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In my mind’s eye, I have the pillbox sitting on the desk in front of me. It’s clear and plastic and it has individual rectangular compartments with lids that snap closed. Each compartment has a pill inside. It’s not a red pill or a blue pill, but a small white pill, and instead of the customary seven letters – SMTWTFS – that you might expect to find on each lid, instead are two letters: NB, JD, BO, TS, MT, NM, BH, RP, DG, RL … the initials on the pillbox lids stretch far out into the distance. Each represents someone in my personal history I need to forgive. On the last lid are the letters: GOD. Do I take the pill? Do I give one to my daughter when I feel the need?
The Nose Knows
The May 22, 2008 issue of Neuron presents research on the early formulations of just such a pill. Although technically, it was administered as a nasal spray, oxytocin was found to reduce the activity in the amygdala, which processes fear as well as paying attention to the possibility of social betrayal. I would expect pharmaceutical companies to continue refining the formulations of this drug. But who should have access to it? And under what circumstances? A part of me would love to simply take such a pill and be done with it. But another part of me suspects doing so would be yet another case of treating the symptoms and missing something calling to me, something of much deeper significance.
Forgiving the Unforgiveable
Letlapa Mphahlele was the operations director of the Azanian People’s Liberation Army in South Africa. One night a number of years ago, he ordered an attack at the Heidelberg Tavern in Capetown. In that attack, Lyndi, the 23 year old daughter of Ginn Fourie was killed. In the time since then, the black revolutionary and the white mother have been on a healing journey together, one of reconciliation and forgiveness. Mphahlele has worked to set up a Foundation in Lyndi’s name and the two travel together and speak about both the need for, and the challenges to bringing about peace and forgiveness in the world. Will a Forgiveness Pill produce the same level of engagement, healing and social action in the world that it has for these two people? Should Ginn Fourie or Letlapa Mphahlele have taken the pill?
The Pain of Pills
There is mounting evidence that a sense of powerless, helplessness or loss of control impairs neural development (think America’s public education system – but that’s another can of pills). Perhaps deciding whether or not someone might take the Forgiveness Pill should be left to that someone. If such a pill is to help in the alleviation of suffering, perhaps it is not up to us to decide if someone is suffering enough to grant them access to the pill. Perhaps our job is to explain the upside and the downside and let people choose for themselves. It might work the way pain medications are administered in progressive hospices, where patients in palliative care hold up fingers to indicate their level of discomfort. Any fingers more than three are provided with pain relief. But many people at the end of life choose to bear as much pain as they can, sensing that something important is happening and that the pain is an integral part of it.
You Choose, You Win
But perhaps the real significance of a pill like this one isn’t so much the function it performs. Perhaps the simple fact that it is needed in the first place will bring attention to and powerfully drive home for parents, teachers, therapists and clergy that the actions we take in the world powerfully affect our own and other people’s neurobiology. For better or worse.
I was getting ready to leave work late one evening when a colleague buttonholed me on my way out of the office with a request. It was a small request really – to deliver something to another mutual colleague. But her voice tone and sense of entitlement triggered an outsized emotional reaction in me – without really meaning to, she “got my back up.” Thinking about my reaction on the drive home, after I curtly declined the request, several things became clear. One was … Polyvagal Theory!
Struggle to Understand
The very first time I heard about it, Polyvagal Theory seemed important and vital to understand, only I couldn’t. No matter who I asked to explain it, or anywhere else I encountered it, even with medical dictionary in hand, Steven Porges’ theory remained locked in a shell of impenetrability. Even after spending a delightful morning listening to Steve lecture to a standing ovation in Berkeley this past October, only small bits of Polyvagal Theory seemed to fall into place.
At first I assigned my difficulty in understanding to a lack of in-depth knowledge of human anatomy – my training is primarily in clinical psychology. But then, on that Friday afternoon, as my “blood began to boil,” my heart began to race, and my stomach began to churn at my colleague’s simple request, I suddenly understood Polyvagal Theory … in my body. So now I’m going to do my best to attempt to explain it to you in yours.
The Life You Save
The first thing to understand about Polyvagal Theory is that it primarily pertains to your (my) own reactive neurophysiology, how our Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal (HPA) axis gets activated in the face of threats that aren’t real, even though our brain makes us think and act as if they are. If we take the example of the colleague whose request hijacked my limbic system as our working example, Polyvagal Theory might posit that it is a useless distraction to think of all the social and emotional intelligence my colleague lacks, and all the ways she really needs to grow and change (even though, were she to do so, it would be marvelous for her own reactive neurophysiology). No, the best and most useful place for my focus to be is on me and my own reactivity.
