What does normal development in the mind look like?
Our minds are embodied. First, we were mud. And the mud was given breath. (Genesis 2:7). Our bodies are the first thing encountering the world, long before our thinking brain encounters the world. Only about 15-20% of our neurons are "ready to go" when we are born. The other 80% need interpersonal relationships in order to learn how to fire. This means that we need relationships to actually successfully grow our brains.
Our brain is an emergent process. This process takes place in our minds and with people in the room regulating us. There is never a time when we are not a function and a feature of interacting with other people (dead or alive people!) We are living, breathing, pulsating bodies of electrobiochemical energy.
We are storytellers. First we sense. And then we make sense of what we sense. Caregivers help us share that story properly. We come into the world looking for someone who is looking for us. And when trauma occurs, that relationship is broken which means our brain is not working as it should.
We come into the world looking for someone who is looking for us.
We begin as bodies but shift into minds. There are actually nine domains for integration. According to Daniel Siegal, the "9 domains for integration" refer to nine key areas of mental functioning that need to be well-connected for optimal psychological well-being. These include:
1. Integration of Consciousness: Awareness of the body, mental/emotional, relational and outside world. Openness to things as they are.
2. Bilateral Integration: Left and right hemispheres are working in synchrony. Left hemisphere is logical and linear, and very literal. Right side is more creative, metaphoric, and symbolic.
3. Vertical Integration: Gut, heart, and lungs all have neural networks that seek to communicate with the brain. Too many people are disconnected from the awareness from our bodies.
4. Memory Integration: Implicit and explicit memory integration. When trauma become implicit memory we are stuck in the past. To integrate a memory, we make implicit memories explicit.
5. Narrative Integration: Biographical memory, needs to be included. We run into the trauma, not from it. When a dog tries to bit you, you have a story for how it can be less painful.
6. State Integration: We can be okay one minute and not okay the next moment. We need to learn to honor our states and honor that we have different needs at the same time and we need to pay attention to that while relating to others.
7. Interpersonal Integration: Honoring and supporting the differences in each other promotes neural integration in the brain.
8. Temporal Integration: We seek certainty, but change is the only constant. We also become aware of our eventual death.
9. Transpirational Integration: The identity of bodily self expands beyond the boundary of the skin. We sense our interconnection of time, place, and people.
Who is in charge here?
If you grow up in a
house that doesn't allow anger, you will be linked and connected to many
things, but you won't be able to link into that anger. Certain parts of
our "orchestra" can be cut off. When we are in our community, things
will become linked like an orchestra.
The middle pre-frontal cortex is the conductor! That conductor needs to go to CONDUCTOR school. It doesn't operate naturally. That training is through interpersonal relationships that I have that create for me the opportunity to develop secure attachment. This brings in the acronym of F-A-C-E-S: Flexible, adaptive, coherent, energized and stable states of mind.
These all depend on emotion in order for us to navigate the world. This is a notion that everything we do as human beings is shaped by emotion. Emotion is the fuel in the tank. We turn it on. We turn it off. We speed it up. We slow it down. We don't build cares just to have a place to store gasoline. But there is nothing that we do with our car that doesn't require gasoline.
We need to ALWAYS be curious about our emotional states.
Our ATTUNEMENT to our emotional states is the first stage in the development of neuroplastic change. It used to be, forty years ago, that if you had a stroke, they sent you home with a "good luck!" Now, you do physical therapy and rehap everyday for weeks on end to improve the neural networks and turn them on in ways they didn't previously know what possible.
You need to SNAG the brain!
SNAGGING means that you: Stimulate Neural Activation and Growth.
One of the primary ways that being seen, soothed, safe, and made be to secure is through attunement. Attunement to our stories with compassion and loving kindness is by SNAGGING the brain. We do this through story-telling. Our stories have pasts, presents, and futures.
When trauma occurs, there is a rupture. Not just the story itself but the mechanics we use to tell the story. The repair of ruptures is necessary if there is going to be secure attachment. There must be a little bit of stress to have things heal. We need necessary enough stress (mild-to-moderate stress) to create enough rupture so we can repair it and our relational connectivity is strengthened. This is common for the development of secure attachment. THIS IS NORMAL.
