We INGEST in a matter of seconds to minutes, DIGEST things in a couple of hours, and METABOLIZE things for the rest of our lives.
We live in a world that trains us to believe that we should live urgently. It trains us to believe that the more urgent things feel, the more quickly those things should be resolved. We live fast. And instant.
God is comfortable with HIS pace and HIS own cadence, and He is not expecting us to move at a faster pace than He is moving.
In other words, I may be metabolizing this information for the rest of my life. And that's okay. This isn't to take in and have figured out instantly. Metabolize. Digest. Contemplate. Learn.
Confessional Communities allow us to healing and experience the physics of relational mass affect.
That above statement may sound confusing to you. But stay with me. It will become clear as you keep reading my notes on this lecture. The bottom line? WE NEED COMMUNITY. WE NEED PEOPLE. And those communities actually help heal us.
Picture a family getting ready for bed. A twelve-year-old that can do it herself. And the two-year-old that Mom will put to bed. But then there is Jimmy, an eight-year-old in his room flying an airplane around his room. Mom asks Dad to handle Jimmy. She walks past the bedroom where Jimmy is, and she is wondering, "What is happening here?" because her husband is flying airplanes with his son, and this doesn't look like he's helping him get ready for bed. But Dad has met his son where he is.
Dad has numerous options. He can make Jimmy put the plane down right away. Or he can let Jimmy decide when to go to bed. But Dad, instead, joins his son. Dad matches his energy and pace, but then ever-so-gradually starts to slow down, on purpose, imperceptibly, and he is, by sheer mass affect and attunement and body language and tone of voice, gradually working his son into bed in a period of 5-7 minutes.
This is an example of a father who is attuned to his son. He isn't letting him do whatever he wants. And he isn't shutting him down immediately. Healing comes about through the physics of mass affect. If your child falls down and skins her knee, you come to her, and you meet her where she is. Her very small body is being met by your much larger body that is coming to her with kindness and gentleness and attunement and is moving in a direction of healing whereby which she learns that even when she is experiencing pain, her pain doesn't get the last word. What gets the last word is her mother being present with her in her pain. It turns her attention to her mom and the care of her pain even in the middle of it.
This is part of the reason that Trinitarian philosophy is so vital as we discuss this healing process. We worship the trinity that collectively, as a community, has created us in His image and has commissioned us to live like he lives. This means that my growth and development happen because I am having an experience with a co-regulating other in a community (ideally with two parents and perhaps siblings). In this situation, the community itself is responsible not just because of its kindness and attunement it offers but because the mass affect of that kindness and attunement. Trinitarian life offers something that a single person's interaction with me is not as able to do. Community life is vital for healing.
Neuroplastic Change
This is relatively new research. We can enhance the size of the neuron, the thickness on which a neuron connects with another neuron, or the number of neurons (particularly in the area of the hippocampus). That neuroplastic change is most effectively enhanced by the frequent practice of small acts. This means that tiny changes over and over again matter!
If I want to learn to play the piano, it is more effective to practice 15 minutes every day of the week then to practice three hours one day a week.
Think about medical school. They don't throw you into a setting that is incredibly overwhelming. They instead push you into these experiences slowly. They don't have you run a code your first day on the floor. You are exposed to those traumatic events in the presence of others so as to train you for the day that you handle this on your own.
Healing is the same way. It's a slow, progressive growth. Little by little, we allow ourselves to be exposed to our traumas in the presence of our community. This community includes your therapist or ideally, a therapist AND friends who are attuned to us.
Trauma affects our time travel: the way we think about the past and how we anticipate the future.
When I have a traumatic event, it is embedded in memory networks and those memory networks became the basis out of which I anticipate my future. Our trauma is unable to tell time.
Those neurons that fire together, wire together. Memory therefore, is a process by which neurons increase their probability of firing together.
If I repeatedly say to myself, "I should have done this or that to prevent the abuse I encountered ..." Those kinds of statements affect our wiring -- reinforcing the shame that I carry with me. I want to practice activating new networks, little by little, durably, over time.
