A Little Self-Love Here
When I get in the car and head up the highway to meet with Magyari for a second time, it’s one of those days: my get-up-and-go has got up and fled. It’s hard to find the oomph, physically, to drive the drive—though I’ve been looking forward to this all week. Luckily, anticipation douses a modicum of my exhaustion.
That isn’t always the case. Many days my fatigue causes me to cancel things, or to not say yes to events in the first place—which is very different from saying no. No means no I won’t or I can’t. Because I prefer to think I can, I often say, “I’m not sure yet,” because I don’t know how I’ll feel when it’s time to head out the door.
Rowland-Seymour has cautioned me that when your bone marrow works twice as hard as other people’s to produce half as many blood cells, and your central nervous system functions on only partial connectivity, you are going to take the hit somewhere. On a bad day, like today, the combo effect feels like my body is trying to drive sixty miles an hour in first gear.
* * *
I HAVE AN hour ahead of me on the highway to do a mental review of the two homework assignments Trish Magyari gave me when last we met.
I’ve read Radical Acceptance, by Tara Brach, PhD. Brach, a therapist and leader in the mindfulness movement, writes about how those of us in Western culture often have a particularly difficult time sending kindness to ourselves because we carry a deep sense of unworthiness within. As most of us move through our relationships, our work, even the most rote moments of our day, we’re unconsciously managing a chronic sense of self-dislike.
At first, I’m not sure I buy the overall concept that we all brim with self-disaffection. In fact, I don’t.
If I were to ask myself, “Do I like myself?” my answer would be—perhaps too glibly—“Of course I do.” I’m very loving with my family, and I know how to say I’m sorry. I tend to be very helpful to those in need; in fact, one of my brothers tells me that being “too nice” is my “fatal flaw.” Hmmm. I’m not sure, then, if that counts as something I like about myself, or something I don’t like. I think of other strengths: I have made it through some hard years, hard loss, and I’ve come through. I think of a grade school essay Christian once wrote in which he said, among other things, “My mom is the most determined person I know. She’s more determined than Frodo.”
Of course he has no idea how many times I’ve given up, been bested by the joy thief. Slipped into the car in the garage in the middle of the night in my pj’s, made certain the windows were rolled up tight, and sobbed over the steering wheel until the sight of my red, snotty face in the rearview mirror startled me. Then walked back upstairs and climbed into bed to wake up the next day and try to make gutting it out look effortless again.
True, faking it isn’t the same as liking yourself. Maybe if you liked yourself you’d be less of a fake.
But surely it’s something.
Still, as I read further, I’m surprised to find that I relate to so much of what Brach has to say. She posits that most of us in Western culture don’t receive the kind of unconditional love that we long for, or experience feeling seen or heard for who we are inside. This creates a sense of loss that begins at a very young age.
She shares a story of a small girl who is tugging and tugging on her daddy’s pant leg when he comes in the door from work, impatient to show him that she’s written her name for the very first time. He’s talking on his cell phone, pacing the floor. She’s pulling at the knee of his trousers, trying to show him the work of which she’s so proud. Finally, he looks down at her and says with exasperation, “What are you doing down there?”
“Daddy, I live down here,” she says.
Most of us grow up feeling, in some measure, that no one is taking note of what we have to offer up to the world. From the time we are very small, we try to compensate by competing and striving hard to prove that we’re worthy enough to be noticed, to belong. Cute or sweet. Smart or attractive. Fast or funny. We so want to stand out, to be enough.
As we strive we begin to feel, in an existential way, that we are, Brach says, “separate.” Here we are, a self in here—and there everyone else is: out there. We feel alone and insecure. Which leads to a pervasive sense that something’s wrong with our life. We can’t understand: surely we aren’t supposed to feel so alone. Everyone else can’t feel as on their own as we do?
Pretty quickly, says Brach, that sense that “something’s wrong” centers on the self. “We don’t just ask ourselves, ‘Is something wrong?’ Rather, it becomes an inner conviction that ‘something’s wrong with me.’ That’s the first conclusion that we make; it’s the primal belief.”
I’m intrigued.
I want to find out how this unconscious lack of self-acceptance fuels the negative floating brain and sabotages our efforts in mindfulness, meditation, and healing.
I reach out to Brach. When we speak by phone she explains to me that to some degree or another we all experience the emotional paper cuts of our culture of criticism, of our societal propensity for shame and blame.
I think about this. We all know the sinking feeling that comes with childhood admonishments over spilled milk, the math we didn’t understand, the grade we didn’t get. The clutch in the gut when no one picks us for dodgeball or asks us to the prom or the day our best friend dumps us for a new one and blabs our deepest secret in the exchange.
From The Karate Kid to A Christmas Story, Hollywood has made an industry of films in which the plot spins on such moments of childhood humiliation. Somewhere in the mix of whatever encouragement, support, and love we receive, there is a healthy dose of you-are-less-than.
I think, too, about the ACE studies. Over 60 percent of us have experienced at least one significant adverse childhood experience. