On the Right and Left Brain. There Is No Cure Without Their Unity. (Part 3/10)

Let’s be sure that we don’t mean awareness. It means experiencing and feeling it. It means having the original feeling again. And that is the difference. Awareness keeps us on the left no matter how hard we want to get to feelings. So if I tell a patient, “You know what feelings you have hidden? A lot of fear.” And she says, ”Yeah, I guess so. Thanks for the information.” That is the end of it. No help. Or if the doctor tells the patient, “explain your feelings.” All is lost because the left brain was used to discuss and explain when it should have first been the right brain. Defying evolution will never get us there. If you think before feeling you still may be out of control; if you feel before thinking you are in control. If I know what is causing my migraines I can get control. If I don’t know I have no control.

Yes, one can do behavior therapy and drive away the symptom which makes the person sicker because she is deprived of an outlet. If she cannot check the gas jets twenty times a day she suffers and is full of fear. The obsession is exactly like taking a tranquilizer. It makes the symptom tranquil but it remains unrelenting because the feeling is. When there is a generalized terror set down at birth or before, (see “Primal Healing” for a full explanation), it stays locked-in. The act out is checking gas jets, and they must be checked many times a day to keep the low-level fear from becoming explosive terror. Now the left brain does not know there is terror forcing the act-out; it just goes on happily with its obsession. And, then the person can reason--after all, it is not so bad. The obsession binds the feeling; thus, the left brain surrounds the right feeling and places a barrier around it; that barrier is in many places, including the corpus callosum.

Yet this person decides to have therapy, not because he suffers but because his wife told him to as she could not stand it any more. They could not go out to dinner until all the jets were checked over and over. So he goes to a therapist who focuses on the act-out, not the cause. Those gas jets. He won’t get well, although his left brain will engage in a constant struggle to control his act out. The inner pressure remains and will be deadly, in the literal form of the word. When he feels what is on the right he has control at last.

And he won’t change until we help him descend to the origins of the terror, in context. And that has to be done slowly over months, one pain at a time; one lesser pain leading to more heavy ones as we progress deeper in therapy. The primal context is that devilish right brain, all disguised and hidden. Yet only it knows about the terror. There is such a gap between the deep feeling and what it forces the obsessive to do that neither she nor her therapist can make the connection. So what are they left to do? Keep on treating the obsession as a viable entity all by itself, ad infinitum. The left brain has extracted its meaning from the origin. It is a therapy of fragmentation, of splitting the patient off from his symptom. It is inhuman and de-human.

Now we have the intellectual left and the emotional right. When we consider having psychotherapy the left chooses cognitive while the right seeks out gestalt (a kind of free-for-all of do whatever you want approach). Those with intrusion of pain may seek us out. We search out whatever will reinforce our neurosis. Let me quickly add that there can be no real progress in any psychotherapy without the active participation in full of both hemispheres. We cannot get well on one side of the brain while the other stays sick. We cannot avoid the pain and feelings that drive us from almost conception on and hope to be rid of anxiety, phobias and depression. The right holds all those secrets; it is up to the left to make the first step toward a rapprochement with it. This is not intellectual theorizing; what I state has a good deal of research behind it, including any number of split-brain experiments that tell us the function of each side.



(To learn more start with Drs Joe Bogen and Roger Sperry’s split-brain work).

Historically, the reason the left hemisphere gets so active when there is stored pain is that it has to suppress it so that it can get on with its job of concentrating on the outside world, the job, school, etc. The right, too, tries to contain overwhelming feelings so that the left can do its job properly. But when it is filled up it needs help, and it turns leftward for help and connection; alas, the left is absent because it has all these meetings and projects and places to go. It can’t be bothered. The left seeks out success when the only real success is to be a feeling human being who can love and be loved. And the busy man comes to therapy and wants action. But he soon finds out that his left brain has to slow down into the feeling zone and that it must accede to the right brain, something it is not used to. The patient complains of constant difficulty in falling asleep. His lower right level has long nerve networks reaching upward that drive the frontal thinking area to be activated; hence, the rumination—on the left. It cannot let go and allow the right to fall asleep. And it goes on and on because the right brain has been neglected. The pain is saying, “let me out,” but the left won’t do it. And so the symptom. The pain has to go somewhere. And then we treat that pain, the back, neck and stomach, because we did not treat the real pain. Is it really only about pain? No, it is about joy, love and contentment but the only way to get there is over the bridge to the pain on the right brain. Then it is real.