How does trauma mess all this up?
Trauma completely disrupts the process of integration. Trauma collects a series of unrepaired ruptures. Amy doesn't just remember the rupture. It remembers that the rupture has not yet been repaired. It continually remembers that the wolf is still at the door. Your system has to HOLD these ruptures. We have to contain the ruptures so that they don't spill out all over our life.
Most of the containing is something that we have no idea we are doing. We are doing this subconsciously. These things lead to TOXIC RUPTURES. Trauma leads us into two general states:
A. Overwhelmed in the setting we are in.
B. Powerless and overwhelmed in response to that setting.
We have heard stories about 9/11. We thought that there would be tons of PTSD from 9/11. However, because of the community and support surrounding it, there was not as much PTSD as you would expect.
If you had an expensive vase as you wanted to move it from one part of the room to another, that wouldn't be that too hard to do. But if the vase was shattered into a million pieces, picking those up would be very challenging. But if there were 3-4 of us in the room, we could move it even easier than we could if it was just one person trying to do it themselves.
My story has been shattered and is in a million pieces in the room. Those people can help me pick up the pieces.
Shame isolates. Shame keeps us from seeking community. All of our domains gets disconnected. We all know what shame is. We don't need a psychiatrist to explain that. Do you realize how subtle shame can be?
1. Shame is not a cognitive experience. We first encounter it in our bodies. And our cognition can't catch up to it quickly enough because it is happening so quickly in our body.
2. When Shame happens, shame in and of itself is not a bad thing. There are behaviors we engage in and shame is an appropriate response. There are things for which we should be ashamed. Our culture tries to push shame to the margin. The culprit is our response to our shame.
The culprit is our response to shame
Developmentally this begins early -- as early as 15-18 months of age! How many of us when we are feeling ashamed want to takes risks? How many of us want to connect others or be creative or go and repair ruptures? All we want to do is run away when we feel shame.
Because of shame, we isolate
We have a feeling. Then we have embarrassment over having the feeling. And so I will double-down on why I am having the feeling and how I can avoid further encounter with the feeling.
Shame is the death of a thousand cuts.
Trauma primarily disinhibits my ability to create beauty and goodness in the world. The Bible tells us that on the first page! We are supposed to be creating beauty and goodness in the world. Shame and trauma doesn't just wound our life. It ultimately scuttles our ability to push the boundary of the "Eden Blessing" into the world because we are using so much energy to contain our shame.
Trauma has an outcome that is not just personal for me. It has an outcome that is between you and me. My trauma is both embodied and relational. If my purpose is to be a co-creator of beauty and goodness in the world with the Lord, than our shame stops that from happening.
A "Shame Inventory" helps you see that our shame behavior is often so subtle and so automatic that we are unaware of its presence and the frequency of the cadence of which it is activated.
A "Shame Inventory" awakens our attention to the fact that SHAME is happening. (These are not actually collect our number of shaming events and share them with a group :) We talk about our traumas in terms of things that have happened TO us. What we are often not as aware of, is the degree to which we actually contribute to the ongoing disintegrative state by virtue of what we then do to ourselves.
You are NOT totally responsible for your pain. However, what we are saying is that, evil is so shrewd in wielding shame in such a way that I am not aware of the frequency to which I give myself repeated messages of shame. "If I had just ..." or "If I would have told someone ..." This opens a door for the accuser to wield shame once more and pile on to our trauma in ways that we are not aware that we are contributing to.
I want to begin to be aware of where evil is trying to hoodwink me! The act of paying attention to these moments gives us an awareness that this death of a thousand cuts is really primarily intending to send me a message of catastrophic abandonment. It is a message that says, "WENDI, YOU ARE ALONE IN THE UNIVERSE." It is running counter to the mandate in Genesis 2:18: "It is not good for man to be alone."
So much of our trauma isolates us even more from one another further. The man and woman, aware that they were naked, covered themselves. This isolated them from themselves even further. We do things with our bodies that reinforce our disintegrated states. We avoid engagement with people. "I am unable to engage with people."
