Your Brain on Freedom

A cautionary note about “brain chatter” is in order. There is a lot of information about the brain being tossed about piece meal by psychologists and motivational speakers. What I mean by piece meal is that people will focus on one particular area of the brain in lieu of a general understanding of how the brain functions as a whole. People will refer to the brainstem as the reptile brain or the limbic system as the mammalian brain and the neocortex as the human brain or the right side versus the left side without a global view of what a person with a well-integrated brain would look like.

There are some who have been pushing the research on meditation. There is some indication that meditation over a long period of time may lead to a thickening of the Prefrontal Cortex (PFC). This is automatically deemed to be a good thing. That conclusion is not scientific. It’s based on a bias toward the idea of an “executive function” and “affect regulation”. Both of these terms are echoes of a rather linear, even patriarchal (top down) perspective. From this point of view, the “higher” brain should be controlling the “lower” brain, which is deemed so entwined with fight or flight directives that it overwhelms our lives at inappropriate moments. This downward view of the brainstem and limbic system resonate with Freud’s idea of the Id—a kind of inner chaos to be controlled—as well as the old Greek tale of Pandora’s box . A thickening of the PFC might actually correlate to repression. One measurement--thickening in this case--is insufficient for us to know if there has been a shift towards more optimal functioning. If, for example, the PFC thickens and blood pressure remains high, well, Houston, we have a problem. For that matter, someone might report they feel better now that they're meditating...but their blood pressure remains high. So "journals" or "surveys" of subjects in and of themselves are not sufficient to know what's really going on in the entire physiological system. For that, we'll need a set of metrics that likely include all the normal vital signs as well as brain waves and immune functions.

There is no doubt that the brainstem and limbic system and entire right side of the brain, which develop long before the left hemisphere is in full capacity, are all involved in various ways with sensing and feeling as well as in the storage of painful memories beyond the reach of left-side consciousness. In other words, what we refer to as the unconscious correlates strongly to systems in those parts of the brain. Those implicit or buried emotions certainly can shape how our left side operates, since the development of the brain recapitulates evolution itself by moving upward and ultimately leftward. The left side, being the last to fully develop, is strongly influenced by its encoded experiential precursors. Consequently, anyone with encoded unconscious emotional memory is going to have deficits, however subtle or slight (or overt) in how their left brain operates—from what they believe about life to how organized or disorganized they may be, from a tendency towards lethargy and depression to a tendency towards compulsion or addiction. But this is precisely because those early injuries were encoded to be unconscious in order to keep from overwhelming our tender young beings. Those memories are not to be feared and controlled but ultimately, gradually, carefully invited into the light of consciousness and integrated throughout the brain, including the left side—whose very content will change if this occurs, e.g. “I thought my wife was really out to intentionally hurt me but now I get that it was my mother who actually did hurt me to such a degree that I was left expecting it from any woman with whom I’d be intimate. My wife was actually trying to help me but I couldn't see it.” (This is an insight that followed some intense grieving I witnessed between a couple in an Imago Dialogue and represents a commonly observed phenomenon in Imago).

Psychiatrist, author and teacher, Dan Siegel has become closely associated with the idea of mindfulness and the term “thickening of the prefrontal cortex.” Yet, this does him a disservice. In his book, Mindsight, he very clearly embraces the grieving process as part of mindfulness (see page 141 for just one example) and discusses in detail what is going on throughout the brain in relationship to the encoding and decoding of implicit emotional memory.

It is critically important we avoid replacing a domination of our lives by unconscious memory in the brainstem and limbic system with a domination of our lives by the left prefrontal cortex. This would only constitute a reinforcement of inner antagonism where the brain identifies part of itself as enemy. Another way to look at it is that it is a covert embracing of “don’t” messages to which we were subjected in childhood and would tend to reinforce repression, as mentioned in my opening paragraph.

Our goal is integration, not domination. The Imago Dialogue presents a wonderful structure and process within which this can take place. When we deepen the client, we deepen them into childhood feelings….what Bruce Crapuchettes, Ph.D. and senior member of the Imago faculty, has called “limbic release” in a speech to the annual Imago Conference in October 2010. When one member of a couple grieves from old hurts, they evoke empathy in their receiving partner. That empathy in turn supports the creation of greater safety between them which in turn makes it easier to grieve in the appropriate context, meaning that what may begin as appearing to be largely a present unresolved issue between the two people turns out to be generally 80%-90% living in the imprinted past of each of them. When the earlier feelings are slowly and carefully brought forth out of the darkness of unconsciousness and integrated into present consciousness, whatever issues there are between two people tend to be much more easily resolved. The negative energy has gone out of them.

The vicious cycle of projection and negative fixation on the “partner as cause of my misery” (including all the various forms of defensive adaptation) gradually dissolves and gives way to a virtuous cycle that integrates the past into the present, which is to say, the brainstem and limbic system memories into full consciousness with the collaboration of the left prefrontal cortex. Insights now flow from the inside out (a released limbic and brainstem), not the outside in (the left PFC trying to figure out what is going on down below). The left PFC is now free to do its job of accurately learning about and responding to the world as it is, no longer hijacked by the past. But so, too, are the brainstem and limbic system free to do their jobs of protecting us from real danger and enabling appropriate emotional responses to both our inner and social lives , unburdened by the past. This is your whole brain. This is your brain on freedom.

C 2011 Bob Kamm