When defenses are weak (when life deals some cruel blows), there can be a breakthrough of deep imprinted terror, and the person claims she is having a panic or anxiety attack. Here the feeling is uncontrolled and uncontained; it has no special context for the moment until the patient takes the vehicle out of storage and rides back in time. The left has to cede hegemony to the right and let it take over, something it is not used to doing. Feelings can lead us to the truth, and that is why we can have such insights as a result because the left now knows what that hidden feeling made her do. The left now knows exactly what circumstances lead to her high blood pressure or his exhibitionism. And the insights flow effortlessly. “I have to show my penis so I can get an emotional reaction (shock)from a woman.” The post session insights are very much part of the primal experience, tying the two sides tightly together. No insights no feelings. Not every time but often.



Let me add in the case of the exhibitionist that before the insights there are many many days of feeling. “I tried every day to get my mother’s attention. She was too depressed to pay attention.” He relived many of these scenes and then the key feeling, “Look at me momma! Please!” To try to have an intellectual insight without all the preceding events and feelings is useless. It remains intellectual, does not seep into the system to make changes.

Let me reiterate: the feeling is experienced; the rape victim invariably creates the same bound hands together during a primal,(her father held her hands as he took her from behind), and she now sees what it made her do. She was hostile to men and became a lesbian. (This is from an actual case that we have filmed). She only felt safe with women. These are the insights that tumble out after a feeling. If she cannot have the insights, then perhaps there was not yet a connected feeling. Perhaps more was dredged up that has yet to be felt and connected. In other words, if there are no insights we are bereft of understanding the act-outs. It is as if to say there were no consequences from a disastrous feeling. And as I noted elsewhere, the earlier and feeling the greater the chance of a serious affliction later on. The valence or force of the imprint never lessens; the left side just covers it up better. So we see here how the obsession with the gas jet and the turn to lesbianism may have the same roots. It is behavior in an unconscious attempt to control a past harmful and traumatic feeling. So in a way, neurosis is the current way we control the past. The only problem is that in the present it remains out of context. It was appropriate to be afraid of father in the past but not normal now to be afraid of authority figures. It is logical but not normal.

So why are there attention deficits? Because the right which is charged with sustained attention is so loaded with pain that it off-loads some of its burden to the left. Now all kinds of inputs are coming in to disturb concentration and focus. The right cannot do its job. Remember that the very early trauma is lodged in the right and takes up space there, and above all, it constantly agitates because pain is driving it incessantly. It needs to connect with the left, and the neo-cortex but the gates stop it. Connection means the end of it as an agitating force. It means rest and relaxation; it means integration. No longer alien feelings but those who have found a home. So long as they are alien the system treats it as a foreign force and considers it as an invading stranger. When the feelings come too close to conscious-awareness the system goes into alarm mode; the white cells treat the feeling as alien and dangerous and the blood pressure and heart rate mount. The happens to almost every patient when they come close to deeply-lodged feelings. The left sounds the alarm when feelings come close and the system goes into alarm/panic mode; mobilizes to keep it all away, while gating swings into action. It stimulates evasive action, avoiding anything that will evoke feelings.

Those who had a harridan for a mother will avoid aggressive women in their lives. Most of us avoid whatever might set off alien feelings; and so in a way we are programmed. Those who had a tyrannical father may become obsequious in the face of male authority in order to stave off anger. The latent fear is already so high that the person cannot take any more. We can tell ourselves—the right self, not to be afraid but it is a weak force against a lifetime of terror; in the same way we can tell our selves not to eat chocolate when the imprint of starvation in the womb hidden on the right is importuning. The left is no match for the imprints on the right. They are always packing more power than the left, as they should; it is our emotional self. So we have an emotional self, an intellectual self and finally, a real self…united. It is that real self that can control things such as overeating or premature ejaculation. Why overeating? Because there is a history underlying it. He is eating out of his history. He is not only hungry now but back then—starving in the womb. He is trying to get fulfilled back then, as well. The same as trying to get love now to make up for no love as a child. Fulfillment is sine qua non; it cannot be forgotten so one is always looking for fulfillment in one way or the other. It is the left that takes need from the right and tries to find ways to get fulfillment, and it is always symbolic because the left side is basically the symbolic side. It wants more and more money because he cannot feel any fulfillment. The left brain sees the steak and the right brain rushes in with its history of starvation or deprivation to make the person eat for both times…..that is over-eating. The intellectual self has no emotional wallop by itself; that is why it is so weak in the face of powerful feelings. So there is sexual stimulation with the resulting premature ejaculation because the early pain is so heavy and the controlling left brain so weak.

For therapists, what the patient says is put into context by the right so that the doctor can also read the emotional subtext of what is going on. In other words, the doctor is not just listening to words but emotions. The left brain needs to hear words and cannot make decisions until he hears the right words. It cannot suss out what is an appropriate move without them. For example, when president Bush was told the Twin Towers were bombed he could not react immediately. He could not feel what was the right thing to do. So he waited, waiting for instructions so his left brain could decide what to do.

It would seem that deep depression is another one of those right brain imprints that never quite make it to upper level left connection; and so the malady lives on untouched by conscious/awareness. Repression of feelings set in so early that we come to think that depression is some kind of alien, unknowable force. We feel “heavy” because the deep powerful imprints are being held down, and we cannot seem to lift the burden. We are literally carrying a load—of pain. These imprints are all nonverbal and exceptionally early. They are almost unreachable except with a therapy that can get down that deep. No intellectual therapy can touch it; which is why there is widespread use of tranquilizers in conventional therapy. Imagine how far the imprint has to travel to reach the higher left brain cortical canopy and make a connection. Then the therapist says, “tell me how you feel.” All is lost because it is preverbal and nonverbal and cannot be expressed in words.

A little example from my life: someone is writing the story of my life. And so he went pretty far to interview one of my shipmates on the battleship we were on together. My pal recounted the story of a Japanese submarine that came up to the surface and was trying to ram us. Then we and another destroyer fired on the sub and sank it. I have no memory of all this, and I was standing on the gun station next to my pal. How is it possible that I do not remember and never did, except small snippets? I wasn’t there. I was in my past and my terror without cease. Where is my past? I have no idea. But I do know that my left side was not properly registering events. I may have seen what I saw but the left side did not acknowledge it and so I have no memory; and it bothers me no end that my life went by unconsciously. I was unconscious of my life; and it happens over and over again that friends tell me about high school and I have no memory of it. I was so deep in the hold of my early painful imprints that I was never there in the present in my childhood.



Just because the patient is unconscious doesn’t mean the doctor has to be. The doctor needs to know about the right brain and what it holds. When it is ignored any therapy that follows must be misleading. The doctor needs to know about how prenatal events get imprinted on the right and what they do to the left. Above all, the doctor needs herself to be connected.



One might wonder why I believe the force of the imprint never lessens even when we are sixty years old? Because in the reliving the force is there with all of its power, and the blood pressure, body temperature and heart rate climb to monumental proportions.

We don’t need to study brain damage to understand the contribution of each hemisphere because neurosis and the disengagement from the two hemispheres can explain so much. In other words, neurosis is very much like brain damage without there being damage, only dysfunction, which is reversible. That is the good part. We can be disconnected neuro-physiologically through destroyed or damaged tissue, or we can be disconnected through gating without serious damage. The result, however, is the same. One side doesn’t know what is going on in the other side.



I have left-brain friends, super-intellectuals who remember everything about their lives, dates, times and places. They are devoid of feelings but their memory is intact. If you had to make a choice what would you choose?

The two brains are symbiotic; and if you get into a therapy that does not fully account for that symbiosis it cannot work.Cognitive/behavior/insight therapy cannot get us deeply into the right side, while Reichian, Gestalt, hypnosis and other similar therapies miss out on the left. It is not like a choice they all make; their brains won’t allow it.

