The Meriwether Lewis of the Mind

Speech Just Wants to Be Free

I have friends, of course, who do not love gossip or gossipers. They don’t think there’s any such thing as “Intelligent Gossip,” a phrase coined by Nobel Laureate, Daniel Kahneman. He thinks gossip works to improve our ability to understand errors of judgment and choice, first in others and then eventually in ourselves. But hey, what does Kahneman – considered (with Amos Tversky) one half of the dynamic duo known as “the Lewis and Clark of the Mind” – know?

Those gossip-disdainers would most often be my Christian and Buddhist friends who believe in things like the guidelines of Right Speech. Right Speech admonishes against gossip. Dedicated formal practice only allows for speaking on ten topics: discussions about modesty, contentment, seclusion, non-entanglement, arousing persistence, virtue, concentration, discernment, on release from suffering, and about the knowledge and vision of release from suffering. Truthfully, that feels a little constricting to me. I’d rather be offered ways of skillfully relating to lay people in everyday life who do gossip, who enjoy it and who use it as a tool for learning (or not). Not feeling comfortable with gossipers, it becomes easy for me to begin unconsciously seeing such people as “less than.” People with whom I shouldn’t be spending valuable time. People my mother warned me about: “Those people.”

Gossipers of the World, Unite!

If he was still around, I bet Buddha would have LOVED gossipers. Why? Because Buddha was deeply awake to and loved reality. And one reality in the world is that there are people who gossip. Always have been and always will be. Buddha would have had no choice but to love them. Anything else would have shown up as dualistic separation. And Buddha wasn’t much into that.

As far as Right Speech goes, Buddha offered that up as one of eight practices any of us might want to try on in order to reduce or eliminate suffering in our own lives. He didn’t offer up the practice of Right Speech as a “should” that every gossiper in the world needs to begin practicing so that I can feel comfortable spending time with them. Rather, he offered it up to me as something to consider practicing for my own benefit. Should I so choose.

Forgiving Us Our Trespasses

Buddha also didn’t say that Right Speech means we should never talk about other people when they aren’t present, either. Ben Wong and Jock McKeen drove home the complexity of this lesson quite memorably for me one day in graduate school when they broke me and my classmates into four groups. Each group was then instructed to gossip about someone in another group. Afterwards, a few courageous souls elected to speak their gossip aloud so the person gossiped about could hear it. I stood up and spoke about how William had “confessed” to me about experiencing incestuous feelings towards his daughter. As soon as the words left my mouth, I could feel the embarrassment, shame and pain of betrayal flood my nervous system. William was at little risk for actually incesting his daughter, and in fact, erotic feelings in fathers towards children occur commonly. Healthy fathers like William, undeniably know what line not to cross.

Fortunately, William forgave me for my demonstration of non-intelligent gossip. By that process I did learn how we might use gossip intelligently, as a gauge – discerning how what I say about other people makes me feel in my own body. If we’re speaking about others intelligently, then the chance is pretty high that we will feel perfectly fine in our body. Or at least okay. Parents or teachers talking about children and their development, or therapists talking about a client’s lack of healing progress with a supervisor are some ready examples that come to mind. Angry venting in the presence of a trusted friend about a third person is also an example of Right Speech in my view. Why? Because it can work to lower retained levels of stress chemicals like adrenaline and cortisol. It might also work to catalyze and discharge buried neurological “dissociation capsules.”

But if I’m only talking about others in disparaging or demeaning ways for the sake of idle chatter, talking in ways that might feel shameful were the people actually present, then odds are pretty good that I’ll be feeling pretty poopy in my body. Not to mention that I might very likely be flooding instead of discharging adrenaline and cortisol, and impoverishing important nerve cells in my heart and brain in the process. We actually can trust our body’s response to gossip to guide us, I think. Provided we’re using our brain and body’s inherent intelligence to help us pay undivided attention up close and personal-like.

The first incident occurred in my early thirties, shortly after I discovered the woman I was in a long term committed relationship with in bed with another man. I’ve written here about that painful episode and the learning and healing I ultimately took away from it. Shortly after that discovery, not unexpectedly, Darika and I got into a seriously heated argument in my front yard. Emotional highjacking literally disconnects many of the brain’s logic circuits and so the argument went on without much resolution for too long a time. Finally, Darika jumped angrily into her little beater Subaru to get away from me and go back home. Then suddenly she stomped on the gas pedal and pointed the car deliberately in my direction, attempting to run me over. I barely managed to leap out of the way. I immediately jumped up, ran over to the car, grabbed the door in a rage-fit and literally ripped it off the hinges. With the door held high over my head, I made a mad dash for the creek that ran alongside my house and hurled it as far as I could out into the water. Tossing that car door away served as an effective energy discharge and I was then able to disengage from Darika without any further discussion or damage. One thing I discovered was that having someone who once loved you profoundly, first murder your soul, and then attempt to murder your body can be tough to stay emotionally centered around.

Trouble in Paradise

The second incident happened several years later on my honeymoon in the Caribbean. My new wife and I had just arrived after a large stressful wedding and something she said or did – I don’t remember what – touched a hot button over dinner. The anger continued to build throughout the meal and by the time we got back to our cabana, I had reached the boiling point. I walked into the bedroom and she followed after I explicitly asked her not to. I needed her to give me some space and leave me be for awhile. In a flash I erupted, picked up the queen size mattress and literally hurled it at the doorway where she had been standing only moments before.

The anger in the first incident is pretty self-explanatory. When someone tries to kill you, they highjack your limbic system. It reactively acts as if the only two options are kill or be killed. We were both fortunate that I was fast on my feet, and that I didn’t do more than destroy Darika’s car door.

The Roots of Violence

The second incident is more complicated and illustrates that you can’t simply talk or think your way out of some traumatic experiences.

The roots of the mattress-tossing incident actually unfolded several days earlier at the wedding. When the band started up after the meal had been served, I reluctantly stepped out onto the dance floor. First I danced with my new bride. Then I danced with her mother. Then my own mother stepped onto the floor. I had not wanted my mother even to attend the wedding. The reasons were many, but the main one was that there would be an open bar. Her history with alcoholism would be seriously put to the test with no one to insure that she didn’t take advantage. But I finally gave in to pressure from my wife’s family.

The minute she drew near me on the dance floor, I could smell that she had indeed visited the open bar. Moments after we began dancing, with a large number of wedding guests watching the two of us on the dance floor, my mother pulled my head down and French kissed me. Needless to say, I was shocked, repulsed, embarrassed and disgusted. I immediately pushed her away and raced from the room. What I wanted to do in that moment was pick her up and, fueled by a wildly out-of-control rage, fling her full across the room. Instead, two days later, I displaced that rage and discharged it unwittingly in a cabana in the Caribbean. We are indeed, rarely upset for the reasons we think we are.

One key healing element in each of these incidents is the physical activity that operated to discharge the energy of anger. The car door tossing I was able to do in the moment. The mattress-tossing ended up being unfortunately displaced and delayed.  And it was decades later that I learned how the brain works, how memories become stored and how necessary non-harmful energy expression and the freeze discharge are for health and well-being. It was then that I came to understand exactly what my violent eruptions were truly about – an important lesson: once we meet the heart with compassionate understanding, we can begin to find our way back home.

I’ve already briefly written “the rest of the story” here. Suffice it to say that when the poo hit the loo, neither one of us had acquired any tools whatsoever to allow us to skillfully navigate safely through each other’s raging psychic storms, or to clean up the mess in the aftermath. All either of us could do was hit the Bail Trail. Decades later, hindsight shows up offering great compassion and understanding and reminds me that 30 years old is SO very young.

Darika and I made one fundamental mistake in our relationship – a mistake quantum physicists, neuroscientists and I call an Attribution Error of the Heart. The brain is first and foremost an association organ. Anything that happens in close sequence or proximity, the brain tends to make meaningful connections with – often an attribution error. The error with such meaning-making is that we attribute and assign false cause in ways that make us often believe things that are fundamentally not true, i.e. that the love energy we feel for our children or our partner originates from and is dependent upon them being in our life and keeping us well-supplied. Jill Bolte Taylor describes the brain’s subtle and very skillful ability with misattribution wonderfully in her book, My Stroke of Insight.

I Am Neuro-Anatomist, Hear Me Roar

Being a brain neuro-anatomist able to bear witness for eight years as her left hemisphere slowly came back online provided Jill (and us) with some really useful information. The experience of love’s energies residing primarily in a minimally traumatized right brain, instantly came to the fore once Jill’s left brain logic circuitry went offline. She sounds a lot like people sound after they return from an entheogen adventure or a Near-Death experience (They can rarely find adequate words. Which makes total sense, since it was the left brain’s word-generating capacity that worked to suppress the awareness of love’s ever-presence in the first place!). As Jill’s left brain circuitry began to return, it began to dominate and overshadow the energy experience we label “love” all over again. Except that Jill was now hip to Left Brain’s workings. She could no longer be fooled into making the attribution error that love lives anywhere else but inside and all around each of us. So, might our own work as parents and people be to experiment with and practice finding ways to get left brain to relax and quiet down and allow us entry into love’s always present right brain abode from time to time?

In order to get back in touch with the love energy that the left brain overshadows and dominates so powerfully, similar to Byron Katie, Jill realized we might be best served by closely investigating the untrue thoughts left brain thinks that unconsciously drive emotional upsets. Better might be to feel our way through what we think, especially when what we think by itself catalyzes great suffering. Not believing what we think which ends up making us feel bad, seems a necessary first step for avoiding attribution errors of the heart. Turning towards painful things that we would ordinarily turn away from and doing deep, compassionate inquiry into them, allows us to uncover love where it actually resides. Hint: it’s NOT in some other person, place or thing.

Loving Our Enemies

Leah Green, founder of The Compassionate Listening Project has observed that, “An enemy is someone whose story we haven’t fully heard.” I would tweak her observation just a wee bit: “An ‘other’ is someone whose story we haven’t fully heard” (Especially teenaged children?) And one reason we haven’t heard it is due most often to what Einstein recognized as our conditioned left brain being trained to view people as “something separate, a kind of optical delusion of consciousness,” an attribution error of the heart. This error quickly gets corrected in times of profound trauma, deep grief, experiences with entheogens, and often in the presence of young children.  Healthy, well-cared for children are born with and then naturally strengthen a compassionate heart. Their immature neurological development and undefended, innocent ways of being in the world naturally resonates with that remembered experience in our own lives. But few children escape childhood wholly unscathed. 

How to Get There From Here

Goethe realized that love does not dominate, grasp or demand; it cultivates. Love works to build the capacity for being loving. It cultivates patience, works to quell fear, and operates in the service of compassion and kindness. Love works by practicing doing small things with great love, as Mother Theresa instructed. It is in such doing and in such being that the barriers to the direct experience of love’s right brain energy often begins to emerge;  that “metaphysical gravity” becomes thinner and thinner, eventually dissolving many of our dozen defense mechanisms, leaving us raw, vulnerable and wide open to love’s mystery.

I have sat for hundreds of hours, simply present with people in the midst of agonizing grief, their customary, conditioned psychological defenses completely shredded. In doing so I am no longer surprised when suddenly the barriers to the subtle energies of love dissolve and I find myself immersed all over again in their warm and tender glow. At those times the brain makes no attribution error. The heart takes over and is simply and fully available to love’s ever-present reality. At such times I find myself blessed to be sitting in state of grace.

How to Child Abuse a 40 Year Old Mother

by Jenny A.

In the 1970’s, sexual abuse was not something people talked about much. Perhaps the subject occasionally crossed my parents’ minds, but not enough for them to stop me from playing at the house of an old man who lived down the street. I suppose my parents thought of him as a harmless old grandfather. He turned out to be a pedophile. My play at his house resulted in me repeatedly being naked, scared and ashamed while he did whatever he wanted with me. I carried the secret of his abuse for decades. This account is the first time I have shared it in a public forum.

The abuse was confusing. My body reacted to his touch, and I also enjoyed the attention, even though somewhere in my little girl heart I knew what was happening was gruesomely wrong. It was also painful at times. Children’s orifices are not meant to accommodate an adult penis. The abuse turned me into a very sexual little girl, and it was not too long before other predators easily recognized the victim in me. Looking back I feel I had a secret sign on my forehead: “molest me.” My story is both similar to and different from Jamie’s Story at the National Child Traumatic Stress Network.

As the years went by I ended up in situations where a doctor, a teacher, a boss, and a handful of men I dated all abused me. I had never learned how to name or heal the original wounds, so I had few tools for avoiding further situations that ended up being traumatic.  Many women who suffer sexual abuse become afflicted with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) without realizing it (I think labels are useless at best and harmful at worst). While this was never my diagnosis, still one of the biggest insults resulted in me having no voice. I had absolutely no idea how to say “No!” Speechless terror does that to children’s voices. I often froze when men put their hands on me. I was completely submissive, my body ready to accommodate their needs. Chronologically, I was 20, 30, 40, but emotionally, psychologically and sexually, I was still six years old. It was not until my daughter turned the age I was when the abuse started, that I mustered the courage to face my past head-on and begin the brutally arduous task of trying to heal. I looked at programs like Model Mugging and the Woman’s Justice Center, but they didn’t fully resonate with me. I mostly did it on my own, for my daughter and for my own inner little girl desperate to be reclaimed and honored.

But the old man down the street wasn’t the only person to exploit me. My father was inappropriate with me first.

Answering the Big Brain Question “NO!”

How does a child make sense of the love that naturally emerges for her father when the things he’s doing are profoundly damaging to her brain, body and soul? And how does she NOT overlay that confusion and disorganization on to every significant relationship with men ever after? How does she skillfully recreate the trauma, not in ways that simply reenact the original wounding, but actually does lead to some kind of healing integration? How does she get back to Square One developmentally speaking? Back, at age 40, to being the innocent child she once was before she was unconsciously betrayed and unskillfully exploited? How does she finally become Incest-Triumphant?

I have had a really hard time trying to figure out how to love my dad and still honor myself in the wake of what he did. Loving fathers don’t violate, betray and abuse their daughters. If I love him and have him in my life, I feel like I am not honoring myself. But, he is my dad and love for our parents is hardwired into us. When we are young we know instinctively that we cannot survive without our parents, so we cling to even the most abusive ones. It’s very confusing. It took an abusive marriage and a handful of later exploitive relationships, and a painful withdrawal from a benzodiazepine tranquilizer given to me to help me cope with my past, to be able to honestly say ”NO MORE ABUSE!! I had to get help to initially stand on my own two feet and learn to take care of myself in every way. Only then was I ready to think about engaging with a man again. Otherwise, I was going to attract yet another perpetrator into my life and once again be sitting in the fire. 

Honoring Healing Wanting to Happen

For me, getting back to square one meant having the courage to accept that I am a sexually abused woman. I’ve had to have the courage to feel the old terror and shame, and allow it to surface and discharge from my body. That means some days I’ve ended up crying and shaking. I’ve had to allow the rage to bubble up. I’ve had to find a healthy outlet for it. Some days I dig holes in my garden and fill them back up again, and dig them up again the next day. I have to be kind and compassionate with myself always, and embrace the little girl inside of me who was so badly dishonored. I have to honor her today, in the here and now. I am still reclaiming parts of myself as I go, but at least now I feel far more real and authentic than I ever have before. And I realize that while my father (and mother, who was complicit in the abuse, but that is another blog entry!) didn’t really love me, I am a good person. I have something precious to share with others: my reclaimed heart and soul. Each and every day, I am more and more at peace with myself and the real suffering in the world.

I was looking directly into her eyes the very instant her brain changed her excited smile into a look of shock and horror. And then she began to cry inconsolably: the father she loved and trusted had just betrayed that trust by throwing away the very thing she could count on to calm her down during stressful times. Needless to say, I felt absolutely horrified. In my heart I knew that I’d unwittingly perpetrated a “soft trauma.” She cried as we started home, and with no pacifier to console her, she quickly became exhausted and fell unconscious asleep.

I learned a number of important lessons from that seemingly small incident. One is, that no matter how much we might love and care for the people in our lives, at some time or another our own limited capacities will have us do things that trigger pain and suffering for them. That is a simple relationship reality. And some things we do may seem unforgivable, but that’s a limiting, self-centered perspective; it’s what happens after such events that matters most. Here is a list of a few things to consider in attempting to repair betrayals of trust:

1. A genuine desire to understand exactly what one did to cause or trigger the pain must emerge. Without such a desire, the repair process is difficult to begin. How do I uncover such a desire if I find it lacking in myself? If I can’t or don’t know how, it’s probably going to require me to get in touch with my hurt and anger, my own buried fears and needs, and find constructive ways to surface and express them first. Repair takes courage because the brain is naturally biased towards pleasure and away from pain. Aversion or avoidance strategies abound. Nobody willingly or joyfully turns towards “growth opportunities,” since they almost always involve pain. As grief specialist Alan Wolfelt reminds us, “You have to feel it to heal it.” Faced with that reality, many of us frequently decide it’s preferable to go unconscious, don one of the Dirty Dozen Psychological Defenses or self-medicate in one form or another. Defense is the first act of war, and on either side of the borders of betrayal it’s easy to lose strength of heart.

