The Life-Threatening Aspects of Love and Unlearning

When I was in my 20s and early 30s I never gave even occasional thought to becoming a parent. Near as I could tell there was little emotional/intellectual upside and BIG downside. Not to mention the $400,000 (currently) it cost to raise a kid and send them to a decent college.

But at some point something changed in my brain, something no one explained to me or prepared me for – unlearning happened. My mother’s favorite saying, “Kids make me n’ern (crazy),” faded away and became replaced by new learning supplied by the likes of Penelope Leach and T. Berry Brazelton (popular baby doctors in vogue at the time). Becoming a father produced vasopression-flooded dreams filled with avid curiosity, great mystery and small exciting adventures. Who was this being I’d helped bring into the world? Whom was I going to spend many years helping her become?

Associations Make it Happen

The brain is a massive, matrix-like, associative organ and it learns by making and strengthening connections between nodal points (neurons). Literally. Neurons that fire during any learning experience fire together in groups and become wired together. This is the well-known Hebb’s Rule. The next time any single neuron in the group fires, they will all fire – until they no longer do. This unwiring or disconnectivity is called unlearning and without it, we would all very quickly run out of usable network space in our matrix-brains. New learning would be extremely difficult, if not impossible to accomplish. These neurons that wire together can be thought of as the arterial connections you can readily see on Google Maps.

When we love a person or a pet or a place, over time, in stages, these connections grow in massive complexity and begin to look like the streets of Manhattan. Many, many experiences with the beloved begin to make more and more connections and take up more and more real estate in the brain, resulting in increasingly detailed neural maps.

Map by Michael Albert

Unlearning is most active and clearly evident as children go through developmental stages – from puberty to adolescence, for example. Subjects and skills we mastered in elementary school like reading and multiplication consolidate and take up less space in the brain. More neural real estate becomes freed up for learning middle school subjects like history and algebra. Leaving home and going off to college involves substantial unlearning as kids begin the work of transforming from a learned history of being our children into strong, integrated,  independent young adults.

Grief as Unlearning

When our kids do go off to college, or a partner dies or a relationship results in separation or divorce, our neural map – the connections we’ve built over time with that person – needs to begin to unravel. Until and unless they do, building a new or different, sustainable relationship becomes more than a little challenging. This is partly why rebound relationships have relatively short lifespans – too much neural real estate still contains connections holding memories of old emotional habits and routines with the previous partner. The successful, active dissolution of those memories literally retracts and disconnects the neurons in our brain from one another. This essential process, similar to unweaving a cloth tapestry, is unlearning.

Unlearning is vital for living a happy, healthy life. As Ephron Rosenzweig, Carol Barnes and Bruce McNaughton at the University of Arizona have discovered, it is essential that we unlearn in order to make room for new memories. That’s why it’s important for all of us, but especially children, to actively grieve. Because their networks are significantly less mature, devoting large tracts of neural real estate to sustaining ungrieved losses early in their lives can significantly compromise and delay normal development. Depending upon the nature and the number involved, ungrieved losses can compromise impulse control and immune function, leading to frequent illness and even early death. Those seemingly random, impulsive thoughts we have of jumping off a cliff or running our car into a tree or into oncoming traffic – my suspicion is that those thoughts are very likely connected to ungrieved losses – unlearning looking to happen.

We sometimes think of people who’ve suffered great losses as dying of a broken heart. Their dying might be more accurately described as the result of a broken brain – and however that may impact the heart. Very often, if it actually doesn’t kill us, our grief unlearned, turns our heart into our strongest organ.

Sweetening the She-Spot

I’ve long been a fan of women, especially mothers. Having grown up as the only male in a family of women, I’m guessing it’s something about what interpersonal neurobiologists Diana Fosha and Marion Solomon identify as women’s “tend and befriend brain,” which positively resonates for me. I like being in the presence of women. They feel familiar and safe; the gender most likely to consistently answer The Big Brain Question “Yes” for me.

As a result, I’m hopeful that the world will not only survive, but thrive in the coming years due primarily to the hearts, minds, brains and spirits of women working in the world more and more as a collective body. Women’s capacity for compassion, creativity and connection, for organizing and building organizations and enterprises that are humane and sustainable, is evidencing itself over and over again all over the globe. Ode Magazine has called women organizing themselves for good works the “not-so-secret secret to changing the world.” The magazine offers examples from Rwanda where women now make up half the lower house of parliament, and from Bangladesh where Nobel Prize winner Mumammad Yunus’s microcredit movement supports thousands of women as they strive valiantly to lift their communities out of poverty. Men in Bangladesh, it turns out, can’t be trusted with microcredit.