I will use myself to explain all this: I was always a right brainer. My mother while carrying was pre-psychotic, and the day I was born I was given over to my grandmother. When she killed herself my mother then went to a mental hospital and shipped my sister and I off separately for quite a long time to strange families. I never could recover from this and began a lifelong anxiety state that never stopped until Primal. I had serious ADD and ould not concentrate nor read anything complex. I could not pay attention and had to move constantly in class. I had serious image problems; very low self esteem. I was imprinted on the right and was dominated by it; there wasn’t enough left brain development to help repress feelings. Agitation on the right did not permit it. So there was a constant flow of pain from the right that decimated the left side function. I had constant nightmares and was terrified of going to sleep. I did badly in high school and never ever thought of any intellectual pursuit like going to college. But, in the navy I took an intelligence test and scored high, so high I was taken off my ship in mid-pacific and sent to university to study. I got straight A’s and realized “I can do this.” I then went to college and got serious about it. But it was not until Primal that I shook my anxiety, ADD, nightmares and the rest. Now after many decades I can think, and think abstractly. I can plan for the distant future, starting a book that will take years to finish.



The Primal Scream was a right brain piece, full of feeling. It took decades until I could use the left side to embellish my work and include serious science into it. I think now both sides are equal and work in harmony. Not easy. I could finally develop the left side because I got rid of all that garbage that was infiltrating into it from the right. As long as the right was overloaded there could be no harmony. And memory never made it to the left to be etched there permanently. The right had a terrible burden, and needed help. I discovered the help and gave it to myself. I invented, rather discovered, a therapy and could finally could make a marriage of the two sides and they get along famously. I can get to sleep easily because I can cede the left side to the right and get below the constant rumination and nightmares. And I can concentrate very well indeed. Apart from the damage surgeons did on my throat I am in perfect health; all systems working fine. I don’t think that is an accident. I use my case in order to illustrate all this for others.

THE RIGHT LEFT BRIDGE

There is major bridge connecting the two hemispheres; actually, there are several bridges (commissures) but the main one is called the corpus callosum; it carries over eighty percent of all emotional information to the left side. It has two functions: one, to carry information from right to left and back again; and two, to block information from right to left and back again. And why would it block information? When it means a lot of pain, more than the left/awareness can tolerate. Then we rationalize, “God will take care of a everything.”

When in our therapy the gates open up and the information passes through from right to left the patient is in pain. Happily, not for long. Once joined there is finally a way to relax; there is harmony and a mutual understanding. When the two sides make their contribution the patient is being integrated and on her way to getting well. And in our brain research there is a greater equilibrium between the two hemispheres.

The distance between our feelings/pain and our conscious/awareness of it I call the Janovian Gap. The wider the gap between right and left brains the sicker we may be and the earlier we may die, at least in my theoretical scheme. The two hemispheres are working against each other instead of in harmony with one another. The gap really is the distance between the right and left brain; how much information is allowed to traverse the corpus callosum (I call hereafter I call the corpus). When there is a wide gap there is an internecine battle going on. The loser is us. That gap often forces us to smoke and drink and take drugs. That is why the strict intellectual, and I know many in my field, has got to fall sick in his or her later life. And that sickness is often cancer. I wish this were just theory. I am at the age of having lost many friends. I see what they die of and I am rarely surprised. The right-siders, the impulsives, due to leaky gates, in my opinion, most often die of a stroke as the pain bursts through without sufficient control. Here the left side is weak.

On the Right and Left Brain. There Is No Cure Without Their Unity. (Part 2/10)

THE LEFT BRAIN

It is the left that is the thinker and the believer. It is the cognitive side, devoid of affect. This analyzing but unfeeling hemisphere seeks out single solutions for complex problems; its focus is narrow and superficial especially in my field. It believes what it is told and obeys readily.

One job of the left brain is to re-represent a feeling higher up in the nervous system.  It helps symbolize the feeling as the conceptual brain comes online.  And we can use that symbol (“he is suffocating me”) to gain access to the right unconscious (real early suffocation). We rely on evolution, understanding how early lower levels of consciousness move upward and forward pushing the next higher level into action.  And in those high level actions there are imbricated the lower level imprints—in this case, real suffocation. So we do not have to guess what is there. The nervous system seems to join similar feelings, seamlessly, into its nerve bundles, classifying them as a single category for storage.  Therefore, we know that below the symbol lies the feeling, and we are rarely disappointed.  We in our feeling therapy never try to change the re-representation/symbol/left-brain alterations of the feeling, (you suffocate me), we only use it to open the door to the imprint, to history. Trying to convince the person that he is wrong in his belief that his wife is suffocating him, is ripping out the belief from its proper context and destroying the organicity of the experience. “OK. I now understand what you mean, doctor, and I see that is not what she is doing.”  It is not her; it is his past that forced the belief.  It comes not from outside but from inside.  If we have no access to that inside we will mistakenly think it is simply her erroneous idea. Again, the belief was given birth by the feeling.  The feeling on the right holds it in place.

