Neurobiology of healing

I learned this from Juliane Taylor Shore.

Our explicit experience is the integration, mixing, of sensory inputs in the here and now (e.g. sight, sound, etc.) and our mental models.  We have a brain that takes up a lot of energy and a body that what to conserve energy by going on automatic pilot.  This way, we don’t have to constantly relearn how to walk or use our phones.  We also have learnings around what we expect in relationships and what we’re going to do around those expectations.  For example, I expect criticism and so I’m going to stay quiet.  David Wallin talks about research that suggests how we see ourselves, what we expect from others and how we see the world is largely shaped by pre-verbal experience.  Attachment styles assessed at 12 months of age, are highly predictive of attachment styles found at 19 and 26 years of age. (And they can change with intentional work.)

These early learnings are mediated by neural networks in the subcortical brain (i.e. limbic brain and basal ganglia).  They are often implicit and feel true. Juliane Taylor Shore calls these mental models emotional knowings (e.g. people don’t value me).  In contrast, our adult consciousness is mediated by neural networks in neo-cortex (e.g. some people value me).  These neural networks in the neo-cortex and subcortical brain are far away and often not in communication with each other.  The neutral networks that mediate emotional knowings that create difficulty in our lives (e.g. I am unlovable) are often very painful and evoke a threat response.  These neural networks are only available for updating or elimination (in a process called memory reconsolidation) under very specific conditions.  There has to be enough safety and enough.  Without enough stress, why change?  For updating to occur, the neural network mediating a problematic emotional knowing needs be active (i.e. a person needs to be embodied and feel their feelings—the potential blessing of being triggered) alongside juxtaposition and toggling back and forth with a neural network that holds disconfirming information that also feel subjectively true.  For example, my young self believes people don’t value me, my adult self believes that’s not universally true.  If a person is experiencing enough safety, mismatch detectors will register that both knowings can’t be simultaneously true, leading to the early learning becoming available for updating.  However, mismatch detectors go offline at the very beginning of a threat response.  Inward compassion and compassion from others increases our capacity to feel pain without going into a physiological threat response. Once an emotional knowing updates, we literally experience life through a different lens.