One of the most difficult things
for many of us to do is break the habit of blaming others for our situation and
our feelings. In my role as a leadership
development consultant working with organizations large and small, I’ve found
this to be rife in spite of much talk about personal initiative and
responsibility. However, the one place
where I see it most graphically on display is in my capacity as an Imago Educator working with distressed couples. Almost any upset will send us reaching for
our hip-mounted six-shooter to blast off a couple of blames, shames, sarcastic
remarks, criticisms, put-downs, mocks or outright attacks. Of course, not everyone voices these, but
they are no less limiting when they happen within the confines of the mind,
manifesting as “the cold-shoulder” or stonewalling or an eruption in the chat room between our ears.
Clearly, a cascade of this kind of
negativity damages and limits intimacy.
So why do we do it? It seems
almost self-evident this is a behavior developed in childhood for the simple
reason that in childhood, we have no or little power (depending on our age) and
other people have all the power, especially our caregivers. We need them to fulfill our needs. We are other-directed from birth. The source of food is mother’s breast. Warmth and protection are in her or Dad’s
arms as well as the ability to dry us when we are wet, cool us when we are hot,
soothe us with holding, rocking, cooing and singing when we feel bad and
stimulate us to learn and feel good. We are incapable of providing and creating
safety for ourselves in all its many forms.
In a well-nurtured childhood, this
other-orientation would give way increasingly to the rise of our competencies
and sense of selfhood. In fact,
childhood could be seen as a gradual journey from powerlessness to, ideally, full
empowerment. In a perfect world, we would
ultimately be able to fully care for ourselves physically, emotionally and mentally and enjoy others as friends,
companions, team-mates, partners, fellow citizens. We would have a fluidly clear sense of what
lives within us—those things for which we are responsible and those things we
do, in fact, have power to influence or change.
But the evidence is that most of us
do not get to adulthood through well-nurtured childhoods. We are highly vulnerable during the first
many years of life. But the period
beginning with conception, including all of gestation, followed by the birth
experience and the first three years out of the womb constitutes a time of
exceptional vulnerability—a fact that most of us adults don’t seem to be able
to hold in consciousness for very long.
This is likely so because our physical and emotional suffering from that
time is utterly out of reach of the adult day-to-day mind. In our culture, day-to-day tends to be
dominated by left-brain functions. Early
painful imprints were laid down in the brain stem, the limbic system and the
right brain. As the saying goes, “You
can’t get there from here” or, put another way, why would we believe we can
think our way (left brain) out of what we were wounded into (brain stem, limbic,
right brain)? In The Emotional Brain,
Joseph LeDoux highlights the fact that the neuro-pathways from the limbic brain
up to the cortex are far more plentiful than those returning. This makes sense because our brains evolved
upward, not downward. This is surely one
of the main reasons Harvard neuro-anatomist and author of My Stroke of Insight,
Jill Bolte Taylor, has stated “we are feeling creatures that think” not
thinking creatures that feel.
The likelihood is that the deficits
we experience in the womb, at birth and those first three years are so strongly
taken into the early brain that they set up a neural architecture that is only
added to when other insults to the system come in the following years. As I
have said often, this is not about blaming parents who, by and large, did the
best they could with what they had. But
it is about discovering cause in
order to understand better how to address the issue.
It has struck me recently that when
we feel so angry with a partner that we whiz around a kind of high-speed
merry-go-round over and over again about what they did versus what they should
have done, we are re-enacting a moment in childhood that probably happened to
most of us several times and which we have buried because it occurred so early
and was so excruciating. That was the first
moment when the deficit of nurturing crossed a threshold into the unbearable. Something in us cried out to our
parents. We didn’t have the words but
the basic meaning was: “You must change!
I cannot bear
this. You’ve got
to start loving me the way I need to be loved!" Again, we didn’t have the words or the
ideas. We had the experience, though, on
an organic level. The cries reverberated
within our cells and tender souls.
In The Continuum Concept, Jean
Liedloff teaches us that we are born with naturally unfolding
expectations. These are, again, on the
organic and implicit level. We expect to
be protected in the womb. We expect to
have a tolerable birth. We expect to be
soothed and calmed after birth. We
expect to be suckled at our mother’s breast.
We expect our parents to be fully responsive to our need for skin
contact, soothing sounds, appropriate stimulation. When these expectations are met, we have what
Liedloff calls “a sense of inner rightness.”
Biologically, she is probably describing homeostasis. Need arises, is met and subsides. We are calm.
All is good. This process unfolds
throughout childhood with the needs changing as we develop. What does not change is the innate
expectation that our caregivers will largely be there for us, will “regulate”
us until we can learn to regulate ourselves, which is to say, care for
ourselves. Considering this, it is a devastating shock to our fragile and open beings to experience parents/caregivers who, for
whatever reason, are not giving and cannot give enough of what we naturally
need to protect and nurture a sense of inner rightness. In adult terms, inner rightness is to feel
like ourselves, comfortable in our skin, psychologically solid, capable and
confident enough to take on life.
