What’s happening in your amazing brain?
CW: child abuse, trauma
My friend Kimberly
feels blissful at the scent of snowmobile exhaust.
My friend Josh feels nauseous at the sight of seafood.
A conversation with my friend Leena me sparked new insight related to my feelings toward cockroaches.
One night, Leena witnessed me have an outsized reaction to a waterbug on my porch.
Once the crisis had been handled, she asked “What do cockroaches symbolize for you?” I’d never thought about that before. Leena’s insightful question prompted me to think back to the first time I remember feeling that way, and a memory surfaced—two actually.
They are both incidents when I was growing up, where an adult was violent toward me in a room—my great-grandmother’s guestroom in once incident, and a garage in the other—where there were cockroaches present.
Understanding why my brain was wired to respond to cockroaches with such strong feelings of repulsion helped me begin to relax around the unsightly creatures.
It slightly lowered the intensity of my “knee-jerk” reaction.
And Leena’s question put me in touch with memories I needed to pay more attention to.
When you encounter cues in your environment—sights, sounds, smells, tastes, or textures—your brain fires in a pattern established earlier when you first encountered those cues.
Your brain then constructs an explanation for what is occurring inside you:
“This thing is good!”
“This thing is dangerous.”
“This thing is repulsive.”
Your brain is unique, wired according to your inherited genetics and your individual life experiences. Your amazing brain is always attempting to keep you safe, heal your past, and help you encounter joy. By learning to map your own brain, you can develop awareness of how your preferences, feelings, and body sensations are shaped by your earlier memories. This awareness can help expand your range of available choices for responding to environmental cues; whenever we speak of “healing,” “growth,” or “maturing”—spiritually or psychologically—this is what we’re talking about.
Your Amazing Brain
Your brain map contains dirt roads and highways
You might picture the flow of information inside your brain as traveling along a system of dirt roads and highways.
Some neural pathways function like superhighways where information travels fast and far; other pathways may be like gravel roads where activity slows down or loops back around.
When your stress level is just right and you feel safe enough, you may find your upper networks are active and humming. When this happens, you may feel like you are being the best version of yourself.
Your upper networks can soothe and calm activity in your lower networks, helping you regulate your emotions, decrease your stress, and increase your awareness of being “safe enough”—which in turn helps you access your upper circuitry.
When you read of times when Jesus responded with creativity, compassion, and nonviolence, you can understand his upper networks were likely active and humming—even in the face of violence.
Reflection:
What environmental cues help you function at your best?
What environmental cues trigger a “knee-jerk” reaction in you?
What’s the earliest memory you have of feeling that way?
Trust is a thermostat for your nervous system
You can think of trust as a neurobiological phenomenon where pleasant neurotransmitters are released in your brain, lowering your stress.
The more time you spend in this helpful, trusting brain-state, the more benefits you receive from it. Trust boosts to your immune system, supports you with decision-making, and increases your capacity to relate kindly and creatively with yourself and others.
You might say that the neurobiological phenomenon of trust functions somewhat like a thermostat for your stress—raising and lowering activity in particular regions of your brain in response to stressors in the environment.
Trust cannot be coerced or chosen.
Trust is an automatic physiological response to encountering someone or something you perceive to be trustworthy.
Reflection:
When your brain is experiencing trust, how can you tell?
In which relationships or situations do you experience trust most often?
In which relationships or situations do you experience a lack of trust?
A cup of stress + a cup of safety = a recipe for learning
A little bit of stress is good for you.
Stress catalyzes your neural networks to stretch and form new linkages.
Stress exists on a continuum between pleasant and unpleasant.
You need the “just right” amount of stress and safety for your brain to grow in helpful ways.
With too little stress, and too much safety, you may feel bored and underwhelmed; in that case, your growth stagnates.
But with too much stress, and too little safety, you’re at risk of being overwhelmed and tossed into a brainstem-state of physiological agony.
Many education, parenting, and criminal corrections systems rely on punishment, which you may understand to be the infliction of stress and pain to the degree that it activates your brainstem, tossing you into a state of agony.
When this happens—neurobiologically speaking—you can expect an intervention to backfire; punishment which raises your stress level too high will short-circuit your learning process.
Reflection:
When have you experienced a “just right” amount of stress and safety?
When have you experienced too little stress and felt stagnant?
When have you felt too much stress and felt overwhelmed?
You borrow my body, and I borrow yours
Your brain are wired to be highly aware of the brains of others.
You have the capacity to effectively “sync up” with other brains so that your wave frequency and neural activity “mirrors” another’s.