A "Shame Attendant" or a part of us, her job is to wake up with us every morning and remind us of all the things we are done wrong. How long would you want that person to be around in your life? But we must be aware of how subtle that Attendant is in our life. That Attendant is often in our life!
That other thing that happens neurobiologically when it comes to trauma is that we have stress hormones and these stress hormones in short-term traumatic events. There is a tipping point at which point the longer those hormones are near the hippocampus, they become poisonous to it. Then the hippocampus can't be a good transmission state for our pre-frontal cortex to access. We find, therefore, that the hormones become a basting soup in which our brain is cooking. In less than three minutes, these hormones are dumped in the blood stream. Once the process is initiated, stopping the process is not nearly as fast.
This is why we need extra hands on board!
It is true that overtime, the process and pathways of neural activity end up in the hemisphere that they were supposed to be in -- left or right hemispheres. But the left and right hemispheres, while they can do a lot of the same things, have one thing that is very different. And that is how they relate to the world.
The RIGHT HEMISPHERE really has a lot to do with WITH-NESS. It is the way of being intimate with the world.
But the LEFT HEMISPHERE sees the world as an object. The left hemishphere, ideally, is serving the right hemisphere.
What trauma does is that tends to disrupt this service that the left and the right will serve for each other. Our right hemisphere starts flooding and disregulating us. We need someone can help us when we get disregulated. Sometimes just getting their right hemisphere to be okay int he room is not easy for them to do.
When we put words into our feelings with a co-regulator, our anxiety decreases! Trauma cuts off hemispheres from each other. Trauma interrupts the entire train of movement. We will continue to have hyper states of vigilance as well as neurobioglical chemical states that are poisoning the water making it difficult for the hippocampus to do its job. They can't down-regulate the Amgydalia!
Trauma's primary affect are states of disintegration.
My neurobiology and its health is never separate from my connection to YOU. My neurobiology and its health is in need of community that is both gentle and firm! We can then turn toward reintegration. We want to be loved, secure, safe, and cared for. But our loss of this originally occurred in a relationship that harmed us. We must take enough risk to step toward reintegration by stepping toward someone who is enabling you to be present to your story with loving kindness, patience, and demand.
We want to tell our story the way we want to tell it. But that is not necessarily empathy. In order for us to move toward healing, it will require us to do things that are not easy but things that can definitely be done.
Trauma impairs the difficulty to imagine a difficult future! The best we can hope for in this life is some matter of management.
The goal of this work is not merely healing. That is not the end. The end is for me to bring the beauty of who I am into my world more fully. And trauma gets in the way of creating beauty in my neck of the woods.
The woman in Mark 5 who has the bleeding problem has an idea of what her healing is supposed to be about. She wants the bleeding to stop. You recognize that if you are here, when Jesus says, "Stop! Who touched me?" He wants even more for her than healing. He wants her to lean into those places of creativity and creation. Trauma keeps her from even imagining what can happen!
Our initial trauma stops us from imagining what our life is really for.
Trauma impairs our God-given faculties to think about what Wendi's life could become! And who Wendi wants to be! And what Wendi wants to do in the world! And what relationships matter to me. Trauma gets in the way of that and at some level it says to you, "The best you can hope for in this life is some level of management."
We have to be willing to stay in the game like the woman in Mark 5.
THE GREEK WORD: SPLAGCHNON (pronounced SPLOGNOSS) means intestines. Something in our SPLAGCHNON WANTS MORE!
There is something in your SPLOGNOSS THAT WANTS MORE!
That longing is so holy. It says something about your heart and your name! Ecclesiastes 3 says, "And He makes all things beautiful in its time for he has placed eternity in the hearts of humankind." Eternity in that phrase references our concept of time. But it also is referring simultaneously to the depth of the quality of the life that God lives. It has no bottom. No top. No side. No end to it. We can't get away from it.
God doesn't leave us without a witness! God has built into his created world a witness for what the story of the gospel is really trying to tell us.
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