If you have a near-drowning incident when you are four years of age, you can protect yourself by never going back to the pool. But if you want to be a part of your friends' pool parties, you may have to come back little by little. Maybe come without clothes and just sit on the edge. And you, little-by-little, end up being more and more comfortable around the pool. We begin to establish new neural networks of safety. But I am not doing it myself. My community is doing it with me. We are doing it collectively, with me and for me.
This element of practicing firing new neural networks so that they can begin to wire together, recognizing that the more frequently we practice small acts, the more durable those neural networks becomes.
We learn to pay attention to the things that we need to pay attention to.
We ultimately become what we pay attention to.
Attention is actually significantly different and unique from attunement. I can pay attention to things non-consciously because I can have my attention dictated and guided automatically without my awareness to all kinds of things in the world. It is another thing altogether to attune, on purpose, to the emotional state of another. When someone attunes to me with loving kindness, they are accessing the neural networks within me that have, for a long time, longed to be seen and made to feel soothed, safe and secure, but up until now have not had the opportunity for that to happen. With that attunement, neural networks in my social engagement system, turn on that haven't had the opportunity to turn on before. Turning that system on, might simultaneously try to activate our fight or flight mechanism.
If your friends call you to go to the pool and you have had this near-drowning experience, at the same time that we long to be with our friends, we are also terrified because it activates memory for you and that memory activation is taking place in you body long before you conscious awareness of that memory is taking place in brain time. (In other words: we feel it before we know we feel it.)
Most of our attentional activity is non-conscious.
Most of our remembered life is implicitly remembered.
So much of our implicitly remembered, non-conscious activity that is encoded is the encoding of fear and shame. Those networks are often non-mylenated and once they get activated, they are there for a long time. Our fear networks don't have much practice being associated with an attuned co-regulating presence. In order for me to begin to remember a different future, I must begin to activate neural networks in which I have the opportunity to practice imagining a different future. I can do that by having here-and-now experiences in which I feel safe, sound, and secure. This is the neural mass affect. And this is done in community.
Story-telling is a bottom-to-top and right-to-left and back again process. But these stories must be told slowly and repeatedly and durably in order for reintegration to take place. This notion is a hallmark of neural plastic change and it creates new neural networks in which we anticipate a life of well-being and a life of joy. Let's say we are speaking to one person who is taking care of us. And let's compare that to being in a community of people who are doing this work. Which one is more successful? The community is more successful.
When a patient comes in for help from a therapist, they often are prepared to out-flank the therapist and refuse to share certain things with them. These things are too uncomfortable. When we find ourselves in a community, not just one-on-one with a therapist, the affect can be very different. As I share my story, someone listening to me can say, "Your vulnerability is affecting my story." A therapist won't say that to a patient readily as the relationship is different. But in the community, the healing moves on back-and-forth lanes more than it does in therapy.
These confessional communities are helpful to people because of our vulnerability -- not because of our wit and wisdom. Most of us do not recognize that in the act of being vulnerable, we create space for helping other people to be vulnerable as well. "When you were vulnerable with me, it spoke to a part of me that I had never thought about before."
The act of vulnerability has power for neuroplastic change and within others that would be otherwise difficult to recognize if I am not in a community that is all being vulnerable with each other. We can out-flank our therapist, but it is hard to out-flank seven or eight people at the same time.
My brain is affected the other brains in the room!
If we have one relationship that is attuned to us, it creates the neural mass for us that we have never had before. It is someone else coming for us. We are able to move into a river of integration because we have the impact of someone who is joining us. If there is more than one person, the pace and depth occurs even faster!
We first sense it in the room amongst non-verbal cues -- the comfort that we feel having someone with us. So much of what trauma does both shatters our story and shatters our story-telling mechanism. We can't imagine a different future. We are walled off neurally. We lose possibilities of hope and joy because we are primarily trying to do all of this by ourselves. We need the mass affect of someone else's brain to invite us to consider (even if for only a small moment) a new experience that turns on a new set of neural networks that we then WANT to practice by remembering.
Even if your encounter is virtual, it is valuable.