The act of witnessing someone else desire something, move toward it, and experience pleasure or pain—relief or healing—can effectively produce a mirrored response within your own body.
René Girard perceived this phenomenon, even before neuroscience came along to explain it; he referred to this “mirroring function” as mimesis.
Under stress, your brain may mirror the nervous system and behavior of others unnecessarily, or to a degree that’s unhelpful and creates rivalry between you—particularly if the object of your mutual desire is perceived to be in scarce supply.
When trust is diminished and stress increases, you can expect to find yourself relating to your rivals as if they were genuine threats.
Reflection:
When have you desired something because someone else wanted it?
When has your body “mirrored” the emotional experience of someone else?
When have you felt in “rivalry” with someone because you both wanted the same thing?
A story’s ending changes your understanding of it
Trauma is something that overwhelms your ability to cope. But as a human being, you are resilient; with resources and social support, you can endure high amounts of stress without it producing trauma. When you experience stress without trauma, your story afterward will sound like this:
“This terrible thing happened, but I knew what to do, and people helped me.”
When you experience stress with trauma, your story afterward will sound like this:
“This terrible thing happened, and I didn’t know what to do, and it seemed nobody helped me.”
When you have experienced trauma, once the danger has passed, it is important to bring your brain’s awareness and attention to your current state of relative safety, or “safe enoughness”. Otherwise, you will experience your brainstem constantly sounding of a “false alarm” which is taxing to your body.
Over time, you will find you experience and eventually articulate, these patterns as stories.
“I’m never safe enough.”
A resolved story is one which you can tell with a clear beginning, middle, and hopeful ending. And the ending of a stressful story has the power to change the meaning of what came before it. Establishing and bringing awareness to your return to safe enoughness—and recognizing how you did that and who helped you—can transform your trauma into a story of stress resilience.
Reflection:
When have you experienced a terribly stressful thing, yet felt resourced and supported?
When have you experienced stress with trauma that felt unresolved?
When has a story of trauma for you or someone you love been given a new ending?
You heal by “crossing” yourself
The pathways in the right hemisphere of your brain generally help you see the bigger picture.
The pathways in the left hemisphere generally help you to notice smaller details.
The pathways in the upper networks of your brain generally give rise to creativity, logical problem solving, compassion, empathy, and choice.
The pathways in the lower networks of your brain generally exist to keep you safe from immediate threats and danger.
Healing is a word for when new linkages are formed between your upper and lower brain networks—a top-and-bottom integration.
We may also understand healing to mean new linkages formed between the left and right sides of your brain—a crossing-the-midline integration.
You can help your brain establish these new linkages by directing attention to the information you’re receiving from each hemisphere, and from your upper and lower networks. These new linkages can help “quiet down” certain parts of the brain so, over time, you’ll find you can listen better to other parts of the brain.
Reflection:
Which hemisphere of your brain do you feel is stronger—the left or the right?
When was the last time your lower networks were “running the show?”
What practices help you “cross the midline” and integrate “top-and-bottom?”
Your brain grows through disconnection and reconnection
In the best of all relationships, you and the other are not always connected and attuned.
Relational Cultural Theory researchers tell us the best of your relationships cycle through connection, disconnection, and reconnection.
Within your optimal “secure” attachment relationships, you and your loved one are attuned more or less one third of the time. The second third, you are mis-attuned. The last third, you are effectively re-attuning.
Most of us learn effective enough strategies for connection and disconnection in life.
However, many of us lack the skills for meaningful reconnection after a conflict.
Repairing trust and reconnecting following a rupture builds the strongest of attachment relationships, which provide essential ingredients for your flourishing.
Reflection:
When have you experienced re-attunement after a relational conflict?
When have you effectively reconnected with someone after a disconnect?
When has someone repaired trust with you after a rupture?
∞
Learning to map your own brain can help you self-monitor and make large and small relational choices to optimize your brain’s capacity for helpful growth and maturing. At the same time, there is a lot to be learned through “trial and error,” as your brain responds to stress and regulation practices differently than other brains. Through brain science, we are discovering which practices which can help different brains exist in that “just right” zone of stress and safety.
Listening with you,
Questions for reflection:
How does understanding your human brain help you relate better to God, ourselves, and one another?
Which amazing brain insight are you finding most useful to you in this season?
How do you understand the relationship between brain science, scripture, and theology?
Further reading:
Systematic Theology: Theological Anthropology, Soteriology, Pneumatology
The Brain & the Spirit, Introduction, Chapters 1 – 7.
A Blessing for One Who is Free