This is a terrible loss to
suffer—the loss of trust and safety amplified by our dependence. It is cause for grieving. The first station of grieving is shock and
denial. Here, perhaps, we see the first
experience of shock—in utero or in infancy.
This is an overwhelming moment.
It makes sense that since our brains are so far from fully developed, we are not able to fully process it
in consciousness, which is a delicate neural web itself at this point. Denial follows (a neural-electro-chemical sequestering) as a survival mechanism to
help us get through to physical adulthood and, hopefully, material
independence.
However, to be a physical
adult does not necessarily mean we have arrived at emotional adulthood. How could we, carrying such a legacy of
unresolved hurt? In adulthood, this hurt
that stubbornly resists identifying its true origins naturally transfers to our
partner more than all other people in our lives, though we may project it onto
bosses, friends, politicians and oligarchs. But with our partners, we are more
exposed emotionally than we have been since childhood. In other words, adult love relationships have powerful resonance with childhood experience. This is not only an experiential truth. It is a neurological truth. After the initial romantic phase of falling
in love, we awaken to the reality that our partners are not us, are not here
for the singular purpose of satisfying our every need, including those of which
we were bereft long ago. In short, as
much as we like to describe them as “a dream come true” in the romantic phase,
in reality, our partners are not our dream persons. (Is that a burden any of us would want to
carry for a lifetime anyway? Wouldn’t we
rather be our partners “real person”?) No matter how much we love them and they
us, there are ways in which we are different enough that it triggers that old
hurt of feeling totally alone yet dependent on someone who “really doesn’t get
me.” We are indeed back in childhood
shock/denial, wishing they were different (“if-only-ing”) and anger—the first
three stations of grieving. Why are we
so deeply stuck here? Because the very
essence of the childhood predicament is that we are not safe and not yet
capable of consciously experiencing and processing the full depth of the hurt
of what it is to be at the mercy of those who cannot consistently enough care for us as we need, in spite of their best efforts.
The
thing we most need to do in adulthood is the thing that was most forbidden in
childhood—to weep our way past our shock, wishing and anger down into the full
sense of fear and abandonment…and even to go beyond weeping to deeply feel the
physical pain that is often the core hurt in the pre-verbal years. It makes sense, then, that barring a full
immersion in such a process, in adulthood we would be caught in a kind of
repetition compulsion, if you will—focused on our partners and desperately
wanting them to change now, blaming and criticizing them when they won’t, can’t
or don’t
Even with the best therapist,
breaking this cycle is likely to be difficult.
However, it is within reach for people who have the emotional bravery
and the good fortune to have a therapeutic process that helps us feel safe
enough to go there. We are not dependent
little children any longer. Our brains
have fully booted up. We have
psychological and social resources available to us that were not there in
childhood.
As scary or painful as it may be, this
requires skills different from what the day-to-day strategic accomplishing mind
offers. Cognition may help some, particularly in increasing our awareness of
the impulse to blame/go negative. It can
educate us and nudge us toward taking responsibility for what resides within
us. In doing so, surely new neural
pathways are being developed. But when
we talk about neural plasticity, there are a few critical questions we would be
wise to continuously ask:
1.
In what
part of the brain are these new neural pathways being developed?
2.
Does
development of new pathways in, say, either Pre-frontal Cortex correlate to
changes in the deeper, older systems where early childhood pain is likely
held?
3.
Finally,
what do these changes mean in terms of sustainable body-mind health?
It seems a “no-brainer” (pun
intended!) that whenever we learn something, we develop new pathways. The questions above go to what kind of
learning is taking place and whether or not it actually contributes to more long-term
openness, consciousness and health or is actually a new stealth form of
self-suppression. After all, we have
ample examples in the history of humanity, not just the history of
psychotherapy, of individuals learning what is best for them yet going ahead
and doing the exact opposite. This is
likely because it is literally a top-down approach, meaning that we are trying
to think our way beyond something that does not yield to the most brilliant
left brain because the locus of the generating dynamic resides in the emotional
and sensory systems, literally embedded in a different part of the brain. The skills necessary for resolving them have to
do with emotional and sensory learning, learning to let go and surrender to what
lives within our bodies and hearts in its original childhood context, not
figuring it out or controlling it. This
would be a bottom up process fully in alignment with the way the brain
evolved.
If we are to help people break the
behavioral grip of reactive blaming, isn’t it clear we will have to make ample
space amidst the words and ideas for emotional, non-verbal and even somatic
experience? Wouldn’t this be true of both
individuals and couples? And doesn’t it
make sense to be looking for how old neural pathways are changed and new ones
generated in the brain stem, limbic system and right brain, too…in other words,
in the entire brain?
C 2014 Bob Kamm