The Protective Function
The next thing to understand is what Polyvagal Theory is actually attempting to explain – why and how we, or our children, often get upset about inconsequential things that matter little in the greater scheme of things. According to Polygvagal Theory, this upset is part of the neurophysiological process that has only our best interests at heart – the Polyvagal nervous system is designed to reliably operate to save our lives in the face of perceived or actual threats to life or limb. When Ralph Waldo Emerson talked about being afraid of things his whole life, most of which never happened, he was essentially talking about the protective elements of our Polyvagal nervous system.
The dorsal and ventral vagus nerves emerge from the base of the brain and connect up to our major organs. 80% of these fibers transmit information from the body to the brain. Parts of these nerve collections are sheathed in myelin. Myelin acts as an insulator and insulated nerves transmit impulses much faster than uninsulated nerves. Any time a threat appears in our internal or external environment, the myelin-sheathed vagus nerves are the first to spread the word.
False Positives
The central problem with the vagus’s speed, is that it often sends false positives – news about things it thinks are threats – usually based upon prior memories of earlier experiences that were most actually painful or threatening at the time. Remember – it’s primarily concerned with saving our lives. So a few false positives are a small price to pay to the vagus. Better to be safe than sorry.
There’s a wisdom teaching that speaks to the vagus’s propensity for rapid response: “We are never upset for the reason we think we are.” Essentially, what this teaching is suggesting is that upsets we experience in the present are most always connected to something that remains unresolved and unintegrated from our past. So these upsets are clues to “healing longing to happen.” In the incident I described above, the colleague who made the request of me, “coincidently” has the same look and feel of my older sister. She has the same voice inflections and the same shaped face. She also has a very bossy way of being that apparently feels overly threatening to my myelinated vagus nerves.
So, what remedy does Polyvagal Theory provide for this kind of over-reactivity? Simply this: it is possible to train ourselves to rapidly over-ride false-positive vagus responses. Some of the ways to actually accomplish this extremely useful bit of bio-self-regulation, you already know from previous pieces I’ve written. I’ll discuss others in future columns.
I’ve been hearing and feeling the siren call of epigenetics research recently. It’s a compelling call, one that I’ve been hearing for awhile now. Only after co-creating distance learning curriculum in Science, Spirituality and Healing, which offers students an opportunity to explore the field in depth, have I decided that it might be a good idea for me to heed the call and explore epigenetics a bit more in depth myself. (One of the benefits of collaborating on curriculum is that other people introduce me to things like epigenetics). As with many “leading-edge” research areas, there is a lot of “interpretation” creatively extrapolated from the hard science that forms the foundation of this field. This creativity can sometimes make it easy to fall in love with, so reader beware.
The Gene Genie
Put simply epigenetics is the study of how environment works to turn genes on and off. More formally, from Science: “Epigenetics is the study of heritable changes in gene function that occur without a change in the DNA sequence.” What this means is that our genes are NOT our destiny. Rather, they’re like the first draft of a movie script. Lots of changes are possible all throughout the creative process we call life. The people, places and circumstances we deliberately or “accidently” find ourselves in the midst of, actually work to change genetic expression within us; as do the things we think, feel and believe on a moment by moment basis. Whether we know it or not, or believe it or not, we are constantly performing epigenetic engineering on our own cells. So is the outside environment in a dynamic, lifelong interplay. Dawson Church has written a very readable account of this growing medical research field – The Genie in your Genes. He lists Ten Principles of Epigenetic Medicine, and from his account, it’s clear that there’s much that we already know and a tremendous amount yet to learn and unlearn.
The Genes of Our Children
If Church’s principles hold true for us, then they likely hold true for our children. What might this mean down in the trenches? Well, let’s look at Epigenetic Principle Two: “Healing is a process, not an event.” Neither I nor my daughter ever got sick much. When we did, I used to think of it as an event, one that began with symptoms and ended with us getting “well.” Later, I began to suspect that the seeds for becoming ill were planted long before the symptoms ever showed up. And unless something changed, they would hold the potential for “re-germinating” long after the symptoms went away. The internal and external environment needed to change in ways that no longer supported the growth of such seeds.
The Grate Escape
Larry Dossey, M.D., author of Healing Words, recounts an experience of what happens in environments that don’t support good health. During rounds on a coronary care unit, he asked a succession of men why they were there. On the unit as a result of sudden heart attacks, these men gave answers that reflected their life situation and not their medical histories: “I couldn’t stand to see my boss’s face one more day,” “I feel trapped in my marriage,” and “My kids fight constantly. I would do anything to get away from their constant bickering.” Having a heart attack was the body making use of epigenetics to get them out of an intolerable, toxic environment. And this is precisely the work that epigenetics appears to accomplish: it will continually try to move us in the direction of good health, even if it has to kill us in the process. Presumably, a coronary care unit is a healthier environment than the places these men came from. Healthy environments keep allostasis from morphing into the stress of allostatic load. While this may be somewhat reductionistic, well-managed stress levels do help keep neurotoxins at bay. They promote optimal neurogenesis and synaptogenesis and very likely create a neural network with a immune system stronger than the one constantly under the excessive stress loads produced by physically and emotionally toxic environments.
