Life Telling TherapyJon Holmes, LMFT · Lic. MFC 45850

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Basal Ganglia and Cerebellum · Neuro-archetypal perspective

The Wild One

The Wild One archetype governs your access to instinct, creative vitality, and the parts of yourself that resist domestication. It is not chaos. It is the deep energy that animates the other archetypes. The basal ganglia, which regulate habitual patterns and the suppression of impulse, and the cerebellum, which coordinates the body's felt sense of movement and aliveness, are its neurological home. When the Wild One is wounded, the basal ganglia encodes domestication as safety, and the body loses access to its own instinctual knowing.

The pattern this page helps name

The Wild One wound is the wound of domestication, the slow erasure of instinct, vitality, and creative aliveness in service of performance, approval, or safety. It is encoded in the temporal lobes as a dissociation from the felt sense of being fully alive, and in the autonomic nervous system as a chronic flatness or numbness.

A question to carry

I feel cut off from a sense of aliveness or vitality, as though I am going through the motions of my life.

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