BRAIN INTEGRATION

A little child is running excitedly down the corrider, when he suddenly slips and bumps his head. Physically, there is no damage at all, however the child who is shocked, scared and sad intuitively extends his arms to be picked up by his mother. She immediately retrieves him into her arms, her cheeks firmly pressed against his. The child then sees the empathy, compassion and safety in her eyes as she gently and slowly sways him from side to side. The Child immediately starts to relax and is settled after a few moments. 

When a child's parents hold and validate his or her emotional experience, nerve connections grow across the child's brain that help a child to manage their emotions. Some of these connections are between the right and left sides of the brain. As this child grows into a health adults, information from the right lobe is integrated with the left lobes. The right lobe experiences an emotion, the left lobe gives a name to that emotion. The emotions in right lobe signal that something important has happened, the left lobe gives reasons to explain why it is important. According to Clinical Professer of Psychiatry Dan Siegel, integration between the right and left brains is critical to developing a healthy way of experiencing emotions. 

According to another distinguished clinician,  neuroscientist and psychologist Alan Schore, things go wrong however where the left frontal lobe suppresses information from the right lobe, rather than integrate with it. So instead of understanding why an event was so important that was creating such feelings, it instead tells the left lobes that it shouldn't be experiencing those emotions in the first place.

But why would the left lobes do this? A lot of it has to do with the messages we get from the environment. If for example in the situation above, the mother had declined to pick up her child, and had told him ‘there’s nothing wrong with you’ and sent him on his way, the child would have the confusing situation of still feeling shock, scared and sad, but getting the message that he shouldn’t be having those feelings. As a result, the child may start to ignore those feelings whenever they come up.

This might seem to work in the short term, however the problem is that those emotions are still active in the circuitry of the right brain, and so they still effect the behaviour of the person. For example, the person may be motivated to avoid any situation that might release those emotions. They may actually be driven to do behaviours that on the outside look high functioning, such as being motivated to work really hard to avoid the feeling of failure, or to focus all their efforts on constantly being around others in order to avoid feeling alone.

It often happens that these emotions end up getting triggered in spite of the best efforts to suppress them. When they are released, they are overwhelming and difficult to control. This may be what happens in some cases of suicide, where people seem to suddenly suicide out of the blue when it had appeared to the people around them that there had been nothing wrong at all. 

Repression of emotions can also cause people to have difficulties with experiencing intimacy in relationships. This can be especially difficult the other partner is looking for more intimacy than what the other partner is able to give.

The brain is a complex organ that integrates many memory circuits, not just the right and left hemispheres. These circuits are like programs that switch on at different times. For example, when you’re talking to your boss, you might have a program that tells you to be extra cautious with what you say. This program can affect your tone of voice, thoughts, and feelings. In another situation, you might have another program that kicks in and affects you in the opposite way, such as getting angry if someone cuts in front of you in traffic. It’s normal for us to have programs that have opposite effects that are activated in different situations. But what happens if you have two programs with opposite actions that are triggered at the same time by the same event? For example, if your boss talks to you harshly, you might have a program that kicks in wanting you to submit, while another program kicks in that is actually telling you to push back hard. In that situation, you might decide to ignore the program telling you to push back. A common expression for this is 'Biting your tongue".

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What happens on the other hand if a child grows up in an environment where they constantly get the message that they are not meant to experience a certain emotion? It is likely that the child will learn to constantly suppress that memory circuit and leave it unintegrated from the rest of the system. 

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According to Alan Schore, the key to progress in therapy is for the therapist to empathically resonate with the patient at a deep emotional level. The therapist can then help the client to regulate those suppressed emotions, in effect giving them the same experience that a securely attached child would recieve from their parent. When therapsits track the patient's experience, and give them permission to experience and explore their bodily sensations, thoughts and feelings, patients often come to new insights and understandings about themselves. As this experience is repeated over and over, the patient will gradually learn to self regulate their own emotions rather than to suppress them.

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Another concept here is that therapy is works towards integrating the information from all the different memory circuits together. That way, the client can use all the helpful information that each memory circuit gives, rather than having to constantly suppress out certain memory circuits.

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Some memory circuits might be linked to very strong negative emotions, and so might be difficult for the patient to think about, meaning that they are difficult to integrate. This is where memory reconsolidation can be very helpful.

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Through these interventions, the therapist can do much to help the client to  achieve their goals, to grow and to heal.