Why I Am Right Brain

I discussed right and left brain in my “Primal Healing”. But I will take it a step further and make it more personal. I grew up a mess, anxious and in unrelenting pain. I was dominated by my right brain. I could not learn, focus or concentrate. I can now. But as I got into feeling and connection, my left brain began to take over its proper function. And I think there is a balance now. That is also what our research shows. Since I believe that the right, feeling brain is charged with an overall perspective, a coordination of disparate event, I was good at that and poor in point by point research. The details eluded me. Too anxious for that.

The good part of this is that it allowed me to see the grand picture and to place separate aspects of human behavior and feeling in a more holistic frame of reference. Thus, the right brain dominance allowed me a broad frame of reference, the connotative approach. I could pay attention to nuance and implications rather than the denotive process of each and every fact being examined separately. And it led me to an overall therapy that did not focus on this fact or that, like cognitive therapy or EMDR. It allowed me to deal with the whole human being. So there is a good part of being dominated by one’s emotions. Now as my left brain develops, and I think it developed very late in my life, I can add the intellectual dimension to what I am researching and put two and two together. Our research into our patients who had one year or more of our therapy found that there was this shift from right to left, forming a more balanced brain. Finally, we can find relief and harmony; no small matter.

Now why was I right brain? Judging by my birth primals I had a horrific, extended birth with a mother who became psychotic after my birth, and who gave me immediately to my grandmother who eventually killed herself, forcing my mother into an asylum. I was then given away to a strange family for some long period of time. The pain was building from the start and there was nothing I could do, no behavioral option that could get me love, or at least approval. There were no options to get out of my predicament. So I suffered. I never knew it was suffering; it was just ADD plus. (plus constant anxiety and nightmares) So generally when there is ADD, look for the suffering and treat it, not just the lack of focus or concentration. And when there are nightmares look carefully at gestation and birth; you will no doubt find many answers there. There is hope. The more we become integrated it will show in our brain scans and in our general feeling of relaxation. You cannot relax with an uneven, unbalanced brain; a brain that is skewed to one side or the other. Being normal means being balanced and harmonious; that is the best of feeling. You will never get there in one blow. It takes many, many relivings but the direction is always right. And slowly integration takes place and the imbalance becomes balance.

Generally of the scientists I have treated there is a common denominator. They got what passed for love by being smart and getting good grades. All they had to do was eschew feelings. So they grew up left brain dominant. Even when they understand the research and the importance of feeling, they cannot make the trip from left to right. They remain unbalanced. It is not an intellectual difference; it is a matter of a whole upbringing. You cannot by any force of will make that transition. The only way is to open up the right brain to feeling and then build on that.

Feelings come first, not the new ideas. That is why fourteen-year-old students I have spoken to get it right away. That is why my patients in pain and feeling also get it. Those who don’t, see feelings as some foreign land. It is strange and incomprehensible to them. A place never to tread. Feelings will eventually sway the intellect; never the reverse where one can understand it all with the left brain and then make the transition. Feelings change ideas; ideas rarely change feelings.

Oxytocin (Part 3/5)

Bonding is the most positive aspect of human relationships. We learn how to bond emotionally in adulthood through early bonding in childhood, as simplistic as that sounds. It cannot be taught! And it certainly cannot be taught in later life. Attachment is pretty well set in our childhood. It is not something we learn; it is something we feel. It is also something biochemical. Those who did not bond very early on with their parents may well be condemned to a lifetime of broken, fragile, tenuous relationships. It may be in large part due to deficits in the hormonal wherewithal such as oxytocin. Oxytocin researcher and National Institute of Mental Health scientist, Thomas Insel has remarked that, "Many of the affectional ties to the mother observed post-natally (after birth) could be laid down by pre-natal experience." Life in the womb may determine life outside the womb for decades to come. It is a continuum, not two separate unrelated events. If the early relationship with one’s parents was distant, alienated and glacial, it may be a harbinger of the love relationships we have or don't have later in life. The earlier the alienation from one's parents, the more trouble there may be in relationships later on. I have seen it in hundreds of my patients. It approaches a biologic law – if my sampling of our patients is any index.