2. Some betrayals are so complex and painful and deeply rooted that repair may be unimaginable. I’m thinking here about what happens to women in times of war; women and children are always the “civilian casualties” of war. They are left with the traumatic ravages to some- how find a way to live with (soft trauma expert, David Bercelli is someone such women and children have found an ally in). But wars don’t only happen in foreign countries. And as Hillary Adams’s video from several weeks ago shows, they are happening inside thousands and thousands of homes here in America right now. Often with nary a word ever spoken before or after. The Shadow lives mostly in silence in America.

3. Cultivate the power of true contrition. In order for us to take the first steps toward repair, we want to know that a person has learned and changed as a result of their unskillful action. Contrition is not something someone can simply declare and then have everything be all right. It’s something that has to authentically emerge from the heart and the bones. And neurological change needs to take place in the brain as well.

4. Apply truly restorative justice. Betrayals cast all parties out of heaven. Recall Amanda’s shock and stress and my pained and contracted heart. When possible restorative justice is often best discerned and served up by the aggrieved for the benefit of all. Restorative justice can often result from constructive counsel-ing that insures the decisions we make do not continue the cycle of harm to others or to ourselves.

5. Work to restore the capacity for self-trust. It’s difficult to think of myself as someone who betrays others. Coming face to face with the reality of that experience can shake one’s confidence. Committing to and getting support for compassionate truth-telling and commitment to change can often help restore self-trust.

6. Recognize that true forgiveness is most often an organic, emergent process; if we could all just “get over it” and forgive our trespassers and betrayers, who among us wouldn’t? The cost in not doing so is simply too great. The evidence suggests that emotionally charged traumatic memories, held in the brain and body as “trauma cysts” deplete our life force. Carolyn Myss recognizes that failing to do the work necessary for forgiveness to emerge, results in a kind of energy denseness that ultimately leads to illness. Trauma cysts, wherever they may take up residence in us, need opening, draining, discharge, and reconnection back up to vital living tissue. Once that happens and the emotional charge is fully removed, often all that remains is simply a factual account of what happened. Without the emotional charge amping the memory, often forgiveness and compassion for self and others is simply what gets freed up to emerge from the depths of our all too human heart.

7. Finally, I’d like to offer up a cautious meta-perspective from Byron Katie who explains what happens when the time is right and we refuse to allow the crazy-suffering stories our brain makes up to run Central Command and then cannily seduce us into believing them: “Forgiveness is discovering that what you thought happened didn’t – that there was never anything to forgive. What seemed terrible changes once you’ve (deeply) questioned it. There is nothing terrible except our unquestioned thoughts about what we see. So whenever you suffer, inquire, look at the thoughts you’re thinking, and set yourself free. Be a child. Know nothing. Take your ignorance all the way to your freedom.”

>>>Donation Link<<<

But something else sometimes happened at the end of the month in our New Haven housing project (New Haven is NOT one of America’s 20 most generous cities, BTW). I can clearly recall times when Dorothy Winfrey or Arlene Haggerty would show up on our doorstep at the end of the month with an extra casserole or a hot pot of stew. We never asked for anything from the neighbors and they never asked for anything in return. We were all on intimate terms with suffering and they were simply answering the call of their own rich, generous hearts. Suffering knows suffering.

Altruism Begins at Home

Children born healthy to caring, attentive parents almost universally begin developing a generous heart. It’s viable and measurable by 15 months (I would bet it begins in utero, but we haven’t developed ways to measure and test that theory yet). But something happens between then and the time children grow up to be bankers and captains of industry and contract one of the six billionaire’s diseases. Steve Jobs contracted one. I won’t go so far as to say that dismantling much of Apple’s charitable giving when he resumed full command in 2000 played a role in his recent death. But that kind of response seems more than a little disconnected from the heart.

Zell Kravinsky, on the other hand, was the opposite of disconnected. A successful real estate developer, Zell gave away his entire 45 million dollar real estate fortune to charity. Because that giving felt so good to Zell’s heart, brain, mind and body, he began looking for other ways he could express the freedom of a generous heart. He challenged his own fearful thinking, did the requisite research and discovered just how good giving really is for us. He also discovered that he, and all of us, have an extra kidney that we don’t really need – when they fail, kidneys always fail in pairs – and one is all any of us needs to adequately perform its necessary exocrine function. An evolutionary design flaw? At any rate, Zell anonymously donated a kidney to a needy donor. After he donated his first kidney, Zell’s brain apparently began generating so many endorphins and so much dopamine and oxytocin that he started making preparations to donate his second kidney, willing to go on dialysis for the rest of his life!

Pathological Altruism

Not all giving is good giving, of course. I know that much of mine, like Bill Gates’s, has mixed motivations. For one thing, the research is unequivocal: giving is good for the brain. I almost always get something back from giving. But I also have a bias that often gets in my way: me. Me and my do-good heart-brain bent on relieving suffering in the world. Too much ego sometimes in thinking I know what’s best for people, and if they would only take my advice and my gifts, we would all be so much better off. That’s pretty unskillful, as I’ve had more than a few recent opportunities to learn. But it’s a challenge worth taking up and making mistakes with, especially when I stop denying that I (and probably you as well) am living better than 95% of the rest of the world. (Half of America’s 1% reputedly don’t even realize they are in that demographic! How out of touch with the rest of the world is that?).

Nevertheless, as this recent NY Times article suggests, some kinds of giving can border on the pathological. Dr. Barbara Oakley, a professor at Oakland University in Michigan offers one possibility of selflessness gone awry when she identifies altruists who steadfastly believe: “I know how to do the right thing, and when I decide to do the right thing it can never be called pathological.” A more self-aware perspective probably works to take a bit more of the “I” out of altruism.

Giving Guidelines

Here’s a reasonable guideline for a charitable heart, I think: give people what they ask for and maybe a little more. Maybe. Most people, on some level, know what they need and what they can handle. They will tell you if you ask them and you make it safe for them to tell you. And often it’s not anywhere near what a truly generous heart is often more than ready to offer. Sad, but often true. Frequently what people need – especially the people closest to us – is something very inexpensive and plentiful indeed: our fullest, deepest, simplemost presence.

As for Zell Kravinsky, friends and family provided that presence and helped him correct the radical right brain imbalance that a generous heart can often produce. He elected not to donate a second kidney and go on dialysis. Instead he went back into real estate and now gives half of everything he earns to charity. Before enlightenment, there’s buying and selling real estate and donating kidneys. After enlightenment, there’s buying and selling real estate. Oh, and he also occasionally operates outside the law by brokering cash deals between kidney sellers and kidney buyers. My kinda road-less-traveled-by guy.

>>>Donation Link<<<

One of my early romantic explorations involved a protracted “courting period” with a woman that involved great chemistry. Alana and I shared a number of mutual social and spiritual interests and in general just enjoyed hanging out together. Over time the barriers to the experience of love’s energies began to simultaneously intensify and dissolve and we opened discussions about the possibility of becoming romantic lovers. When we agreed we would, I rented a secluded cabin in the Adirondacks, and with the requisite candles, incense and music, we consummated the relationship. At one seminal moment during that first time together, I looked down at Alana and was shocked and horrified to discover the face of an eight year old child staring back at me. Eight was the age when Alana’s father began sexually molesting her. And now, as the result of an unexpected, regressive, energetic facial morphing process orchestrated by her brain and body, it suddenly felt like I too, had just committed a sexual violation. From that moment forward, Alana’s incest trauma hung like the Grim Reaper over our relationship. It wasn’t too long afterwards until her pain – repeatedly triggered and never resolved – became too much for either of us to bear. Finally, one day the Relationship Reaper thankfully came to collect each of us and put us out of our mutual misery.

Deny Anything Damaging Happened

In spite of current TV’s interest in exploiting the cultural taboo, incest is still prohibited in every culture on the planet for a range of reasons. Prohibiting it is part of what makes us human (the reverse may also be true, especially when we’re able to successfully turn our wounds into our gifts). While I’m not an expert, it seems reasonable that sexual abuse damages the vulnerable neural circuitry of young children in complex ways, and every perpetration is different. I also suspect it definitely disrupts the emerging Cortisol Awakening Response.

Some women I’ve talked with about the experience have told me that their greatest pain was not the incest itself, but that they had absolutely no one they could tell the full truth to about what happened. And not that they hated it … but that they loved it! The experience afforded a glimpse of heaven. And every sexual experience afterwards provided glimpse after glimpse. They weren’t sex-obsessed, though; they had become God-obsessed. Sex had simply become a vehicle to know God. At least for a while. Until the insistent need for living life on earth began to show up.

Other women recognized that for them, the day the abuse began was the “day the music died.” And still other women, especially when violence was involved, recognized that their ability to easily get emotionally hijacked, under even minimal stress, was directly tied to the early abuse. Harvard psychiatrist Judith Herman remarks in her book Father-Daughter Incest, “incest becomes like a small, nasty pet that you have for many, many years.” The brain had become like the one depicted on the right: severely compromised in its ability to process energy and information, particularly under stress.

Sexual abuse of young children is sadly one of the most under-reported of all crimes. In addition to the Cortisol Awakening Response, it also appears to damage children’s GABA supply system (essential for homeostasis) and exposes their hearts, brains, minds and bodies to stress loads their development is rarely equipped to handle. Because abuse never happens in a social vacuum, at the very least abuse delays and distorts emotional and social development. And without skillful, effective intervention – intervention that restores psychological and somatic functioning to high levels – that early overload can echo and reverberate across the canyons of our lives forever.

Make Frequent Attribution Errors of the Heart

Children easily make what I call “attribution errors of the heart.” The brain is first and foremost an association organ. Anything that happens in close sequence or proximity, the brain tends to make meaningful connections with. The problem with such meaning-making is that more often than not we make errors in attribution and assign false cause. Children’s immature neurological development makes them particularly susceptible to this error. Healthy, well-cared for children are born with and then naturally strengthen a compassionate heart. So, if something bad happens, they often automatically feel responsible. The problem becomes exacerbated by the fact that intense experiences like sexual abuse generate all kinds of associations children’s immature neurology is simply not equipped to handle. Early abuse can often result in extreme disorganization in thinking, sometimes showing up in later life as fugue states, spacing out, hypo- (depression) or hyper-arousal, physical illness along with recurrent frequent emotional reactivity triggered in oneself and by resonance in others.

Give in to the Impulse to Isolate

Over many years of hearing stories from women about their experiences of abuse, one theme I’ve heard over and over is the wish to go live in a cave or a monastery or go and live as a hermit in the woods. The need to isolate and insulate and set up strong protective boundaries shows up often among abused men and women. But trauma-imposed isolation is not solitude. That’s often the explanatory fiction we tell ourselves to make sense of why we’re alone. One challenge with the wish to isolate is: Wherever You Go, There Your Neurology Goes, Too. And often what the protective barriers end up doing is locking us alone inside with our demons (or our ecstatic divinity?). One result: many older women in America living alone and out of touch.

In an interview with Shane Bauer, one of the young American hostages released from Iran, he said that the most unbearable aspect of his imprisonment was the time he was forced to spend in isolation. Self-imposed isolation for abused adults is really trauma-imposed isolation. The brain is a social organ. Without the deep stimulation of other authentic hearts, brains, minds and bodies, like plants untended in a garden, neurons begin to wither and die. Being locked alone, even in the Garden of Eden, can end up doing profound damage.

Go Searching for Dr. Good Dad

A transcendent impulse lives in all of us that is constantly attempting to move us in the direction of health, harmony and connection. Like plants orienting towards the sun, that impulse can draw us to seemingly compassionate, loving, replacement father figures (and often mother figures as well). It’s often kind of like attempting a neurological do-over. One main challenge with that approach and perspective is that in order for healing to happen, the trauma will, if not unskillfully reenacted in physical reality, almost certainly become reenacted emotionally. We have to feel it to heal it. Good Dad is destined, often through the mechanisms of transference and projection, to be neurologically morphed into Bad Dad. The left brain frequently overlays the past onto the present, often creating a kind of reality distortion field. Without help discerning what’s real, what’s scary, what’s safe, and what’s an overlay from our personal traumatic past, perceiving accurately becomes an almost impossible task. And where once we might have felt safety, joy and the possibility of healing, Good Dad’s very presence now begins to stir up great fear and anxiety. This dynamic often results in many relationship ruptures, even between people of the same age and the same level of development. Sadly, repair can become difficult to sort through. But not impossible. Healing continually yearns to happen.

Avoid Grieving the Losses

The losses involved with childhood sexual abuse are considerable. An organic, timely unfolding childhood is lost. Innocence is lost. Trust is lost. Safety is lost. Security is lost. Peace of mind is lost. Sisters are lost. Dad is lost (or possibly uncle-brother-neighbor) and often mom as well. Neural real estate is lost. Sacred sanctity of self is lost. Voice is lost. Ungrieved, these losses inevitably begin to weigh on us with increasing gravity. Grieving cannot be avoided forever. Suffering knows suffering. One way to live solidly grounded in the world and ultimately know deep, sustainable joy – to begin to regain heaven on earth – is to inquire into and fully grieve our losses.

Discount The Healing Power of the Trauma Narrative

It helps to express the story of the abuse in words, pictures and voice. Voice is often murdered by sexual abuse: secrets must be kept, a code of silence must prevail, no one is ever to know “our special secret.” Taking The Golden Rule of Social Neuroscience into account, one potentially promising way to approach this area of healing might be to become involved with a local chapter of RAINN. Important will be to resonate strongly with one or two experienced people in such a group. Trusting them will hopefully provide help when the fragmented, crazy thoughts begin distorting reality.

And while expressing the trauma narrative might be necessary for healing, it is often not enough. The body holds memories as well, and they too, need for full expression. For that reason, one possibility to consider might be getting involved with an organization like Peace Over Violence where self-defense is taught in ways that peacefully result in triumphant, healing resolution. Equally good might be to take charge of our own healing and use Craig’s List or Drew’s List to organize incest empowerment groups co-led or co-facilitated by people who have managed to find their own healing paths. As with any healing journey, skillful guides can make all the difference. Each time we pick up a thread and give voice to the pain of our losses or any other truth in our experience in the presence of understanding, compassionate fellow travelers, some bit of healing happens. However much our brains and hearts manage to increase their capacity to process energy and information, depicted in the scan on the left, the world inevitably begins to become a kinder, safer place.

1. Learn to skillfully manage stress. Steve was pretty driven, which seems to have resulted in him being unskillful in managing his stress levels. By his own admission, the stress of being a father and family man and simultan- eously the CEO of both Pixar Studios and Apple Computer seems to have contributed to the illness that ultimately killed him. He was probably right. Just driving in traffic from Cupertino to Emeryville every week would have done me in.

Three parts to skillful stress management are: A. first, recognize that stress absolutely needs to be managed; B. next, learn your own distinctive signals that indicate when eustress (good stress) has crossed over into distress; and then C. develop personal practices to effectively manage that crossover. Frequently the crossover happens when we believe a thought that isn’t true. Which is often much that we believe about the past and frequently imagine disastrously about the future.

2. Don’t have friends and family get to know you by having some acquaintance write your biography; have your family write it together with you … one day at a time. This is just SO obviously insane I can’t believe it wasn’t apparent to everyone, especially Walter Isaacson! If Steve was to ask his kids or wife which they’d prefer: to have a book about him and a new iPhone 4S around for the next 30 years, or him alive in the flesh, I would hope Steve alive would have been their preferred choice.

Steve would have additionally been well-served to realize that a biography will not ever make people know or understand anyone. Our hearts, brains, minds, bodies and souls make us all way too complex and dynamic for that. All people will ever know and understand from a biography is the story the writer chooses to tell, a partial and necessarily selective story at that.

3. Practice constructively channeling anger. There are numerous reported instances of Steve unskillfully displacing anger and deliberately hurting people who worked for him, as well as the people closest to him. He would commonly direct anger to wound people where they were most vulnerable. Steve needed to learn to continually challenge the illusion of separation: what harms others, harms oneself even more. He needed to stop the rationalizing and hypocrisy: “This is just the necessary truth-teller I am.” He was constantly challenging his engineers to exceed themselves. What made him exempt from growing into kindness? I suspect the failure to learn that lesson contributed in some way to his life ending early – when we hurt other people, considerable anecdotal evidence suggests it profoundly adversely affects our own neurophysiology.

4. Preferential treatment of sons is less than optimal for daughter’s brain development. As well as for son’s. As social worker, Cathy Jo Cress points out, many kids inherently grok the unfairness of such treatment. But they often feel stuck and powerless to say or do anything about changing it. Feeling stuck and powerless is probably not how most of us would ideally choose to raise our kids.

Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī

5. Even integration has a shadow side. Just as Steve yearned for technological integration, the human brain, too, yearns for integration as well. Integrated systems, after all, simply work better. UCLA neuro psychiatrist Dan Siegel often speaks eloquently and forcefully about the need for, and the power of an integrated brain. But just as the mystical poet Rumi observed there are a 1000 ways to kneel and kiss the ground, my guess is there are many more ways to integrate the brain, and some of them, like stringent demands and unexamined assumptions, will often produce disintegration, just the opposite of what’s needed. To paraphrase Jimmy Buffet (who probably borrowed from someone else), “We end up becoming the people our parents warned us about.”

6. Recognize the need for balance. Steve somehow missed this central tenet of Buddhism, a passionate pursuit of his. They don’t call it the Middle Path for nothing. Anytime we’re shooting for something “insanely great,” we may wish to look a bit more closely at the insane piece. Also, the ego piece. When the passionate pursuit of excellence morphs into the compulsive drive for perfection, we’ve crossed an important line. The pursuit of perfection is as bad for CEOs as research shows it is for parents. Even Buddha was satisfied with excellence, with becoming a “good enough” Buddhist.

7. Have the courage to live a life threaded with regret. Although it isn’t directly expressed by Steve at any time in Isaacson’s account, what I came away with was a sense that at the end of his life Steve had many regrets. As Kathryn Schulz details in this recent TED talk, allowing ourselves to deeply feel our regrets leads ironically to a life filled with few of them.

8. To constantly work to distort reality is to fail to love reality. Rather than pander to people’s addiction to toys and other technologies that will eventually end up in a landfill somewhere, Steve would have been better served substituting his “I-Know Mind” for “Don’t-Know Mind.” That might have allowed him to see that technology most often is a poor substitute for authentic human connection as this recent research suggests. 

9. Don’t passionately pursue technological excellence in order to solve the wrong problem. One central problem Steve seemed to be continually trying to solve, that many technology companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google, are still trying to solve, is what NY Times columnist David Brooks terms the world-wide oxytocin shortage. Oxytocin is the bonding hormone. It is essential in order for people to feel great affection and affinity for one another. From the telephone, to radio, to television, to computer-mediated-communication, to Skype video, technology keeps trying, but has so far failed to sufficiently address the oxytocin shortage. I think it might actually require human beings hanging out in person helping other human beings, heart to heart and face to face.

So, here’s a beginning list of guidelines. Some of them have been “reversed engineered” from Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues and her recent writing (Over It) in response to the sex abuse scandals flooding the national news.  Feel free to add guidelines of your own (Please Note: This post is in no way intended to be male-bashing; just the opposite, in fact).

1. Men who love and respect their penis, manage their penis. It’s the responsibility of the penis-owner to learn and practice what is and isn’t skillful management. Anything that leads directly or indirectly to suffering, even decades down the road, damages a penis-owner’s brain.
2. Every action the penis takes or fails to take, the brain records. Each action or deliberate non-action adds positively to identity, health and well-being or else subtracts from it.
3. Skillful penis management is sexy and liberating. If a man or woman knows you practice skillful penis management, they don’t need to flood their systems with a torrent of self-protective, anxiety-generated neurotoxins. Skillful penis management is good for the brain.
4. A penis never, ever goes where it isn’t morally and ethically invited and warmly welcome, ever. Period. Unless you want to seriously damage your brain, powerfully compromise your immune system, be plagued by recurrent nightmares, and descend into a life threaded with pain and suffering.
5. The damage that a poorly managed penis can do is unfortunately rarely later traced back to the source. Similar to how Judge William Adams fails to consider there may be a connection between his daughter Hilary only being able to work minimum wage jobs and his beating her, it’s difficult for most people to see the direct connection between the rape of a 16 year old and her later inability to hold a job for an extended period, struggle in primary relationships, or have so much of her creativity fail to ever fully manifest in the world. The neural disorganization caused by physical and sexual assault can have widespread and lasting repercussions. Without skillful, healing community support, it can last a lifetime.
6. Penises need to remain intact. Some doctors, clergy and parents assume they know more than the intelligence that created the foreskin. Science is replete with subsequent discoveries that demonstrate this kind of thinking is the height of hubristic folly. We don’t circumcise dogs or horses. Why are baby boys so special? Some trauma specialists draw a direct line between foreskin removal – trauma perpetrated upon a very delicate neural network – and the modern propensity for war. Oh, and by the way, the 12 known functions of foreskin play a critical role for emotional sexual functioning (A telling research study, I think, might be to compare circumcision numbers among rapists with age-matched cohorts in the general population. My hypothesis would be that more rapists are circumcised than not).
7. It’s a good idea to both genuinely feel and authentically express gratitude, wonderment, reverence and appreciation for those places when and where a penis is morally and ethically invited and warmly welcome. Always. 
8. Penises are never to be erotically exposed to children of any chronological or emotional age. Those who might advocate for a nudist lifestyles, free and open sexuality, or who suggest that constant exposure normalizes and takes the mystery off the sexual organs frequently fail to consider what might be going on in children themselves, especially as they are required to become an integrated member of the larger culture. Penis mismanagment does not happen in a vacuum.
9. Never expose a penis to toxic environments. Little penises have big ears. And those ears are connected to the self-esteem centers in the brain. Being shamed, dismissed, embarrassed, or in any other way diminished is poor penis management.
10. Take your penis seriously and give your penis a stand-up name, one you can be proud of. Like Sterling or Knute or Ripken or Woody (Toy Story) or Canoodle. Vaginas have names; pets have names; plants have names. Names that are disparaging and derogatory frequently become prophetically self-fulfilling. Those are bad names. We can do better.
11. A penis is part of a whole human being that includes a brain and a heart. Penises are best deployed as an inseparable, integrated ally of that triumvirate. All for one and one for all.