When these moments of feeling seen ... happen, take a moment and pause ... and then repeat the moment. When these moments occur in our confessional communities, stop the process, and invite the person who has had this new-creation moment to stop and reflect and tell us what just happened in our body. "I want you to tell me who spoke to you and what did they say and how did they say it." You will watch the lights go from being dim to being brighter and brighter. We are re-firing those same neural networks that were firing when the first insight came. Encourage your friend to go home and write about this. Write the screenplay. Note what a person was wearing. Where a person was sitting. Remember the event as it has happened.
In Deuteronomy 8, Moses tells the people to remember four separate times. As we practice remembering, we are enhancing our neural plastic change. And to the degree that we are doing this in the context of community, we are building a bigger train.
Trauma and its primary vehicle of shame is like a locomotive.
Let's see you encounter a tiny little wagon flying toward you at 3mph. You could stop that with your foot. If you have a train approaching you at the exact same speed, you couldn't stop it. But not from its velocity. It's because of its mass affect!
What we are doing in this healing work is building a bigger train.
Our trauma and the shame that it wields is like a locomotive. We can't just speak to the trauma and have it go away. We, collectively, join forces (bringing my mind to the table which has had a co-regulatory experience with someone else) and have a community, collectively, that together begins to shape our remembered past that then shapes our anticipated future because of the affect of multiple people in the presence of our mind.
It's not surprising then that when we hear Jesus say:
Where two are more of you are gathered, I will be there also.
He is speaking to the relational mass affect!
We need people!
Paul never went anywhere by himself. He always went places with other people. Jesus decided that his ministry was going to be WITH others. God is a God of communal mass affect. This is everywhere in the Biblical narrative!
One of the other things that these confessional communities do for us is this: everyone is born into a system. Every system in the world is based off the family. We model this in every single system: politics, work, school etc.
Consequently our traumas don't just exist relationally. They take place in some sort of system. "Yes, my Uncle abused me over many months, but that took place in a certain system that maybe allowed that to happen." When we are moving toward healing, our neuroplastic change will be dependent on having a community of people that is able to enhance our durability of our neuroplastic change. Can we have more and more people that we are having a secure interaction with?
Your healing process is a train moving out of a station. Trains don't move out of stations quickly.
We must allow ourselves to exhale and realize that the very act of acknowledging our trauma, itself, is a great act of courage. Moving toward it and into it with a trusted relationship is another act of courage that all takes time. But that process of the train moving out of the station in the context of community is going to help us do what they talk about in Hebrews 12:1-2:
"Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God."
Who are the cloud of witnesses in your life? Who are the cloud of witnesses for you that are bearing witness to your trauma? We need a cloud of witnesses that are bearing witness to the story that I am telling. This will enable me to tell that story more truly. Do you have that cloud? Let's run with perseverance!
This healing journey is NOT a walk in the park. Evil has no intention of going quietly into the night. It will resist us at every turn. This will be work of perseverance. We will need practice over and over again. And we need help from people who are witnessing our stories! Do you trust that God is aware of this path that you are on?
There is a ton of effort that is required to resist the self-contempt that you feel for yourself.
One of the hard things about "renewing our mind" is throwing off the sin. There is no secret that we are not very good at loving one another. But even more difficult than loving other people is our capacity to be receptive to love. We don't love others well because we can't give what we don't have. Those old memory networks of terror and trauma make me feel that I will be left on the side of the road! So I have to throw off my practices that enhance my trauma. And this is so, SO difficult.
But God wants us to be a participant in this healing. We are doing active work at remembering and turning our attention to joy. When someone SEES me, I still have lots of memories of feeling UNSEEN. But I must participate in remembering the time that we do feel SEEN. It is tricky because we will be imperfect at this. And our imperfection leads to bludgeoning ourselves for not being perfect.
My healing requires my full participation!
You must work to turn your attention away from the sin that entangles and turn your attention to Jesus Christ the perfecter of your faith. Can you spend time each day remembering the positive things that happened and be "transformed by the renewing your mind?" Can you take an active role in receiving your healing?
There will be times that evil wants to access our old neural networks. It will tell us that nothing has changed at all! Our community can remind us of the new life that we are creating. We are creating outposts of beauty and goodness and part of that creation work includes suffering! Our brains are sifting out old memories of grief.
It is harder to receive love than it is to give love.
Jesus does not care about benchmarks. He just wants us in the game!
As you listen, what is stirring for you?
Notice that.
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