In certain mountain rodents such as the mountain vole, a species that lives an isolated life (as differentiated from the prairie vole, which is more social), a shot of oxytocin proved to encourage bonding and pairing between voles. After repeated injections there was a long-acting anti-stress effect, which calmed overall behavior and gave rise to a strong tendency to bond. This again indicates that early love supports calmness and serenity. Those humans who are able to bond with others have high levels of oxytocin. Love seems to be the ultimate painkiller and a permanent one. It prepares us for the challenges of life and is the ultimate survival tool.

All of our hormones are sensitive to the environment; when it is hostile and dangerous the system “ withdraws” or retracts, and that includes the levels of oxytocin. A mother giving birth who is under stress and great pain will have less oxytocin; (one reason why when it is injected it aids in childbirth). We have to assume that a mother who is chronically stressed while carrying will result in less oxytocin in her offspring. It seems to work in see-saw fashion, more adrenaline (stress—provoking the flight or fight response) less oxytocin.

That means that during childhood when love is offered by our parents, and still later by lovers, we cannot feel it. Repression has blocked our ability to receive input, even if that input is love. Repression, in short, has predated later love by a parent and blocked its input. Repression, therefore, can set up before birth when a chronically anxious mother has induced her fear into the baby and adversely affected oxytocin. And then we wonder why our baby is so fidgety and cannot be hugged.

There is enough evidence to show that a newborn's heart rate, body temperature, and respiration rate are governed by the mother; when she is loving and nurturing towards the baby she carries, there is a positive affect on the baby and the set-points of heart rate and blood pressure become normal. Any neglect she inflicts changes the biochemistry of the baby, perhaps permanently. Her anxiety and depression during pregnancy may very well alter the offspring's sex hormone levels. We know, for example, that anxiety in the mother can and does alter the sex hormone level of the fetus and can feminize infant males. So what we see is that once a male is feminized he is vulnerable, more vulnerable to a lack of love during infancy and childhood. He may become homosexual as a result of a cold, distant father, while the one who is not vulnerable will remain heterosexual. We need to understand that at certain levels of vulnerability, stress, trauma or pain can produce an overload and channel them into a symptom. In this sense, homosexuality could be considered a symptom, in the sense that there is a latent tendency, a feminizing, which only becomes overt homosexual behavior due to trauma; i.e., the lack of a father’s love. If the father’s love is there, it may remain a latent tendency.

The female prairie vole, when treated soon after birth with steroid/stress hormones, showed an increase in masculine behavior, such as mounting. Most of us don't have to be injected with stress hormones; stress in the womb and just after birth accomplish the same thing, and may indeed masculinize females. It seems like whatever happens in the womb has a lifetime of consequences; whereas events after birth seem to provoke compensating mechanisms that vitiate its effects. Thus drugs given to a pregnant mother has an enduring effect on the offspring, while drugs given to an infant may not reset the set-points. The earlier this happens the more enduring the imprint and its physiologic effects.

Although we may think that an injection is something special, the same chemical process takes place naturally. We can inject oxytocin, or we can massage the animal, and increase oxytocin levels that way. We can create stress for a pregnant woman, or inject her with steroids – the psychological effect is precisely the same as from a needle. A mother can be kind and loving and raise the serotonin levels in her offspring so that he can better handle adversity or a doctor can inject serotonin into the offspring and produce a temporary calming effect that is no different than that created by a loving look from the mother. A mother can "inject" oxytocin into her baby through her milk, which contains high levels of the hormone. Love, or what looks like it, can be injected. When "injected" naturally and at the proper time it will produce a loving human being.

A therapist can ask us, "Were you loved?," and we may insist, "Absolutely," yet we are betrayed by our oxytocin levels, which are far too low, and by our stress hormone levels, which are far too high, and also by our hormone levels which may be quite deviated. They speak too. The body and its physiology do not lie. Indeed, we may have been loved after birth, but suffered severe traumas in the womb of which we remain completely unaware.

To be continued next week...