So perhaps the title of this blog has grabbed your attention. You can readily see why criticizing your partner could be abusive to him or her. But self-abuse? How can that be?
This is a long blog, so here is a synopsis: The things for which we criticize our partners are usually deeply-set personality traits that play out in habitual behaviors. Those are direct manifestations of the powerful imprints their life experience has made on them from inception right through childhood into adulthood. Those imprints are part of their actual life story, not a “take” on it that can be changed by thinking about it differently. It is what happened and was recorded in them, in their entire physiological system. Consequently, to criticize or struggle with such traits and behaviors is, unconsciously, an attempt to deny the validity of your partner’s life journey. On a practical level, it is as nonsensical as screaming at someone to be calm…but we do it anyway! When you rob their story of validity, you rob yourself of the validity of your own story and all the truth it carries. In other words, you are denying voice to the very forces that drive you to focus on your partner. Of course, your partner can do the same, in which case you have a self-reinforcing, self-justifying loop that is a closed system without the possibility of transformation…unless a significantly more global approach is taken. Such criticism, shame, blame or struggle is 360 degree abuse. It inadvertently attempts to invalidate human nature. So what is a healthy way to deal with the frustration, fear, hurt and anger that can be triggered in us by our partner’s behavior? Read on…
Now for the fuller explanation. Humans are creatures of story. We each have our own. It is imprinted in our cells. That imprint undoubtedly begins in the womb, long before we can understand or utter a word. Our brainstem and the right side of our brain, specifically the right limbic system, are the earliest parts of that three-pound wonder-gel to mature. The brainstem begins appearing at about 33 days in the womb and is mature within 6 months after birth. The right hemisphere is functioning before birth, while still in development. It is generally fully functional between our second and third birthdays.
Both the brainstem and right hemisphere are intensively involved in sensing and feeling to serve survival. We are designed for a vividly physical experience of loving and being loved. This is fundamental, biological need serving attachment which serves survival because it leads to our being protected and cared for during our most vulnerable years. We are also designed to record and remember painful experiences so we can learn from them and avoid them in the future. Compared to this early development of the sensing-feeling systems in the brain, the left hemisphere (the “thinking” brain, engaged in logic, literalness, language and linearity, as Dan Siegel has said) shows up late to the party of life. It isn’t fully operational until around age twenty-five. These facts give broad justification to the statement by Harvard neurologist Jill Bolte Taylor when she writes, “…biologically, we are feeling creatures that think” as opposed to thinking creatures that feel.
When we are most vulnerable--before birth, during it and during the first three years of life, all our important experiences, particularly the painful ones, are being experienced and processed by a sensing-feeling brain and body. This continues to be the over-riding truth all through childhood. Our experience is dominated by our fully flowered capacity to feel compared to a slowly emerging ability to think, to contextualize our experience and express it in language (generally, authentic language production doesn’t kick in until around age two when the area of the brain known as Broca’s lights up).
So the earliest chapters of our lives, the templates of our future experiences and perceptions, are being written in our brains and bodies during a time of heightened physical and emotional sensitivity, right down to the cellular level. As the brain matures upward and leftward (retracing actual evolutionary development), those templates elaborate within the new neuro-pathways, but the essential code is the same.
Imagine that the brainstem and right brain are clay tablets. Early painful experiences are etched in them in a specific biochemical alphabet designed to encode the suffering and encapsulate it. As the brain develops upward and leftward during the first twenty-five years of life, imagine that each new level of development is actually a new writing medium, even though the alphabet stays the same. From clay we move to animal skins, then to bark and then ever more refined forms of paper so that more and more complex information can be written on a single development “layer”. At each level, the alphabet is the same but the language becomes increasingly complex to where we focus on that complexity and ignore its essential components. Consequently, even when the left hemisphere does develop, moving further and further from the older (from an evolutionary point of view) structures, it is still being shaped by the pre-eminence of the original biochemical alphabet of pain and encapsulation of pain. This answers the question why seemingly brilliant (left brain logical) people can have some pretty farfetched ideas and engage in behavior that is not the least bit logical. Even their immersion in the realm of ideas itself is a way of trying to escape the early hurt whose energy may be sublimated and dissipated to some degree, but never vanishes.
If my mother was anxious during her pregnancy with me, if she was struggling economically, trying to survive a war, an earthquake, a drought or other cataclysm, if she was fighting with my father or her parents, if she had a scary accident while she was carrying me, if she had a difficult time with the birth, if she and my dad were ambivalent about having me, if they had a hard time adjusting to parenthood, having to give so much and read and respond to my infantile needs, if they had a stressful dynamic between them, if either was depressed, drank, smoked, over-ate, gambled, was addicted to work, fame, the quest for money, power, recognition, if they had bouts of helplessness and rage while rearing me, if either of them died or suffered a tragic loss while I was small, if one or both of my parents were just tough as nails, judgmental, defensive, demanding, aloof…shall I go on? If any of these and any of a thousand other possibilities were unfolding while I was growing up, those things imprinted in me to the degree that my young system could not consciously process them. This is a critical point many miss when considering childhood injury. The lasting imprint begins to be recorded at the precise second that the hurt is too severe to be consciously processed by the young system.
