I want to be in a position of control and power and will fight to restore myself to that position. A flight scenario involves turning and running in order to withdraw from the scene, or becoming helpless in a situation, such as the action taken by the woman next to me. In both cases of flight and fight, I would have effectively cut myself off from many different creative and intelligent solutions that the situation called for.
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