I was watching an old ventriloquist stage act from the 1950’s on YouTube. His name was Arthur Worsley and two things struck me about his act.

Firstly, although he wasn’t moving his lips much, giving the impression that it was the dummy speaking, this caused him to hold a rather un-natural expression on his own face.

Secondly, I couldn’t help noticing how frightening the dummy looked. It took me back to when I’d first seen this act as a child on an old black and white TV back home with mum and dad.

I suddenly realised that I was experiencing thoughts and feelings like I had when I was five years old.

The dummy had scared me then, and was scaring me now – but I’m sixty years older than when I first had these feelings? Why is this happening? What is this trick of my unruly mind?

It occurred to me that my unruly mind was automatically linking what I was seeing now with a memory from sixty years ago. It was re-presenting it to me in the present moment and in my body, I could feel that I was reacting as if I was under some sort of imminent danger from this weird and scary TV clip.

At first, I thought my mind was playing tricks, but it was working perfectly well.

It was flagging up a potential threat logged deep in my memory; it was matching this current event back to my childhood fear of this ventriloquist dummy and by matching it with that original activating event it was producing feelings in my body now which was motivating me to act – such as to turn off the video, otherwise known as the ‘flight’ response.