I hesitate to say this but the left brain when left to is own devices and not softened by the right, is a tyrant, an unfeeling fascist who can do harm.  Look at it in social terms; every fascist state denies the needs of its people and suppresses them when they show their face. So needs are not fulfilled and indeed are punished when they want fulfillment.  The State is not democratic until acknowledges needs.  We are not normal until needs are either fulfilled or felt; until the right brain sees the light of day.

The left brain is the symbolic self; it rises last out of evolution. It has the job of translating feelings from the past into current notions and beliefs, and helps us live in the present. Strange, because it does not speak the language of the right but it can translate it into its own verbal language. Clearly the right does not speak English but it speaks in its own way.  Isn’t that odd?  The left (say, in psychotherapy) tries to put words onto something that has no words; it is speaking the wrong language but is doing the best it can. Its language is numbers and statistics, after all. It is in theory and beliefs; that is why left brainers love theories and hypotheses.  And they stick by them no matter what the reality.  So they use the theory to interpret the patient’s words and cannot learn anything new that might contradict the theory.

You cannot get a doctor’s degree in my field without quoting a bunch of numbers. The only proof a student can proffer to get a diploma is statistics.  And voila, there is the sought-after diploma, at last.  But what happened? On the way the left crushed the right forevermore, never to be returned to is proper place.  And they give the student the diploma with the right brain attached in case he may need it in the future.  Alas, he doesn’t; I mean, he does, but he can’t find it.  He lost it in the seven years of desiccated, disembodied, devitalized and etiolated study.

You see the problem we have had in psychotherapy? Left brain doctors adopting left brain therapies and getting left brain answers for their results.  They publish in left brain journals for left brain scientists. Perfect.  It reinforces itself and reifies the results in a closed circle of reason.  Then a lonely right brainer comes along and says, “Hey I have a new idea.”  No one wants to hear it.  They are busy perfecting the minutia of their theory.  They have a very good rationale for what they are doing.

We do need the left side for science and the right side for feelings but never one or the other. And if we have to make a critique of any other therapy it is because it skews to one side or the other.  The right brainers get involved in airy-fairy approaches with little science behind them, (feelings and imagination from the right run wild), while the left brain maintains a narrow focus not seeing the implications nor totality of the event.  We need both; left and right working together, good imagination and feelings even beyond the facts, and facts that place feelings and imagination within the constraint of science.

The problem we have in our profession of mental health is that those early experiences lie on the right and do not tell their secrets to the left. That is one reason it remains unconscious.  The experience has no words nor scenes to help us know and remember them.  After all, life in the womb is wordless and bereft of scenes. Here lies the problem. Ina verbal, intellectual therapy we are trying to learn about the unconscious with a language that is on the left.  It’s watching the game from the far-away left bleachers and understands nothing.  The right is trying to inform it with its anxiety, obsessions and depressions but  the left can’t hear it.  The right has the key responsibility for integration of the two sides, but it cannot do it alone; and too often the left is not interested.  It has its modus operandi and does not want to be bothered. It never wants to get too emotional.  It cries a few tears and believes that is the extent of human emotion. It is not.  Clearly, the right is more “human.”  It cares about the living and it cares about feeling.



As we mature, the left comes on line, and the right is relieved because it can “dump” some of its load onto the left. What it dumps is the energy and force of the feelings and imprints; not the content.  The left hemisphere is like a shadow of the right, only vaguely aware of what the real feeling is. Yet in a vague way it understands a bit. The left is always looking through a screen trying to figure out what the real feeling is. So the person feels depressed but doesn’t know about the deep and early hopelessness and helplessness imprinted there.  Then we have a doctor who labels it depression, when that is not the feeling at all. It is a left brain tag from the left field stands describing what may be wrong.  Diagnosis is a label not a dynamic description.  The left will try to make the emotional information rational, as best it can.  When that load is too heavy with right side profound hopelessness, the left side can be overwhelmed.  There is then a profound weltschmerz that overcomes the left, as well. And the patient just feels down.  The doctor says, “You are depressed.”  The patient says, “thank you,” and now what?  How do we treat depression when we do not know what it is?  The labels don’t tell us much but feelings do.  Labels and diagnoses are left brain and can only approximate the right.  When the patient plunges into right brain deep hopelessness the depression begins to lift and we have learned something.

So the poor left side, that aloof insensitive guy in our head senses depression and struggles to make sense of what is going on inside. Confusion reigns. (Unfortunately, only the right orbitofrontal cortex, around the eyes, can look back into our history and suss out our old feelings.

As the load of pain increases the left is obligated to fabricate paranoia or fantasy of some kind, “They are after me and want to kill me.”  Or it can adopt booga booga, far-out, spacey ideas that are beyond reality.  We might call those ideas “crazy,” but it is only the left trying to accommodate the pressure from the right; to encircle and bind the terrible force, and to make it rational. The left is trying to fabricate a rationale for the feeling without knowing exactly what the feeling is; a strange paradox. But if we asked the person who was rationalizing what was the feeling behind it all he would have no idea. It all remains unconscious because of the lack of connection. We see this in the political sphere where groups want more and more arms because they feel unsafe.  They concoct an enemy that we must arm against.  They will never feel safe because “unsafe” is an imprint, an imprint that forces the left to find a rationale--an enemy. Yet they will only feel safe, ultimately, when they have gone back to feel "unsafe" in its original context.

One would think that the right simply dumps what it can to the left and that is the end of it.  But no.  There are filters that scramble the message so that only a bit of the memory/feeling gets through.  The left must guess what the feeling is, and it manufactures ideation to cover it. To produce the message and its comprehension we must address the brain that is holding the old, old secrets, and we cannot do that with the left brain; that means we cannot use the intellect to accomplish the task.   We must seduce the right brain to give up its pain, and it does so reluctantly—and slowly, and methodically and ever-so hesitantly.  It is not in a rush to feel pain but it will do so if it is not thrust into it abruptly.  Gently, gently is the watchword. The left must relinquish its hold, as well. And we must use the language of the right; simple sentences, a light tone, unforced cadence and mostly non-verbal cues; a touch here a nod of the head there.  If you want to talk big words and long sentences go to the left and ruin the session. And above all, do not use abstractions that the left side loves because that throws the patient into the wrong brain and stops feelings in their tracks.  We use her body language to tell us where to go; a cough, a tear, a tension all speak volumes and talk to us explicitly.   When we feel someone is hurting, a little hug will bring forth the tears, whereas a lengthy discussion or positive cheerleading won’t.  It is only what we do in therapy but it takes years to learn it.



Now we see why the ideas we manufacture are so unchanging; they are defending against a deep unconscious feeling that is not changing.  And we/the left don’t know about this. I find this incredible that we have feelings on one side that are not recognized on the other. Alas, that is the human condition.  It makes us eat chocolate and drink vodka and yet it is as if that side belonged to someone else; I guess in a way it does. What happens is that the left side takes the leitmotif of the right-side feeling and gives it structure. The right cannot do that; structure is not what it is about.

So we have a danger (of the feeling—lack of oxygen at birth or lack of love)which forces the manufacture of an enemy. And now the left does what it can to protect itself against that enemy. In extreme psychosis one puts foil covers on the head to stop the aliens from getting in.

It is pretty much the same in all cases. For example depression, which most often has at its base deep hopelessness.  Until the person feels fully that hopelessness, in context, the tendency to depression will stay.  And it stays a threat for a lifetime.  Where does the feeling come from?  Many places and many different times; perhaps at birth being impeded from coming out into life or being strangling by the cord; whatever engenders hopelessness—insuperable odds. This may be compounded later with feeling unloved with no chance at love by two statues (parents) incapable of love, compounded again by a husband later on who is cold and indifferent.  All this exacerbates the feeling of hopelessness. So, depression is not a feeling; it is the result of feeling, the suppression of it. The left side is often playing whack-a-mole; knocking down any sign of that hopelessness as soon as it shows its face. The person, driven by right, obliges the left brain to stuff itself with pain-killers without even knowing that there is pain.  And if the left knows there is pain inside it rarely knows what it is.  That is because the right is protecting the left from too much information--pain. The right is both a friend and an enemy. Choose your weapons; you cannot have both.  When you feel fully you have only a great friend who liberates you.