Our Daughters as Positive Deviants

Women planting seeds for change have been showing up around the world in the form of Positive Deviancy for awhile now. Essentially, positive deviants are those people unwilling to simply accept the conventional wisdom and the status quo, especially when it’s clear that doing so leads to ongoing pain and suffering, not just for women, but for everyone.

The world is full of prime examples of women demonstrating what it means to be a positive deviant. They are probably best exemplified by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s popular saying, “Well-behaved women seldom make history.” Elena Simons, known as Wonder Woman in her native country, is such a history-maker. And she has fun while doing so, mixing humor with social critique in “Fungagement” as the head of the Buyer’s Army – a battalion of pink bereted and pink booted women shoppers with matching pink shopping baskets based in the Netherlands. Their mission: encourage stores to carry organic, freely traded, animal-friendly products.

New York based, Dr. Jennifer Leigh, founder of Honor the Girl, is another exemplar of Positive Deviancy. Her mission is “to honor the girl to better the world,” as she organizes Pajama Parties, overnight gatherings for teen girls all around the country. At these PJ soirees, kids not only connect and have great fun, but they talk about the cultural messages and technological changes that impact their lives and how to positively deal with them. These young women get exposed to all kinds of creative possibilities for supporting one another, each in her own unique brand of positive deviancy.

Another positive deviant can be found in Jennifer Buergermeister, founder of the Texas Two-Step Yoga Tour! Jennifer is committed to bringing the transformative aspects of yoga to all of the Lone Star State. For starters. Her work to unify the unifiers serves as a meta-reminder that the illusion of separation is a persistent one all around the world.

Clear about the transformative, integrative potential of physical movement, still another example of a positive deviant is Stephanie Ludwig. She resigned safe, secure work with her local church and, working in concert with women in the national office, brought a chapter of Girls on the Run^® to Flagstaff, Arizona. Girls on the Run is an experiential learning program for girls age eight to thirteen. They skillfully combine training for a multi-mile run while simultaneously encouraging positive emotional, social, mental, spiritual and physical development.

Difficulties with Deviancy

Western culture frequently works against the cultivation of positive deviancy. Mostly, kids are encouraged to conform, to be compliant, to uncritically obey elders and other authorities. In that environment, it’s difficult to nurture the internal resources required to step out and grow up to be a Rude and Bold Woman. Similarly, peer pressure to conform is also difficult to flourish in the midst of for most kids.

Positive deviancy is especially difficult to accomplish without positive encouragement and support from parents, teachers and clergy. Parents essentially need to encourage their kids to become “outlaws” in the best sense of that word. It’s the outlaws after all, those who refuse to be bound by silly, oppressive and unfair laws, who most often work to get them changed.

Deviancy Begins at Home

To support and encourage positive deviancy, parents have their work cut out for them. Why? Because encouraging and supporting such qualities in children often invites first questioning parental authority right where we all live. And after you’ve been the boss of your kids for 10 or 12 years, changing the nature of the parental relationship is not such an easy thing to do. But one sure way to encourage positive deviancy in our children is to model it – for mothers (and fathers) to become the epitome of positive deviancy themselves.

The Pornographic Brain

In June of 2009 internet users launched more than ten billion searches on the most popular search engines. Two and a half billion of those searches were for pornography! (How big is a billion? If you were to count out loud to one million, it would take you about 11 days. To count to a billion would take you 30 years!) With the advent of iPads, Droids and Dreamscreens pornography is available to anyone, anywhere at any time. Researchers in the United Kingdom couldn’t find a single male who had not viewed porn. And 2009 CyberSentinel poll found that 13-16 year olds of both genders spend almost two hours a week viewing pornography, and Columbia University found that 45% of teens have “friends” who regularly view and download porn. Pornography has become the naked elephant self-stimulating itself in the middle of our digital living room.

Can something that feels go good and seems so harmless be in any way connected to the suffering in the world?  Longtime sex therapist and noted researcher, Wendy Maltz thinks so:

(After many, many years of research), I’ve come to the conclusion that pornography is moving from an individual and couples’ problem to a public health problem, capable of deeply harming the emotional, sexual, and relationship well-being of millions of men, women, and children.

Empirical evidence is currently unclear as to whether excessive viewing of pornography is the “new crack cocaine” that leads to addiction, misogyny, pedophilia and sexual dysfunction. These claims were made amidst great criticism by a number of scientists and clinicians before a Senate subcommittee a few years ago. But from a neuroscience perspective, some things are pretty certain. One is, different brains will be affected by pornography in different ways. Even though many things done to excess hold the possibility of becoming toxic – drugs, alcohol, tobacco, sugar, shopping, television, work – not all brains turn the opiods released by repeatedly viewing pornography into so-called “erototoxins.” Viewing doesn’t automatically lead to addiction, but it does increase the risk for those who are vulnerable.

Cooling Our Jets

Pornography is a hot topic that often stirs strong responses in mixed company, which can work against constructive dialogue. The strength of our emotional reaction to porn is often an indicator of how integrated (or not) our own brains are around the subject. And while we might wish that pornography and easy access to it didn’t exist and wasn’t a significant problem, burying our collective heads in the sand won’t go very far in accurately informing each other or in providing useful guidance for our children.

While accurate statistics are hard to come by, supposedly a high percentage of people who participate in the porn industry were sexually abused as young children (The psycho-neurological mechanisms of shame, repression, dissociation and denial make any such stats questionable at best). Abuse in any form though, reduces neurogenesis (growth of new neurons) and synaptogenesis (the integrated connectivity of neurons). Add in the shame that often accompanies the use of pornography, and we can begin to build a pretty compelling case for the social consequences of pornography leading to substantial neurological impoverishment.

Pornography, like casual sex, invites turning off those parts of our brain that would have us emotionally connect to and deeply care for others. In addition, according to an MSNBC study, more than 70% of porn users keep their use secret and view it in isolation. Social isolation is another proven impairer of optimal neurological development.

Help for the Hand-icapped

So what can we do to skillfully address the issue of pornography where our children are concerned?  I have some recommendations:

Be willing to entertain the possibility that pornography may be a problem. Human beings engage in lots of initially enjoyable things that inevitably turn out to be harmful, only later coming to realize it. This may be one more.

Be prepared for the subject to present itself in our homes. This will often come as an unexpected surprise: a magazine found under the mattress, a computer screen left open and active by accident, etc.

Work with trusted others to begin to reduce our own charge, negative or positive, on the subject. Whatever our hot buttons, our kids are the ones who know them best and they will almost always find ways to press them. You can be pretty sure if you have a hot button around sexuality and pornography, eventually it’s going to get pressed.

Depending upon the extent of the problem, seek professional help. These kinds of compulsive behaviors are not easy to beat single-handedly.

Pornography usage can be a difficult emotional issue to tackle head on. Like many of the challenges of parenting, it will very likely require us to change the hardest thing of all … ourselves.

Taking the Brain to Heart

Except for a brief stint in my early twenties working in for-profit corporate America, for most of my life I have been drawn to so-called “heart work.”  I involved myself with non-profits providing important and meaningful service in the local community. When I lived on the San Francisco peninsula, I volunteered at Kara, a grief counseling agency on and off for more than 20 years, collaborating with friends to create their Children’s Grief Program. I’ve also been involved here, here and here, non-profits all, doing needed service work in the world. My draw to this work isn’t all that altruistic. It’s more the result of how it makes me feel when I do it: it seems to trigger an oxytocin release in my brain and body. Oxytocin is the peptide most responsible for reducing fear and increasing trust – good experiences to have in our daily workplace. They helped me to answer The Big Brain Question, “Yes.”

The Heart's Energetic Torus

 

While few neuroscientists would point to the heart as the organ most central to defining what it means to be and work as a human, there are growing numbers of researchers who are discovering qualities about the heart heretofore unknown. For instance, Rollin McCraty at the Institute of Heartmath indicates that the heart’s electromagnetic field can be measured at a distance of 12 feet away from the body. (Is this a limitation of our hearts or of our measuring instruments? With more refined instruments – like a massively integrated human heart-brain(?) – might we be able to sense a specific heart’s electromagnetic signature on the other side of the planet?).

The Evolution of the Heart

Joseph Chilton Pearce, in his book, The Biology of Transcendence makes the claim that in spite of wars and recurring economic and political turmoil, human beings are still in the process of evolving. While certainly open to scientific debate, where that evolution is taking us, Pearce claims, is in the direction of hooking up more and more neurons from the brain to the heart. He identifies the heart as our “Fifth Brain,” one we potentially begin making early connections to in childhood. To the extent those early connections are supported and encouraged and given repeated opportunities for growth and development, Pearce argues, they will tend to strengthen and increase, much as the neural networks in any part of the head brain tend to do.

Reasons of Its Own

Ever the scientist, and fascinated with this line of inquiry, after being diagnosed with Stage IV lymphoma, Dr. Paul Pearsall made the most of serendipity. When he found himself recovering from radiation treatments on a hospital ward together with a number of heart transplant patients he was curious to know what it was like to have someone else’s heart beating in their chest. So he began to interview these transplant patients. It turns out that the hearts these people received apparently came with pieces of the donor’s personal history, pieces these recipients could actually remember. For a compelling account of these folk’s experience, check out this short video: Transplanting Memories.

Deeply intrigued by what he discovered, Pearsall extensively researched and wrote The Heart’s Code. In it he provided a “cardio-energetic portrait of the heart”:

The heart is our most powerful organ. There is no subtleness about the immense physical power of the heart. The brain’s power pales by comparison.

The heart responds directly to the environment. The heart reacts neuro-hormonally to the outside world not only in response to the brain, but sometimes without the brain’s awareness.

The heart is a dynamic system. It expresses itself as energy, matter and information.

The heart is the conductor of the energy of the body’s cells. The subtle energies of the heart produce “info-energetic cellular memories.”

The heart is the body’s primary organizing force. It is the creator of the gestalt we call “me,” and the catalyst for the mind that results in our experience of “us.”

The heart resonates with information-containing energy. Energy, matter and information are one and the same. Whenever any one of these characteristics are present, the other two are also there in some form.

The heart is the body system’s core. The heart’s energy transmission becomes highly influential for our body and for all the bodies around us.

The heart “speaks” and sends information. We can learn to access this information by quieting our brain.

All hearts exchange information with other hearts and brains. When one heart sends energy to another, that energy becomes part of the receiving heart’s memory.

Transplanted hearts come with their own info-energetic cellular memories.

Holding Our Children Heart to Heart

I’m firmly convinced that we must model and teach our children how to access the intelligence of the heart in order to bring balance to the extensively employed and often misused “sharp edge of intellect;” intelligence is different than wisdom. Scientific evidence is accumulating that suggests doing so will help our children make better decisions and manage life risk more effectively. And when they grow up to be soldiers, politicians and work on Wall Street, isn’t such work something we want our kids to be able to fully bring the heart’s wisdom to?

Making the Most of the Good

In my late thirties, I took a course in something called The Unlimit Your Life Seminars from Jim Fadiman. Essentially, I learned a series of daily affirmations based loosely upon The Power of Positive Thinking, with a number of spiritual and altruistic elements added in. After working with the Seminar principles for a couple of years, almost everything on the list of things I wanted to accomplish or create came to pass.

Dr. Jim Fadiman

Pretty significant things, too. For example, I had dreamed of hand-building my own house for more than 20 years, and through a series of seemingly miraculous events (including being given a half million dollar building lot for free!), I ended up building a 4000 square foot home in one of the most affluent areas of the country. By building and selling houses on spec, our family ended up with a net worth of several million dollars (This was obviously before the current downturn; and the work was inspired by a spiritual teacher issuing me the directive, “Provide shelter for people” during a vulnerable, teachable moment). In my “spare time,” I not only managed to write several award-winning books, but also completed the requirements for two Master’s degrees and a Ph.D. in psychology. This isn’t meant to be me singing great praises of myself, but rather to illustrate the power of an organized, integrated brain learning to work in concert with itself, and people with similarly well-organized brains (Several years later, “transition stress” caused me to hunker down and stop doing all these disciplined practices that clearly worked. I stopped building, stopped playing, stopped listening to music, stopped affirming, lost the house, lost my marriage and filed for bankruptcy, as my brain unfortunately reverted to its relatively disorganized baseline mean).

A Tale of Two Neurons

Last week I gave a talk entitled “A Tale of Two Neurons” to the dedicated folks serving families at the Navy base here on Whidbey Island. As part of that talk I invited one half of the group to role-play impoverished neurons – the kind that needs and can benefit from disciplined trainings like Jim’s. The other half got to role-play enriched neurons. I had each group describe the events and circumstances that made  them that way. The enriched group came up with things like loving parents, secure attachment, safe early environments, good friends and lots of repetition of novel stimuli. The impoverished group came up with many of the opposites of those factors; but what was most interesting is that impoverished list was significantly longer than the enriched group’s. Why? Because the brain has a built-in negative bias. Its primary job is to keep us safe and alive. Consequently, it needs to observe, record and preserve the memories of any experiences that might prove threatening to our survival. Thus the need and the importance of things like the Unlimit Your Life Seminars, positive teachers and positive thinking – to help us overcome the brain’s built-in “negative” bias.

Once Again With Feeling

What most powerfully drives affirmation and positive thinking though, is not simply the repetition of positive phrases, but rather – authentic emotion. In order for such words and sentences to work optimally, we must bring great feeling to them. This is one reason why Affective Balance Therapies (ABTs) and programs like City at Peace work faster and are often more effective than cognitive therapies alone. Neuroscience research has produced any number of studies that confirm emotion is one powerful key to learning, neural growth and integration. Some well-regarded work by Antoine Bechara at the University of Iowa, for example, goes a long way towards explaining why teenagers frequently make such poor decisions – they possess great feeling, but lack sufficient regulatory cortical connections to readily control and constructively channel their emotions. (Which is why the brains working at the developmental level of teenagers at places like Enron and in Wall Street investment banks need outside regulation imposed by hopefully less cluelessly disorganized brains!).

Feeling the Love

Psychologist Rick Hanson of the Greater Good Foundation in Berkeley, and the co-author of Buddha’s Brain, offers three suggestions for using emotion to bring balance to our brain’s inborn threat-monitoring bias. First, practice turning the positive facts that permeate our lives every day into positive experiences by deliberately paying greater attention to them. Second, savor such experiences. Rick quotes Marc Lewis at the University of Toronto who claims that the longer something is held in awareness, the more emotionally stimulating it becomes. In the process it enlists more brain neurons into firing and wiring together, thus becoming a much stronger memory. Third and finally, deliberately provide time to let such experiences sink in through prayer, meditation or contemplation.

These are wonderful principles to both teach and model for our children. As a result, hopefully they won’t have to work as hard as so many of us have had to in order  to regularly accentuate the positives in our lives.

The Myth of the Rugged Individualist

As a kid I spent a lot of time alone. My role models were mostly TV characters like Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, Bronco Layne, Bret Maverick, and Richard Boone as Paladin. Iconoclasts and rugged individualists all, they each worked diligently in the service of good against the forces of evil. They were mostly strong, silent types – men of action living in a black and white world. You didn’t mess with them unless you were out of your mind.

In the light of current brain science research, most of my childhood heroes would very likely turn out to be clinically diagnosable, the inevitable result of experiencing one brain-disorganizing trauma after another from mishaps while tearing across the Texas plain. Why, for example, did Jim Bowie need to openly walk through the world carrying a three inch wide, sixteen inch long knife named after him everywhere he went? Or why did Bret Maverick wander from town to town acting out his gambling addiction with a thousand dollar bill pinned under his coat collar. Banks were around then and paid interest on savings, too. And the defense of the Alamo? Clearly Bowie and Davy Crockett were engaged in pretty distorted thinking. I’ve been to the Alamo and the walls around it are barely six feet high – completely indefensible. Their folly was undoubtedly dissociative “suicide by Santa Anna.”

Having long aspired to it, I’m now pretty convinced that rugged individualism is how neurological disorganization plays out for any number of us. One result of my spending so much time alone as a young kid, is that my speech and language centers failed to develop very strongly. Rugged individualists don’t show up as strong, silent types because we want to, it’s because we have little choice. According to neuro-psychiatrist Louann Brizendene, the speech and language centers in men are normally about one third the size of those in women. I’m pretty sure they’re even less developed in me. It takes great brain energy producing a lot of concentrated focus for me to speak aloud for even a short amount of time. Words just don’t easily form in my mind, leaving me sometimes feeling like a barely functional autistic. And recent research suggest that this neural real estate deficiency makes me not so great at reading nonverbal communication very well either.

Self-Enforced Solitary Confinement

I occasionally used to think about spending time in prison (what part of my personal trauma history might be responsible for that line of thinking?) and about getting sent to solitary confinement. It would be a welcome retreat for me. I’d be safe and contained and have ample time to explore creative flights of fancy. I’m now sure that’s quite wrongheaded. John Bowlby, the originator of attachment theory, thought so as well. He believed isolation was inherently traumatizing in and of itself, often leading to something like “primal panic.” As Buddha probably intuited when he established the sangha (spiritual community) as a central element in his teachings, adults and children need other people to help us regulate our neurophysiology, to help us engage in a kind of emotional homeostasis. This ongoing, interactive, self-other emotional regulation is described by Dan Goleman in his book, Social Intelligence as a “Neural Duet.”

We also need other people to help us release the “cuddle hormone,” oxytocin, associated with states of calm, joy and contented bliss. Without other heart-brain-mind-bodies dancing together with ours, those creative flights of fancy can easily trigger a glucocorticoid typhoon that is not at all easy to regulate single-mindedly. In other words, when I’m all alone, I’m much crazier than when I’m in the company of others. (One purpose reading books and magazines seems to serve is to place me vicariously in the company of others as a way to direct and constructively channel mental and emotional energy).

The Early Bird Attaches to the Worm

As might be predicted, this propensity for isolation frequently follows in the wake of less than optimal early attachment. Insecure attachment leaves me less able to take emotional risks, proactively reach out to others, or deal with conflict very easily. I simply don’t have the neural resources – the integrated connections that would readily and easily allow for that.

But the good news is that with practice, any one of us can grow new neural connections in our speech and language centers. Being able to grow new neurons and connections is one of the things that makes practicing in places like Toastmasters work so well. It’s also why for the last four or five years I’ve been teaching classes and forcing myself to give public talks. In light of the 10000 Hours-to-Become-an-Expert Rule, by 2015 all my speech and language centers should finally be fully reclaimed. In place of the strong, silent, rugged individualist will bloom a social butterfly!

