Still Talking to the Wrong Brain

For decades now I have been emphasizing the fact that in psychotherapy we have been addressing the wrong brain. If we really want to produce feeling human beings and not mental giants in therapy we need to skirt the left brain and focus elsewhere. Science has pretty well concluded that it’s the right brain that allows for reliving, not the intellectual insightful left brain. Several studies have emphasized addressing the right brain in order to penetrate the deeper regions of feelings. (W. Penfield 1958 proc. Nat'l Academy of Science USA 44 51-66. Also, Banceaud et al., 19994 Brain, 117 71-90) So long as we focus on the left frontal, thinking, rationalizing brain we will only get progress limited to the thinking, comprehending brain and not the feeling one. We will be loaded with insights that cover over feelings rather than expanding them. Progress will be limited to the psyche and not the whole system. That is why neurology and psychology must meet and inform each other. For it has been fairly consistent now that the right brain is chiefly responsible for reliving our historical feelings. If we ignore how the brain and emotions work will certainly go astray.

I suppose the philosophical dilemma is what is most important, feelings or intellect? They are both essential but feelings have been terribly neglected in psychotherapy. We have to right the ship and put feelings back to where they belong.

We cannot insist on a sit-up, insight-driven therapeutic approach and hope to get to feelings. Unfortunately, too many therapists believe that the goal of psychotherapy should be awareness and self understanding of feelings rather than eliminating the painful ones. What happens too often is that the patient uses her insight and her intellect to suppress feelings and then imagine she is doing well in therapy. Insights become an agent of self-deception. “Oh. I understand my feelings so now I am better.” Not so fast. Understanding feelings is not the same as feeling them. Feeling them gives meaning to life, to experience, gives joy and empathy; gives the person a new élan vital. Feeling them activates the whole system not just the isolated mental apparatus. I think insight has had an exalted place in therapy since the time of Freud because he , emphasized them, and he did that because they had not and still do not have a way of penetrating the feeling zone of the brain. Being left with only the cortex there was no choice but to focus on it and its functioning. Comprehension and insight became the lingua franca of therapy, and we still suffer from that unwitting deception.

And feeling them is not the same as painting or writing them. I see writers who can write about feelings yet cannot feel them, and so they live a life bereft. And they come to therapy in order to feel better but too often the therapy neglects feelings and so they cannot possibly feel better. They know more but still feel empty. Feelings fill that emptiness, and why? Because the patients can feel what that emptiness or loneliness is about and get to the root of it.

There are other aspects of the confluence between feelings and knowledge. There use to be scream clubs where groups of college students would get together and scream; implying that they were doing a sort of psychotherapy. But now we know that without cortical connection a scream is just a scream, unconnected and therefore not integrated into the system. In short, a release or abreaction with nothing curative. Here again we need to understand the relationship between lower and higher brain centers and how they interact. We know that emoting in and of itself is just a discharge of the energy of the feeling without integration. Thus we need to understand the triune brain to see that a feeling is made up of different levels of brain organization, none of which can be ignored. There needs to be the energy portion, the emotional and the intellectual or psychological. And we need to know how pain comes into existence and how it becomes eradicated. We need to know that there is a gating system and a defense system and how they interact. There needs to be science involved with carefully constructed hypotheses that can be tested and measured. We need to know what we mean by cure and/or progress in psychotherapy.