I sometimes find myself having quite animated discussions with friends and colleagues about the brain and my assertion that simply knowing how it works helps make it work better. For example, knowing how stress – both chronic and acute – slows down and diminishes the brain’s processing capacity, often allows me to course-correct in midstream. I can begin noticing the kinds of people, places and things that tip good stress (eustress) in my life over to distress (allostatic load), and then make adjustments to return to the eustress side of the ledger. So, here below I’ve decided to make my case to the world for some of the benefits obtained from knowing how my brain works.

1.  The brain is an unimaginably complex, dynamic, ever-changing energy and information processing collection of matrices. Recognizing it as such makes it difficult to subscribe to the “Fixed Mindset” of human development. “That’s just how we are and always will be.” “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks,” etc. People can and do change, all across their lifespan. Since none of us escapes childhood unscathed, we have to change. When we’re placed in environments together with people who understand, support and expect great change, it makes growth, learning and healing much more likely. We begin to stop living down to our own or others’ expectations.

2. We can learn at a deep embodied level to take very little personally in our lives. Every brain periodically goes into spasmodic, trauma-linked disorganization, which often shows up in emotionally expressive ways: think anger, sadness, fear or confusion. While we may be the triggering catalyst for such spasms in others (or they for us), we are rarely the root cause (A Course in Miracles, Lesson 5: We are seldom upset for the reasons we think we are). And barring organic damage, we are rarely to blame or at fault. We can, however, assume responsibility for being a triggering catalyst and make any caring reparations that may be needed or wanted to help restore health and harmony.

3. We can practice deploying The Golden Rule of Social Neuroscience. Our brains operate essentially as both extremely complex wired and wireless networks. Much like wireless telephones, some brains carry 3G processing capacity, some carry 4, 5 and 10G processing capacity. . . at different times, under varying stress loads. All of us are smarter than any one of us and none of us is smart all the time. The Golden Rule of Social Neuroscience encourages us to locate and hang out with skillful, well-intentioned people of greater processing capacity than we might currently operate with. Doing so, often by simple proximity, will help expand our own network’s processing capacity. Note: In my experience people at the beginnings and endings of life seem to have highly amped up information processing capacities … if that’s the orientation and expectation we meet them with!

4. Knowing how the brain works means that we realize it doesn’t simply learn, but that unless thwarted, it is always looking to learn how to learn. The brain has one primary function, to keep us alive in every environment it finds itself. Loving learning and more importantly, knowing how and why and when to “unlearn” is critical to its and our success.

5. The brain is an associative organ. As Stanford neuroscientist Carla Schatz neatly summarized Hebb’s Rule, “Neurons that fire together, wire together.” Knowing this simple neural reality teaches us that it doesn’t take much for some innocent or offhand remark to set a single neuron firing in the center of a matrix retaining  traumatic memories. And that once one neuron holding a painful memory begins firing, the process of kindling can set the complete collection ablaze. The result: an emotional meltdown. Knowing both that and how this process works, however, frequently allows me to head a meltdown off at the pass, or make a much swifter recovery.

6. Many brain areas are plastic, meaning capable of great change. But that plasticity is competitive. It’s one of the reasons that people, places and things that initially excite us, lose their emotional draw down the road and we move on to the next new, new person, place or thing. Knowing this, we can begin to build circuits of new learning that can take plasticity into account. And rather than perhaps looking to change my exterior landscape, I can make a plan and begin remodeling my interior self-scape. It’s a much greener way to go.

7. The brain’s dopamine-based appetitive pleasure system fills us with hopeful anticipation regarding the future. Those parts of the brain are most active when we access the energies of love. (Similar areas are activated when someone ingests cocaine!). According to UC Berkeley neuroscientist Walter Freeman, love creates a generous state of mind (heart) and promotes new pathways. Tapping into the energy of love continually surrounding us turns out to be big brain changing medicine as this recent research underscores. Children born into healthy families know that love is the sea they constantly swim in from the get-go. As we grow out of childhood most of us forget this essential reality. Thus the spiritual directive to “become again as little children.”

8. We can wise up to the bully that is our left brain. Left to its own devices neurologist Bruce Miller at UCSF claims that the left brain is often at work trying to suppress the right, all the while advocating mightily for itself. Much of the brain is necessarily devoted to inhibiting free expression and energy processing (to counteract this tendency is one reason people drink or take drugs). Having more choice available to consciously decide what can and can’t be expressed, leads to a fuller, richer, more deeply creative life, as this recent RSA animation explains.

9. The cartography for neural integration has been laid out by brain educators like Bonnie Badenoch and Dan Siegel. While it often doesn’t look that way, there is clear evidence that the human race is on a positive transformational trajectory. We’ve had exemplars like Buddha, Christ and Mohammed show up powerfully demonstrating such an embodied reality. They were in the brain change business and knew it. They also knew that by first changing the brain we are ultimately led to a profound change of heart, mind, body and soul.

10. I’m continually being reminded (sometimes emphatically!) not to trust what I think. Or take what I think very seriously – given the frequent appearances  of things like brain biases and 15 styles of distorted thinking; but especially considering those things  my left brain thinks up that attempt to reinforce and solidify the illusion of separation. Just as the neurons in the brain work better connected up to each other, so do I work better in connection with other people in the world. Anything that shows up trying to convince me otherwise, like fear and anxiety and distrust, I have learned to be immediately suspicious of. And … I tie my camel.

11. Finally, the structures and processes found in the brain are replicated in various places throughout the universe. As such, they provide a great template for taking deliberate, creative, loving action in the world. It’s hard to go very wrong when we try to skillfully replicate one of the most extraordinary creations in the known universe – our working brain.