Yes, you’ve been very clear that is what you mean when speaking about the primitive brain. And I’m so grateful that you have introduced me to that lens of viewing our thoughts, feelings and behaviours through…I’ve found it to be a very potent tool for self-understanding and change and equally as important for understanding the behaviours of others. I came to the understanding some time ago that our biology is the foundation that everything else that we are is built upon. For example, what we refer to as psychology might more accurately be termed bio-psychology and in that regard the primitive brain (primitive biology) understanding is really a key component.
What I think you’re saying is that our more cognitive functions need to be ‘trained’ to have more influence in how we react…and how we interpret interactions with others…to bring us out of the primitive brain reactions and engaging more with the parasympathetic system. And I can totally understand and agree with that.
If I no longer have any response to someone else’s words, in all likelihood I’m probably dead or in a coma… 
So, yes I have, and we all have, emotions and sensations in relationship to other’s words and actions and what I’m asserting is that I am also capable of realizing that the other person didn’t cause those emotions and sensations. That was my part of the dynamic. My emotional response is in relationship to but not caused by the other’s behaviour…I’m the one who supplied the emotions I’m feeling in that transaction. If the very same exchange took place a day before or seventeen minutes later I very well may have had a completely different relationship to those words. If those same words were spoken by the same person in exactly in the same manner but to a different person and not me it’s almost certain that the emotional response of the receiver of those words would be different. That’s pretty strong evidence to me that the other person didn’t supply my emotional response in our transaction yet most of us, IME, have the very clear sense that the other person caused our emotional response and that it’s very much a Newtonian cause/effect…that person’s words hit me and caused my specific emotions.
I find it interesting as to why it is that we so easily and willingly perceive that cause/effect is the truth of what’s happening. Here’s my best guess as to why: it seems the primitive brain thinks and experiences only in very literal cause/effect, physical ways. That words and facial expressions ‘hit’ us and cause an ‘injury’…like sticks and stones. That’s how it experiences the world…everything is an object…even invisible and conceptual energy processes like words and gestures and ideas are perceived as if they are objects. “ I was struck with an idea ”…but an idea isn’t an object…it can’t strike you. “ His words really hit me hard. ” But words can’t literally hit. These things can only feel ‘as if’ they have hit us. These are metaphors of the primitive brain which is only capable of understanding the world in terms of ‘things’ and how things interact with each other it would seem…what I’ve been calling Newtonian physics. It’s a survival strategy from a time and age when physical dangers were plenty and those dangers primarily came in the form of ‘things’…sticks and stones and tigers and other humans and when we came into physical contact with those things they…HURT! So now, in an era when most of those physical dangers have been removed, ideas and words and thoughts have become ‘things’ that can injure. The primitive brain makes no distinction between invisible energy processes and physical objects. Newtonian physics governs the outside world (primitive brain) but our inner life operates much more like Quantum physics (higher cognitive functions)…and there is, I believe, the conundrum.
So, for me that all leads me to consider that a really good starting place is to question the validity of our felt sense of what is happening. Do our feelings always represent the truth of what’s happening? Did the other person cause my emotions simply because that’s how it feels to me? It’s my assertion that our feelings only represent the truth of what we are feeling. It’s that simple. Nothing else. They are very unreliable witnesses beyond that I think. And in this way I can challenge and deconstruct the felt truth of a ‘cause/effect’.
If feelings were known to be reliable witnesses then there would be a significantly larger prison population.
I can see this taking place in a court of law:
“Is that the man who stole your lawnmower?”
“Yes!!”
“How do you know.”
“Well, when he looks at me I just get a feeling he’s guilty.”
“Right…good enough for me…guards, take him away!!”