A Lifetime of Good Health
Canadian palliative care physician and child advocate, Gábor Máté writes in his book, When the Body Says No, about the impact of our early beginnings throughout the lifespan:
The biology of potential illness arises early in life. The brain’s stress response mechanisms are programmed by experiences beginning in infancy, and so are the implicit, unconscious memories that govern our attitudes and behaviors toward ourselves, others and the world. Cancer, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis and the other conditions we examined are not abrupt new developments in adult life, but culminations of lifelong processes. The human interactions and biological imprinting that shaped these processes took place in periods of our life for which we may have no conscious recall.
By paying close attention to our own and our children’s stress levels and doing our best to make them manageable, it appears that we can create an environment where epigenetics can optimally work its magic.
Sometimes people will come up to me and tell me right to my face that they think I’m one of the most generous people they know. I’m always surprised and more than a little uncomfortable with such pronouncements for a number of reasons. One is, I don’t generally feel that generous. In other words I don’t walk through much of my day emanating Generosity Consciousness. More often I feel like a scrimy cheeseparer, frequently trying to get the best deal for myself in order to scrimp and hoard for the rainy day my mother perpetually warned me about.
The Impaired Ability to Love
Michel Odent, the renown French obstetrician, might assess that I possess a degree of neural disorganization originating in the “primal period” that has resulted in what he calls an impaired ability to love. Some might argue with him, but I won’t. That fits my own internal feeling experience more than anything else. And it is this impairment that I do my best to continually confront. It becomes like the grain of sand inside requiring me to work to grow and polish The Pearl Beyond Price. So, that essentially makes me a work in progress, just like most of the other people I know. But what is this “work” that I am supposedly progressing with? And why is it important that I do it? And what kind of progress am I making? And are there benefits of doing this work that I can pass on to children? The field of social neuroscience has something interesting to say about these questions, I think.
The Brain Change Business
From earlier writings, many of you know that I am a big fan of Bruce Perry. One of Bruce’s pointed observations is that because the brain appears to mediate most all human experience, no matter what business we’re in – and this includes the “doing our own work” and the “repairing the inability to love” business – first and foremost, we’re in the Brain Change Business. Assuming that’s the case, then by association, we’re also in the Mind Change and Belief Change Business. From personal experience, it seems a mind can be a very challenging thing to truly and lastingly change. Beliefs can be even harder.
Change-Up Mind
What are some of the ways that work to actually change my mind? Well, one is to take large and small risks to learn something new and significant, something that has personal meaning to me. For example, risking giving away things that I feel great attachment to – like money, time and energy. What is the actual experience like when I sit and contemplate giving away $10,000 that I don’t really feel like I can spare? Well, in truth it’s mixed. There’s a thrill connected to it, and immediately on its heels, there’s a kind of constricting fear. In my imagination, the thrill seems to come from one part of my brain, the fear from another – “What about the rain day?” “Who will help you should you ever need it?” “People will think you’re nuts giving away money like that!” (I’ve previously written about the results of this experiment in personal philanthropy, but not about the process leading up to it). This emotional mix seems difficult to contain and modulate all by myself. And so, taking risks like this seems to require good social support. It’s not something to be attempted at home alone.
The Heart Change Business
Apart from the people I explored my personal motivation with in the above experiment, two books were seminal in transforming my inability a bit. One was Spiritual Economics by the renown Unity minister, Eric Butterworth. The other book was a very moving account by some of the children of America’s wealthiest families – Rockefeller, Pillsbury, Carnegie, to name a few. That book was: We Gave Away a Fortune by Anne Slepian and Christopher Mogil. It details the personal struggle of these young philanthropists who decided to violate a Golden Rule of the Wealthy: “Never Give Away Principal.” When faced with the reality of the suffering in the world, and the realization that their personal wealth could make an appreciable difference, they had a collective change of heart and went against family code. Their courageous change of heart, it turned out, ultimately contributed to mine. And for my own personal experiment, I couldn’t imagine a more profoundly gratifying outcome. It’s one that, when I reflect on it, does make me feel like a generous person. And, it turns out it’s good for my brain and health as well. It’s a good thing to model for children too, I think.