The left brain loves categories which is why the new psychiatric diagnostic manual is as thick as the Manhattan phone book.  Each new behavior has a category, so instead of seeing how feeling underlies it all, the experts, under the emprise /hold of the Behaviorists decide to concentrate on diagnostic categories, as if that can really helps or makes a difference in therapy.  So now they want to include forgiveness and also gratitude as categories; the only thing left out is sneezing but it won’t be long.  The truth is when my patients begin a certain kind of deep cough they are usually into something from deep in the neuraxis and it is truly diagnostic; so you see coughing is a diagnosis.  Why list each behavior in lieu of the motivation/feeling behind it?  Because feeling has been left out of the mix.  So those left brainers are building one by one several thousand diagnostic categories and they do it because the insurance companies require it for payment.  Nothing to do with science; nothing to do with the brain or psychology or people’s suffering; more to do with finance and economics.  Categories are not people; they are things, inhuman, devoid of humanity and suffering.  Doesn’t that fit nicely with giant insurance corporations? And isn’t that perfect for the left brain?

The left adores vocabulary.  Big words to confuse and obfuscate(oops)meaning.  We then have to wade through the verbiage to see if we can understand it. Again, feelings lead to simple language; the more abstracted we are the bigger and more complicated the words.  And that is why when we professionals read textbooks or scientific reports they are almost indecipherable.  But if you want another professional to respect you, you need this kind of vocabulary.

If we meet someone who is inflexible we have a left-brainer. If one is thinking about divorce because the wife is so rigid, think about a therapy that will help her join with the flexible, creative side.

The left side has a certain arrogance to it; it can’t be wrong---at least until it is humbled by the right side truths that show it reality.  Meanwhile, the left side is that of defense, “I am not wrong. You (or the devil) made me do it.”  The left-brainer cannot accept emotional reality until he checks statistics to be sure; to have his unreality verified. The left side, in short, doesn't easily adapt to new ways of doing things. It is obdurate and unyielding.  The left-brain doctor thinks she can cure addiction without acknowledging the right.  She focuses on the addict’s bad ideas and compelling behavior.  But neglects where the feelings lie.  The left does not like to hear emotional truths, therapist or addict. It is an unconscious conspiracy of two. But when the load is so great on the right there is a burst-through of pain, and the left can no longer function well, drastic measures are required. “Burst-through" means from right to left; the right is now a gate-crasher. It has to get out no matter what. It needs freedom from constraint, a constraint that may have begun during the birth process where egress out of the womb was blocked.  

The left side is the “aware” side, (of full conscious/awareness), and when the depths of emotional pain surges forward the person is suddenly aware of what is down there. But the left side often flees from that knowledge. It is a very reluctant customer, and accepts ideas most skeptically.

The problem is that those early traumatic experiences lie on the right and do not tell its secrets to the left. Worse, the left side is largely indifferent to it throughout life. The left wasn’t even “alive” when all the sturm um drang took place.  That is one reason it is unconscious. And why we do not know about it.  The left hemisphere has its modus operandi and does not want to be bothered. Its focus is outside. It never wants to get too emotional; in fact, it can’t. There is insufficient emotional equipment on the left.  So the person has mastered economics and knows nothing of the body she carries around all of the time.

Too often the left won’t help out with feelings, and indeed, runs from the right and its contents.  The left senses danger.  While the left brain is telling her analytic/cognitive therapist, “My parents could not show their feelings but I knew what they meant and I forgive them for it,” the right brain is screaming to her feeling therapist, “Hold me. Touch me!  Love me just a little.”  And that need/feeling is burrowing away in our unconscious stealthily doing its damage, weakening the heart, raising blood pressure and going about the job of killing us because the left brain refuses to acknowledge the need.  Not only “refuses” but aids and abets suppressing the need and keeping it out of contact with our left side thinking, comprehending selves.

