If you’re like me, some part of your life has been spent avoiding or turning away from things that make you nervous. For example, in my life a number of traumatic experiences have happened while I’ve been traveling. As a result, I tend to avoid travel, especially to foreign countries. I’ve taken only a single travel vacation in the 14 years I’ve lived here on Whidbey Island. It was to the Oregon coast, and my wife and I (mostly I) decided we’d prefer to come home early!
I’ve also avoided job interviews for much of my life. As an education consultant and an independent contractor, people usually reach out and initially contact me. Since my nervous system experiences most all evaluation as threat – job interviews are all about evaluation – I managed to orchestrate a reasonable workaround.
Unfortunately, this neurobiological vulnerability has caused me to miss out on a lot of experiences I might have had but didn’t. For example, I spent ten years semi-retired and underemployed working at a Stanford think tank. Every Fall MacArthur geniuses, Guggenheim fellows and Nobel Laureates would come and spend a sabbatical year. Many were warm and welcoming, and yet I never interpersonally interacted meaningfully with a single one of them.
Another example: my former wife’s family had a number of close friends who were successful Wall Street traders and hedge fund operaters. All I had to do was ask and any one of them would have been happy to have me come and shadow them as they made and lost fortunes in the financial markets. It could have be an eye-opening education. And while I wanted to do it, I never asked.
Abdication Is Not Integration
Integration means: the organization of constituent elements into a coordinated, harmonious whole. Where our brains and bodies are concerned, it refers to neural networks that are not richly connected being able to become enriched in their connectivity. We know there are 12 areas in the normal human brain (Rich Club Networks) that are richly populated and connected with brain cells. Energy and information easily flows within and between these networks (think Grand Central Station or major airline hubs).
Traumatic experiences, poverty, chornic stress, other adverse life events, even an imbalanced left-brain education (think STEM) can fragment and impoverish this connectivity in different parts of the brain. For example, trauma I experienced in junior high school significantly adversely impacted my speech and language centers, making it especially difficult to speak in front of groups. For many years I avoided that possibility completely, even when specifically requested to address such groups. Nevertheless, the healing/integration urge continued to draw me in that direction, and after a number of painful false starts (like being fired from my first three teaching jobs), I finally managed to figure out ways to comfortably stand in front of a classroom and engagingly connect with students – the integration phase that unfolded after years of abdication.
Whole Brain Living
In her book Whole Brain Living, Jill Bolte Taylor identifies four neural network complexes and the characteristics of each. Below is a list of some of those characteristics:
The careful observer will notice that many of the characteristics of Left Feeling & Right Feeling and Left Thinking & Right Thinking are in conflict with one another. I would posit – and I’m pretty sure that Jill would as well – that such conflict results from a lack of neural integration.
What to do? Jill’s recommendation is to learn the specific characteristics of the four individual networks and whenever a “disturbance in the force” arises, call a Brain Huddle and give each network a voice. Once the “unconscious” has been made conscious, a clear path forward generally emerges. It seems like a worthwhile practice, one that Jill implies has contributed greatly to her almost full recovery from the left hemisphere stroke she experienced in 1996.
Other possibilities for increasing network integration could include meditation: we know from research by Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin and Andrew Newberg (then at Penn) that long time contemplatives have more robust fiber tracts between hemispheres and that run from subcortical regions up to the six layers of cortical cells where the potential for wise action lives.
Finally, there’s the possibility of working with somatic therapeutic modalities that have proven effective in ameliorating retained traumatic memories. Here’s a collection of nineteen that I put together a number of years ago. There are probably new ones that have come into being since then that I’m not currently aware of as well. Best wishes for skillful integration going forward.
The Committed Parent 
Hi Mark. Your posts always inspire me to bring my anxious and lurking right brain forward. I loved the list of integrative neurosoma therapies. Although I feel most comfortable with the therapies that work off my left hemi-strength, I have come to appreciate those that are also creative and/or spiritual in their healing.
The late Steve Andreas’ son Mark and wife Connierae offer metaphorical translations of trauma that involve drawing a problem and then coming up with universal sayings (in metaphors, song lyrics, proverbs) that might title or encapsulate the problem while the drawing and sayings together help develop unappreciated resiliencies and healing. Their process somehow brings the brain alive even for us reluctant creatives. In that aliveness, traumas seem to scuttle out of our nervous system like the dust bunnies they are.
For me it has been true that profound loss and grief have forced me, like Jill Bolte Taylor to step to the right of myself to heal. Perhaps death, whether of people or dreams, forces our hand to create and embrace life.
I was dragged to an art workshop after a death of possibilities and somehow painted my dog’s face. She was sitting at my side and my shapeless blobs of watercolors blurred together to clearly bring her face forth.
After the elected physical death of my best friend from the Covid long hauler syndrome, I felt utterly lost in the world. I saw a talk on spirit animals that offered a meditation, so I sat and followed that process into a middle world of some sort of shamanistic trance, only to have a pelican drop down in my mind’s eye, which is almost never strongly visual.
My friend loved to cook and feed unexpected crowds of people. Like the pelican, she would fly to her store and bring back an ocean of food for us all to eat. When this happened, I got paper and a pencil, found a photo of a pelican and forced myself to draw. The pelican emerged to help release the frozen grief and now stays next to the dog, as a reminder to trust the flow of life within. Pretty certain I would not be able to draw that again.
The creative-spiritual work I saw from a Playback Theater group sort of exemplifies how traumatizing and frozen life experiences can flip on a dime with creative-spiritual work. They took one such trauma as explained to a narrator who interviewed the participant and summarized the experience for us and the troupe. They then played it back to the storyteller and audience through re-enactment movements and sounds on the spot, using an improv collective style.
The telling, narrating, and then the troupe’s interpretation of the water, the boat, and the event helped resolve the fear and persistent anxieties from that event for the storyteller. To see the visual movement, hear the rhythms, and then see the dance of that moment of people together certainly primed the truth of being alive.
For me, all these therapeutic experiences involved sort of an unexplainable force at play. I know they all are creative and I do not know how to conceptualize and embody the force. Is it an unconscious energy that is released, is it an exercising of neural pathways that do not typically fire together, is it about a collective unconscious, mirror neurons or expressing some unappreciated DNA potential? Is it spiritual or is it universal or is simply unique a better word for when it happens?
Like Alice in her strange dreamland, I wonder.
Thanks for reading this rambling Mark. Any thoughts you or others have are always appreciated. Best to you. Julie Kuck
Hi Julie, Thanks for this response. I’m pretty convinced that the critical variables for any trauma-healing methodology involve moving the body with a clear intention to effect some kind of positive activity related to the overwhelming event(s). Those conditions seem to be present in some form or another in all the treatment modalities I listed in the previous posting. Best, Mark
On Mon, Feb 28, 2022 at 12:34 PM The Committed Parent wrote:
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This got me thinking about how our impression of someone from their writing can give us am impression of how they’d act in person–without us consciously thinking about it.
In terms of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, I would have thought you to be introverted, but comfortable in front of a classroom or a crowd.
I am introverted, but, as long as they aren’t actually threatening, I’m quite comfortable in front of crowds and classrooms. My guess is that’s largely because I sang in church choir starting in elementary school, so my brain interprets being stared at by a crowd as being fun. (Again, if it’s not a hostile crowd.)
Since our brains and bodies are constantly monitoring the environment for cues of safety and danger, having an early beginning that is filled with cues of safety, turns out to be a profound advantage in terms of growing the self-regulating networks we need to be curious and engage with novel experiences. When the opposite is true, it’s the threat-detection networks that become super-robust…
Best, Mark
On Sun, Feb 27, 2022 at 9:13 AM The Committed Parent wrote:
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