Blog 5 of 5 · From the Cell to the Person
“Not ‘what’s wrong with me?’ but ‘what happened to me?’”
Matt Hudson
Have you ever wondered why you can forget where you put your keys five minutes ago, yet remember a moment of embarrassment from thirty years back in full colour?
It isn’t a design fault. It’s your survival brain doing exactly what it was designed to do.
Your survival brain was built to remember danger
For hundreds of thousands of years, our ancestors lived with real, immediate threats. The ones who survived were the ones who remembered: the rustle in the long grass, the face of the stranger who meant harm, the river that nearly took them. And how did the brain store those lessons so they’d never be forgotten? Not as tidy sentences. As images, charged with feeling, ready to fire the instant anything looked remotely similar.
That survival brain is brilliant. It kept our species alive. I have nothing but respect for it.
The only problem is; it was built for the savannah, not the staff meeting.
The guard dog and the photograph
Picture a loyal guard dog. Once, years ago, a burglar broke in, and the dog never forgot him. Good dog! That’s exactly its job.
But now somebody has pinned a photograph of that burglar to the kitchen wall. And every time the dog walks past, it barks. Day and night. At a picture. The burglar is long gone, but the dog doesn’t know that. As far as it’s concerned, the danger is right there.
That’s what an Emotional Memory Image does. Something happened when you were small (perhaps a raised voice, a cold silence, a moment of feeling utterly alone) and your survival system took a picture. It filed it in the space around you, in what neuroscientists call peripersonal space, so it could react in a heartbeat. And it’s been barking at that picture ever since.
The racing heart before a phone call. The tight chest when someone’s disappointed in you. The shoulders that live up by your ears. None of that is weakness. It’s a loyal system doing its job a little too well.
Why this is good news
I’d love you to take this in, because it changes everything: there is nothing wrong with you. Your mind isn’t broken. Your body isn’t betraying you. You’re carrying an ancient protection system, your survival brain, that was never told the danger had passed.
This is also why I spell it dis-ease. Long before a symptom gets a name, a whole system can be ill at ease, braced against a threat that’s no longer there. My most recent paper explores this link between undiagnosed trauma and the body. A lot of what we call dis-ease may be a protective response that’s simply never been switched off.
And here’s the hopeful part. You don’t need to fight the guard dog. You don’t need to train it, shout at it or medicate it into silence. You simply need to take the photograph off the wall.
Taking the picture down
Bruce Lipton showed us that the cell changes its behaviour when it reads a different environment. At the level of the person, I believe the same thing happens when the image in our field changes.
Thanks to research into memory reconsolidation, we now know that emotional memories become changeable for a short while when they’re reactivated. So when we find the image (by asking where the feeling is, rather than what happened) and gently change its qualities, the memory is stored again without its old charge. The guard dog walks past the wall, finds no picture, and quietly lies down.
Priya’s phone
Priya, a successful solicitor, came to see me because her heart pounded every time her phone rang. “It’s ridiculous,” she said. “I’m a grown woman. It’s a phone.” She’d tried breathing exercises, an app for anxiety, even turning the ringer off altogether.
(Names and details changed, as always.)
“It’s not ridiculous at all,” I said. “Something in you is trying very hard to protect you. Let’s find out what it’s looking at.”
When I asked where that pounding would be if it were out there in front of her, she pointed close to her right ear. “It’s a sort of sharp, bright shape. It feels loud.”
We didn’t go looking for a story. We worked with the shape: moved it, softened it, let it change. After a few minutes she let out a long breath. “It’s quiet,” she said. “It’s just… not there.”
A month later she sent me a message: “My phone rang in a meeting today and I simply answered it. I didn’t even notice until afterwards.”
What becomes possible
Let me finish this series with a bigger thought.
Imagine for a moment what life might look like if more of us took those old photographs down. Fewer people living braced for danger that left decades ago. More people able to think clearly, love openly, and rest properly. Families that stop handing the same Family Rules down from one generation to the next.
I won’t call that a leap in evolution. Let’s leave that word to the biologists. But I do believe it’s a choice each of us can make, one image at a time, and that it ripples outward into our families and communities in ways we’ll never fully measure.
That’s what excites me. Lipton showed us the cell is not a victim of its genes. I want to show you that you are not a prisoner of your past.
I’ve written more about how this plays out in the body in How Undiagnosed Trauma Becomes Dis-ease and Functional Neurological Disorder: Could Undiagnosed Trauma Be the Hidden Driver?
So where do you start?
Think of one reaction that feels bigger than the situation deserves. Ask yourself: if this feeling were out there, where would it be? Notice it. Thank it, even; it’s been trying to keep you safe.
The MindReset app on Apple and Google will guide you through the rest, step by step. Please keep seeing your doctor, and if what you uncover feels heavy, work alongside a trauma-informed practitioner.
Your survival system did its job. You can let it rest now.
The From the Cell to the Person series
That’s the end of the series. If you’d like to start again from the beginning, go back to Blog 1: Lipton Explained Why. Here’s How..
- Blog 1: Lipton Explained Why. Here’s How.
- Blog 2: Why Affirmations Don’t Work (And What Does)
- Blog 3: Beliefs Are the Symptom; the Image Is the Source
- Blog 4: Healing Without the Story
- Blog 5: Your Survival System Did Its Job Too Well (you are here)
References
- Hudson, M. (2021). Frontiers in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.716535
- Hudson, M. (2022). Frontiers in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.947952
- Hudson, M. (2025). https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S3050613125000269
- Nader, K., Schafe, G. E., & LeDoux, J. E. (2000). Nature, 406, 722–726.
- Lipton, B. H. (2005). The Biology of Belief. Mountain of Love/Elite Books.