The Perils of Taking Life Sitting Down

I once had a girlfriend in my late teens named Marlyce Greco. She was a starstruck fan of Arthur Lee and Love, and so one summer Saturday night we went to see him and the band at the Whiskey a Go-Go on Sunset Strip in Hollywood. Around midnight, after we came over Mullholland and cruised down into the Valley on my Triumph motorcycle, a woman who’d had too much to drink, made a sudden left turn in front of us just as we entered the intersection at Coldwater Canyon and Moorpark. We broadsided her at 40 miles an hour, sending Marlyce and I flying over the top of her station wagon and out into the traffic trying to avoid us.

Miraculously neither of us ended up seriously hurt. In the aftermath, we were both able to stand on the street corner and speak semi-coherently to people who came to our aid. Except for one problem – I couldn’t stop shaking. Forty-plus years later, I’ve come to learn I was having a body and brain-stabilizing, Acute Stress Reaction.

The “Oh Shoot” Moment

In the moment when I realized we were going to smash into that station wagon, all my major muscles tensed. All thinking ceased, my breathing stopped and my whole body was flooded with adrenaline and cortisol. From studies of animals in the wild by ethologists like Robert Sapolsky and Peter Levine, we know that the shaking afterwards was my nervous system’s way of trying to move those powerful glucocorticoids out of my body and brain in order to keep them from doing neurological harm. Instead of loading me into an ambulance and taking me to the UCLA Medical Center and exposing me to the horrendous pain and suffering that abounds in any inner city Emergency Room on a Saturday night, probably better would have been to trot or walk me around the block a few times. It is lack of physical movement – the freeze response – that seems to play a significant role in traumatic experiences becoming intrusively fixed in long term memory.

Walk it Off, Shake it Off, Dance it Off

When my daughter was small, I noticed that whenever she fell or scraped her knee, her first response would be to look to me for a reaction. If I was cool and simply picked her up, brushed her off and walked her around, she was over the incident quite rapidly. My calm became her calm. I’m pretty convinced, and research from folks like Bessel van der Kolk, Bob Scaer and Pat Ogden seem to confirm that anything we do that helps us mitigate the Freeze Response in the wake of spills and trauma, provides great neurological benefits – physical movement in the wake of overwhelming experiences seems to keep us from forming “Dissociation Capsules,” those easily-acquired neurological snarl-jams that work to frequently float us away from the stress of the present moment.

The need for, and the power of physical movement, even “triumphant action” as a potential healing aid in the wake of traumatic experiences, is important to realize for parents and other caregivers in the world, especially those parts of the world where exploding IEDs and other traumatic assaults are a regular, unpredictable way of life. Anything we can do to support the physical and mental health of any one of us is invariably good for all of us.

Challenging Conversations

Related to physically traumatic experiences are the neurologically similar experience of difficult conversations – those emotionally-laden, adrenaline-fueled discussions we find ourselves frequently faced with involving family members, friends and creative colleagues. Roger Fisher, Bruce Patton, Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen – members of the Harvard Negotiation Project – have written a book on just this topic. They present a series of flexible guidelines for deliberately and consciously engaging in Difficult Conversations.

They suggest breaking difficult discussions into three parts: the story part – what happened; the feeling part – how we feel about what happened; and the Third Story – the result that often emerges from deep listening and mutually inclusive, beneficial problem-solving. Missing from their guidelines is my feeling that these conversations should rarely be engaged in sitting down. Such conversations jazz up our neurobiology and then leave us with nowhere to go with all that vibrating energy. Moving that energy through our system in my experience is best accomplished by not taking such encounters sitting down. And this is probably a good practice for the rest of our lives as well.

Invoking the Gravitas of Affirmation

More than 50 years have passed and I can still clearly remember Mrs. Lieberman, my fourth grade teacher, announcing to the rest of the class: “Mark is a very good reader. He reads with excellent comprehension.” That single piece of praise shaped a significant part of my life thereafter – reading became a daily mainstay, as necessary for me as food, air and water.

And then, in my early twenties I attended a talk in Ojai, California by the renown Indian spiritual teacher, J. Krishnamurti. I was flabbergasted when I heard him say that he never read books, that books were a distraction on the spiritual path!

Teachable Gravitas

I love that spacey diastema!

Each of these declarations made a lasting impression on me. The first is a demonstration of what Princeton philosopher, Cornel West calls “The Gravitas of Affirmation,” the second an illustration of what spiritual adepts call a “teachable moment.” In the latter instance, I was ripe for waking up to the possibility that something I learned in the fourth grade, which I held sacrosanct, might not hold the truth and power in the real world that I thought it did.

But the point of this little vignette is that parents, teachers, therapists and clergy have great power, often more than many of us realize. The things that we say and do in the presence of children (and adults as well) can leave lasting impressions for good or ill. For example, just last week the New York Times published this piece on the negative impact that yelling has on kids – something I’ve been railing against for years. All we need do is pay attention to how we feel when we’re screamed at – attend to the flood of neural-inhibiting glucocorticoids racing through our bodies, along with the guilt that often follows – to know that yelling is not “best for the children.” Nevertheless, as the article indicates, the majority of parents in America do yell at their kids, without realizing its negative neural impact. What to do?