Normal, everyday scrapes and bruises that we can cry away as they occur are not going to stay with us. On the other hand, if an everyday scrape happens and my parent shames me when I cry, that will certainly become part of an enduring record. Crying is a natural process built into our system to help us excrete pain and learn from it. After a good, full cry, our system is returned to a more balanced state than it was before we cried and we can take whatever lesson is implicit in the injury. Crying serves our survival by optimizing our system toward homeostasis, a state Harville Hendrix has called “relaxed joyfulness” with all its attendant benefits. But when we are deprived of this capacity, overwhelming painful experience is cut off from consciousness and processed in the right side of the brain which, for all intents and purposes, becomes the home of the unconscious. (As a passing note, it is worth stating that injury can happen in the womb, well before we are capable of crying. Such a hurt would in all likelihood, by the sheer vulnerability of our system at that time, be deep and carry a broad array of possible long-term manifestations in subjective experience as well as observable personality and behavior. In a forthcoming book, Life Before Birth, Arthur Janov will go where no man has gone before in comprehensively exploring the environment and experience of the unborn child.)
Terrence Real, PhD, a widely recognized specialist in men’s issues, urges us to think more broadly about the idea of childhood trauma. He suggests we too often look for big headline kinds of experiences, like molestation, physical beatings, alcoholism in the family or the death of a parent and ignore the everyday accumulation of hurts of simply not being seen or heard by our caregivers. In his bestselling book, I Don’t Want to Talk About It (p. 106) he writes “Relatively mild childhood injury can have long-lasting effects because it occurs while the very structures of the personality, body, and brain are being formed…”
The ability to disconnect from consciousness is another survival mechanism to help us endure overarching injury. The problem with it, however, is that it does not optimize our system. It is a temporary adaptation to get us through childhood. It holds the emotional load of the original experience for later retrieval and processing. If we do not enter into that process in adulthood, when we are now safe to gradually feel our way through what was “unfeelable and unthinkable” as youngsters, our system is gradually thrown out of kilter. The “container” for the old wound is more like a cage than a hermetic capsule. Its cries may not be heard by the conscious mind (Left Prefrontal Cortex), or if they are, will have their meanings scrambled. Nonetheless, they reverberate powerfully, shaking and shaping the neural corridors of our system, making love relationships increasingly difficult, raising the odds we’ll become dependent on work, money, sex, power, the approval of others, ideas, food, drugs, alcohol. They will manifest in a variety of “disorders” and “dysfunctions”, increasing our secretions of stress hormones, raising blood pressure, depleting our brain’s capacity to produce adequate secretions of critical neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine, and increasing our risk for all kinds of afflictions later in life from depression to heart disease. (The mechanism by which disconnection takes place in the brain is reasonably well understood, largely through the work of Ronald Melzack with his gate theory as well as his more recent work on the neuro-matrix, and through the work of Arthur Janov in elaborating on the fine points of how the gates, in particular, operate). We will compound the problem by categorizing each emotional or physical manifestation as a separate disorder, rather than seeing the common face behind a myriad of psycho-physiological masks.
So when someone criticizes a behavior or quality that is a result of those early experiences, those imprinted templates, they are telling us our story isn’t real or valid…or they are saying they can’t tolerate the truth of our story, of what happened to us and how it is showing up today. Most criticizers go further. They tell us we are bad, wrong or dumb for being a certain way and doing a certain way, or for not being strong or tough enough to rise above that early pain. But that kind of message—you need to be tougher—is exactly the kind of early impact that caused the difficulty in the first place. It is telling a tender young system that it should not be tender and young. At its essence, the message is, “Don’t be so hurt. If you are that way, you can’t be the loving mom or dad I need you to be for me and that is intolerable. I was deprived as a child. Now I’m deprived again as an adult. It’s just too much to bear!”
Of course, this is not to say that we have to love everything our partner does. Expecting a perfect match utterly absent of disagreement or friction is another perspective forged from thwarted childhood need. So, it’s fine to dislike a behavior or quality of our partner. It’s fine to ask our partner to alter a behavior as well. But there is a big difference between asking on the one hand and demanding on the other. Fixating on a behavior, struggling to change, bend, spindle and mutilate it is simply mis-targeting. If it bothers us that much, the odds are upwards of ninety percent that it has triggered something in our own unconscious. That pain is a call to us. It is a message launched in a bottle from the shores of childhood suddenly being tossed up on the beach of the present. That’s why we need to shift our attention to the inner world and enhance our skills in navigating it, not indict our partner. (Of course, there may be some behaviors for which we have to establish a boundaries to protect ourselves in the present—such as infidelity and physical abuse, to mention only two. If therapy cannot heal them, divorce may be a rational move.)
Again, we tell our partner , directly or indirectly, we can’t abide how they are, we are negating our own story as well. We can’t have it both ways. There isn’t one “right” story and one “right” storyteller—us! If your story is invalid to me, then the very idea of the imprint is invalid in my eyes, whether I wish to admit it or not. Thus, when I criticize you, I am negating my own truth; I am joining with the forces that afflicted both of us in the first place, the forces that squelched our true original voices and our respective realities. When the poet John Donne wrote, “…every man’s death diminishes me” he was right on. Negating the life experience of any man or woman is a tantamount to attempting to kill their personhood. It is also a negation of the truth of what human beings are: creatures that come into the world as highly vulnerable and dependent feelers; creatures who do not choose their parents or their path through the world into adulthood, creatures whose prime mission is to survive and who will do so by sequestering, when they must, the painful aspects of their journey in a dark place, away from daily awareness.
There is far too much glibness present right now among some of the speakers, authors and consultants in the country when it comes to the idea of “neuroplasticity”. We are told, “Change your thinking, change your brain, change your life.” This is bumper-sticker psychology, espoused by the High Priests of the Left Prefrontal Cortex. We listen to them at our peril. Their exhortations fly in the face of the truth residing between our ears and in our bodies. We became thinking creatures last, long after we were already fully feeling. Joseph LeDoux, author of The Emotional Brain, teaches us that the neuropathways from the limbic (feeling) system up to the neocortex are far more developed than the neuropathways back to the limbic system. This is a neurological way of saying it is a fool’s errand trying to think your way out of what you were wounded into. So telling your partner he/she should be different, should buck up and forget the past, is an attempt to negate evolution. This is not about our perspective on our life’s journey. It’s the experience itself written in our cells in a biochemical alphabet whose characters are forged in deprivation of need. Further, it is no longer the past but an enduring imprint that lives within us.
It also bears stating that gaining an intellectual understanding of the way we evolved, how we are wired, what our true nature is by reading a piece such as this one, can be helpful in guiding us in the right direction. However, understanding alone will not stop us from engaging in criticism. For that, a much deeper shift will be necessary, one that engages more of the total brain and nervous system.
When we consider all this, we begin to see the fog lifting from the whole idea of blaming, shaming, criticizing, struggling with our partner, defending ourselves, even acting out. We do it because we unconsciously are trying to get away from the hurt that lives in us. When you act in a way that doesn’t satisfy my present needs, it lights up the neuro-matrix that holds my old hurt. That feels bad. So, reactively, I try to get you to change so that you satisfy my needs and stay away from the old hurt. If I succeed, we have a lose-lose situation. Ironically, if you do change your behavior and begin to satisfy a need that links down into the early injury, I will not be able to fully experience your gracious giving for very long, because it will still light up that neuro-matrix by reminding me that I didn’t get this kind of love when I was little. My early violated needs will be unmasked by the blam of your love.
So where is the win-win to be had? It exists in openly acknowledging these dynamics as central to human experience, in supporting each other in a process by which we both get to honor our story, tell our story, grieve it deeply over time as aspects of it become available for conscious processing and ultimately, in the words of Dr. Brene Brown, fully reclaim our worthiness, the truth and validity of our life story.
In Imago couples work, this unfolds on a regular basis. I have experienced it firsthand as a participant and had the privilege of witnessing people from their twenties to their eighties suddenly connect to the emotion of a long-ago moment and double over in tears in their partners’ laps. It is gut and heart-wrenching work that requires a different set of skills than most of us possess—the skill to stop defending, to fall into the feeling that is there, usually in the chest or solar plexus, and fully surrender to its cry of pain. Afterwards, people regularly say things like, “I had totally forgotten that,” or “I had no idea there was still so much hurt in me about that,” or “It was so long ago…I’m amazed at how deep the feeling still is.” In my own individual inner work, I have had this same experience many times over the last forty years and have also had the privilege of witnessing it in others. Its power and truth are undeniable.
Memory sequestered gradually distorts and erodes our psychological and physiological health. Memory opened gradually will hurt…but it is a hurt that we can finally handle in adulthood…a hurt that heals.
Special Note: For this blog, I’ve leaned heavily on the works of Brene Brown, PhD, Dr. Antonio Damasio, Harville Hendrix, PhD, Arthur Janov, PhD, Joseph Le Doux, PhD, Dr. Alan Schore, Dr. Dan Siegel and Jill Bolte Taylor, PhD. Each has made a unique and important contribution to our understanding of how our brains and bodies are affected by, hide, remember and express hurt.
C 2011 Bob Kamm
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