The left is often fear-ridden, jumpy and startled, with good reason because when the imprint rises from the depths the person can begin to feel terror, not a pleasant experience.  The right side is literally strangling while the left side senses panic. Think of this because I cannot get over how bizarre it is. The right side is holding the actual memory and its sensation/feeling of strangling, while the left side is screaming at her husband, “You leave me no room to breathe.”  When the right moves toward conscious/awareness that actual sensation starts to become conscious (always think conscious=right intrusion; the transformation of the left from simply “aware” to conscious).  But when we insert tranquilizers into her system she will stop yelling, “You leave me no room to breathe.”  Because we have further stuffed that feeling deeper into the unconscious so that for the moment it no longer drives the left side to yell about strangling and no breathing room.   The closer the right moves to the left the more impelling the  behavior.  When the right moves all the way over into the left we have a primal. For that we need help because the defense system usually won’t allow it.  It is only when the defense system has already opened and the right has broken through that we suffer and become partially aware of it.

When there is a strong right-left defense system, with the person heavily on the left, his interest for a lifetime will be business, science and external symbolic focus (like money and scientific facts).  The arts are over on the right; which is why the artist often suffers and takes drugs. He is living inside the pain; the good part is that he is also on the side of creativity.

If one is to be liberated from the unconscious we have to suffer again, as unfair as that seems.  The pain has to surface so it can be connected. The right has to cross over into the left; no cure without that.  Remember, when all those different approaches out there discuss making us conscious, we need to know what and where the unconscious lies and what it takes to make it conscious.  The left almost never has a clue.  The right does. It never tells us the reason but we can feel it. The left knows the reason after connection because the feeling is there. The right is ready to connect when the left is.  When that connection happens we can finally experience joy.  The right has met its soul-mate and what a relief!  We are connected, integrated.  But wait, there is more; much more to this story.  Let’s look some more at the left hemisphere.

The left loves the mechanical.  It works point by point in meticulous fashion.  It is the left side that is cognitive and helps form belief systems. Its focus is narrow and channeled. It does great brain surgery, but as I noted, don’t ask it to do a riff in a jazz piece. It can read the notes but cannot feel the music.

The left often thinks it feels but it only thinks it.  It cannot feel it until it feels, as simplistic as that sounds.  It is basically detached from feelings and is devoid of emotion. The left loves numbers, statistics and categories, and the so-called  “objective facts.” It is the hemisphere of abstraction, of shredding the emotions out of emotional events and human interaction.  Think here of cognitive therapy; it shreds the last ounce of feeling from psychologic observation so that we are left with dry facts.

I note that one of the key functions of the left is to suppress feeling.  When the right feeling threatens to become conscious the left rushes in to shut it down; it orders the gates into action. The prefrontal cortex moves against the rising feeling on the deeper right and we remain unfeeling, which is one way we block bad feeling—numbed out. The left makes sure that there is an infusion of serotonin and other inhibitory chemicals (GABA and other repressors) to bolster gating against the right.

It is the left that forgives, blames, regrets, is ashamed, shows gratitude, remorse and appreciation; all of which are not necessarily feelings but looks like them, and can be faked.  And if in a criminal proceeding you do not show remorse and say how sorry you were to kill that girl you will not get a reduced sentence.  But if you can fake sincerity you will get off sooner.  Why?  Words, words, words. If we cannot feel we must take your word for it. If we can feel we can suss out the feeling in your words.  If there is any.

The left side can manufacture all sorts of rationales to explain why there is and was no love or why I was not wrong and you are.  It is expert at defending, while the right succumbs to these left-side rationales, and burrows itself more deeply into the physical system.  We do need the left side for science and the right side for feeling.

So now we can understand such symptoms such as obsessions.  Obsessions are not just thoughts; they arise out of obsessive feelings which drive them. They are in evolutionary order; feelings at the beginning followed by thoughts and beliefs.  One may try doorknobs ten times a day to get over the fear of something being there, i,e,. bugs. The right feels very unsafe, perhaps in the womb with a very highly strung, anxious mother.  Later on, years later, the left tries to keep the imprinted unsafe feeling in bounds by checking the gas jet twenty times.  What is diabolic is that the obsessive rarely if ever knows what lies in the right brain that makes her do it. So isn’t it obvious that when the two sides connect it means the end of all that?