The Power of Proclamation

I’m sure many of you reading this column can recall a casual positive remark, perhaps made in passing by some person of consequence long ago. It’s very likely one that greatly impacted your life and remains with you still: Mrs. Creel in the third grade telling you you had a lovely blue eyes, or Ms. Levitt in the sixth grade proclaiming you as very good at long division, or Mr. Fisher, the school principal, genuinely amazed when you scored off the charts on the Minnesota Spatial Relations test. The sum of these kinds of affirmations can take on a gravitas of their own, a kind of collective meta-gravitas, if you will. And while I know of no direct empirical research on their neurological power, there is little doubt in my mind that they can do wonders for neural growth and connectivity. I know this mostly by extrapolating from research on the neurobiology of successfully managing stress, laughter and play, all of which do enrich neural development.

Anything that keeps allostasis (good stress) from turning into excessive or sustained allostatic load (bad stress), has to be placed on the plus side of the neurological ledger, especially for expectant mothers. And timely, authentic praise makes our neurophysiology hum like a symphony string section. For empirical evidence, simply check in with your own body. Essential though, is that the praise and affirmation we bestow needs to be just that: timely and authentic. It can’t be faint praise offered days later with a hidden or double agenda. Interestingly, these are also aspects of contingent communication, for which we do have a lot of empirical research confirming neurological efficacy.

Right Speech

There’s a wonderful Zen directive that lives in my long-ago memory as something like this: “Do not think bad thoughts. But if you do think bad thoughts, do not speak them. But if you do speak them, do your best to correct any damage they may have done.” We don’t have to be perfect in this practice. We only have to be willing to attend closely to the intent of the words we put out into the world and work on repairing any damage they may have done. With practice (about 10,000 hours worth), the things we do think and the things we do say may more and more begin to take on their own affirmative gravitas.

The High Cost of Kvetching

The older I get the more whining and kvetching (naggy, critical griping) I seem to find myself doing. One example: I need to cut down on my American news-watching, especially the political/financial reporting, because I spend too much time finger-pointing and barking at the TV. In the either/or world between strategic optimism or defensive pessimism, I generally tend to excel on defense.

It’s interesting to explore what goes on internally when I find myself reacting in this way. At the root of much of my reactivity often lies … fear. Fear that politicians are going to make the mess they’ve already made, worse. Fear that Wall Street – and specifically the big banks – are going to ruin any possible chance that I might have for a happy financial retirement. Fear that what lies ahead for me is mostly greater and greater pain, anxiety and suffering until I finally give up and die. The irony is not lost on me: while I’m so busy being driven by all of this Future-fear, I’m not very present to the glorious life around me in the moment. I blame it on my brain’s inability to easily manage anxiety, which of course, is simply more finger-pointing.

The High Costs of Kvetching

There are a number of things that make whining and kvetching less than optimal, both as a role model for kids, and for my own integrated brain development as well. In the parlance of economics, one might be lost opportunity cost. While I’m all too busy kvetching, it’s taking up way too much of my time, energy and attention. But the brain can only focus fully on one thing at a time. Just as it can’t fully attend to the road while driving and simultaneously eat and send text messages, it doesn’t easily allow me to talk attentively on the phone and simultaneously pay bills on line or give kids or kittens full attention. Because I’m so busy kvetching, as a result of this brain limitation, I’m not paying attention and fully focused on the constructive things I might be doing,  like decoding the brain using light or practicing over-expressing the NR2B gene. (This is the lone gene which seems to inspire our brains to process more energy and information faster – which would make me much smarter, able to manage anxiety more effectively, and thus be less inclined to kvetch. What a double bind!).

The Kvetching Catch

But is kvetching all bad? Dr. Barbara Held believes you can kvetch your way to better health and she offers these five aspects (my interpretation) for the practice:

1. Safeguard your inalienable right to kvetch

2. Practice selective kvetching; honor the limits of your kvetchee

3. Don’t pseudo-kvetch – kvetch with gusto

4. Don’t practice kvetching one-upmanship

5. Praise the power of the practice of kvetching

As a defensive pessimist, I don’t particularly agree with Dr. Held’s premise, although I do subscribe to her main point: we need to be able to be honest with ourselves and others about what’s true in our experience, and then find effective avenues for expressing it.

