I love my dining room in the morning. The light comes softly through the windows, it flows into every corner and crevice and invites me in with a warm greeting to the day. It makes my brain happy. It actually makes my brain fire off a bunch of chemicals and electrical sparks that make my whole body feel good. And it makes my soul feel good too.
I am sharing links to two other articles today that talk about our brain and how it can get wired because of fear and trauma and how it can get re-wired by love and acceptance. This is a huge topic for me because of how my brain was wired as a child. I didn’t know that it was being mapped by the trauma of abandonment of a mother, abuse from stepmothers, and the overwhelming anger of a father on alcohol. You can’t know as a child that when you are under attack it is forming you – you tend to just duck and cover after awhile. You do know that things happening in your world don’t make you feel good. You also learn that if you stay small and quiet they might not notice you and you won’t be collateral damage in the daily wars of the adults around you. Of course that didn’t work well for me. I had a very hard time staying small and quiet. I still have that issue. But I remember my brother Tim doing just that. I remember, even as a little girl, watching something being extinguished in him when he was being hit and kicked by the adults that were supposed to be loving and kind. It broke him, shaped him, mapped his brain to only expect fear and trauma. I also remember wishing it was me that they would hit and often I would take the blame for his wrong doings to spare him being hurt any more. It was that obvious, even to the little girl I was , that this was killing him inside.
Childhood trauma is one of the leading causes of addictive behavior. Children from homes where abuse and neglect, high stress, abandonment, and anger are a part of their daily lives are more likely to exhibit addictive behaviors including alcoholism, drug abuse, smoking, eating disorders, and obesity. Their brains get mapped. And here is how:
- The amygdala (your brain’s threat detection center) can become overactive, engaging in a constant program of looking for, seeing and assessing threat. This will cause you to feel intensely anxious, vulnerable and fearful.
- The hippocampus (your brain’s center for processing memories) can become underactive. Rather than consolidating and then placing memories in the outer layer of the brain for long-term storage, memories get hung up in a present-day loop. The result: You will experience and re-experience intrusive, disturbing and uncomfortable recollections.
- The cortex (your brain’s center for executive control) becomes interrupted by survival-oriented instincts from deep inside your inner brain. These instincts overrule logical thinking, diminish cognitive processing and decrease your ability to inhibit behavior. Even when you try to refrain from addictive behavior you will experience an unstoppable urge to engage in it.(Rosenthal, Michelle. “Trauma and Addiction: 7 Reasons Your Habit Makes Perfect Sense.” Recovery.org. Recovery.org, 30 Mar. 2015. Web. 25 Feb. 2016. )
So – there you have it. Broken brain=broken life.
BUT – what if we don’t have to just accept that? Because that seems to be what we have done. We have basically said, yes, this person experienced trauma and yes, they need help or they need to get over it or they need to make better choices. And everyone of those responses is actually correct. But it isn’t as simple as just telling someone to get over it or that they need to make better choices. We need to be showing people HOW to make better choices by teaching them to re-wire or re-map their brain. In my last blog post I talked about how art helped me to move into a much healthier place in my life. I believe that the repeated processes of creativity, the repeated starting and completion of paintings, photographs, writings, and other art mediums helped my brain recover from childhood trauma and from adult trauma brought on by bad choices which again are connected to childhood trauma. Being creative created new pathways, new, happy, positive, feel-good pathways that helped to heal my traumatized brain. I know it happened as surely as I am sitting here right now typing this sentence. Art healed me. But it doesn’t have to be art that is the key for everyone. It might be talk therapy, it might be brain games, or it might be medication, or it might be spiritual exploration or alternative therapies that helps a broken brain to heal. It might take many things, it might take time, it WILL take time. My brain did not heal over night.
Here is a link to a quick read about how childhood trauma leads to a negatively mapped brain:
Childhood Trauma Leads to Brains Wired for Fear
The author of the above article also believes that there is indeed the ability to help reshape, re-wire, and re-map the brains of those who experienced childhood trauma.
“One thing we can do – which is not all that well explored because there hasn’t been that much funding for it – is neurofeedback, where you can actually help people to rewire the wiring of their brain structures.” (Bessel van der Kolk)
In the following link, the article, ‘The Science of Happiness: Why complaining is literally killing you.’ explains how changes in WHAT we think and HOW we think actually have a physical impact on the way the brain fires.We CAN teach our brains to be healthy brains, to build healthy pathways, to experience and create health in our thinking and in our living. We are just getting started on this type of brain building and re-building. But I think it is HUGE in terms of what it offers for the addict, the abused, the broken. There wasn’t any way I could save my brother Tim. I kept telling him that he carried all the wrong things in his heart but the problem came from all the wrong things he carried in his brain. We have always equated love, pain, loss, etc. to our hearts. But it appears our heart might actually be in our brain. Love looks like a healthy brain.
Love looks like something that isn’t bruised and painful. Love looks like hope. Love looks like the electrical sparks that fire off when I walk into my dining room in the morning and the sun and heat and possibilities of a new day greet me. I am happy for all those possibilities to come. I am not afraid anymore.
My brain looks very much like love.
A Blue Cape Cod 