Kvetching as a Call to Action

In my mind, kvetching is a conditioned response left over from childhood. I whined as a kid because whining preceded words. Kvetching also seems closely related to the Two Perilous Questions which have inspired many to spiritual maturity. Expressing dissatisfaction generally gives voice to momentary truths, answering the first question: What’s true for me?  While it often misses the bigger picture – that in any moment of my life things are actually going quite well, and there’s very little to actually really fear – kvetching is a bit like winning the Nobel Peace Prize before you’ve actually done anything real to bring about peace. In the best of all possible worlds, it stands as a first alert and sets the stage for taking action required to address and resolve Perilous Question Number Two. Addressing this question – What do I want? – invites exploring a further and deeper truth, one that requires me to take action, often life-changing in ways big and small. It also often requires me to reconfigure my ordo amorum – rearranging the unfortunate human hierarchy of the things I love against the things I love most. Difficult choices that often require painful action. No wonder I’m so passively disinclined to make such changes until circumstances force me to.

In addition, kvetching often seems to trap me in a neurological loop, one that I deeply believe at some level is trying to move me towards greater healing integration. It often feels like I’m trapped in small, narrow, fear-generated thought-bubbles, which is what a traumatized brain normally does in the face of threat. The brain orchestrates these life-saving measures even with threats that aren’t particularly real, like in response to voices debating politics on my television screen. At which point, I can either turn off the television, or breathe my way back to a mindful awareness that “in this moment, everything’s all right.” Some day, brain willing, I might even be able to do both!

How to Beautify Your Disorganized Brain

In my early thirties I took a job as a psychology intern at a private residential treatment center for emotionally disturbed adolescents. Many of the residents came to that center having been physically, emotionally and sexually abused as young kids. As a result they had to be removed from their upper middle class home environments.

The center was located on an abandoned farm up in northwestern Connecticut – a bucolic paradise, replete with old barns converted into cozy bunkhouses and comfortable work and meeting spaces, with acres of gardens and lovely hiking trails woven through the evergreen forests.

It was ironic for me to be hired there – only the week before I’d been a resident in a not-so-similar place in downtown New Haven. I had voluntarily committed myself to this free, urban mental hospital in the wake of an “extreme grief reaction” – a three-decade backlog of ungrieved losses finally claiming their due expression.

Who’s in Charge Here?

Two things have stayed with me from that internship at The Country Place: first, there was very little difference that I could discern between the patients and the staff. And in fact, as I later learned, when patients got better, many elected to become staff. The second thing that has stayed with me: The beauty of the place itself seemed to work an active, healing magic. In less than a year, my brain became completely reorganized and my soul fully restored such that I could resume pursuing the graduate degree I had unexpectedly interrupted by taking my own psychiatric time out.

From that experience I’ve come to think it’s not an accident that monasteries, convents and spiritual retreat centers are beautiful and orderly environments – as within, so without. One of the clearest “tells” that a resident was getting better at The Country Place, was the point when they would begin to automatically put their living space in good order – making their bed each morning, picking dirty clothes up off the floor, organizing their desks.

Ever since that restorative stint in the country, I have been continually drawn to inspiring environments, places that are nourishing for the soul, and not by accident, I don’t think.  I spent two years attending classes to earn a master’s degree here, and I spent ten years as part of a team keeping the grounds of this think tank on the hill overlooking Silicon Valley environmentally inspiring. I seem to be irredeemably drawn to create and spend time with beautiful environs.

Environmental Entrainment

Environment, it turns out has tremendous impact on everything living. Our genes and every cell in our body, especially our brain cells, have been designed to creatively adapt to changing environmental conditions. Here’s what MacArthur fellow and Stanford neurobiologist, Robert Sapolsky, in his book Monkeyluv, has to say about the importance of environment:

… it is at least as valid to think “genes can be convenient tools used by environmental factors to influence behavior,” … and “evolution is mostly about natural selection for different genetic sensitivities and responses to environmental influences.”

A Tale of Two Neurons

My interpretation of what Sapolsky is saying is that the safer and more beautiful the environment we spend our lives in, the greater the potential for optimal genetic, neural and cellular organization, especially during our early formative years – not to mention, improved health, as this study suggests. We can’t consider our own or our children’s welfare without simultaneously consciously considering the environment that surrounds all of us.

It is not surprising to me in the least that neuroscientists have discovered that environments, particularly natural ones, positively impact neural development and integration, especially those of us most vulnerable to disorganization. Even watching the Ken Burns’ PBS special, The National Parks has the power to positively affect me in body, brain, mind and spirit – it inspires me and makes me want to immediately get out into the wild.

The point of this piece is that beauty and order are something that children need to be regularly exposed to. And they need to have the importance of both gently taught to them and modeled on an ongoing basis. They aren’t born with full-blown capacities for appreciating beauty and order. And if you’re anything like me, you can teach and model  -  much like charity and self-compassion – that there’s no better place to begin beautifying brain, heart, mind and body than … right at home.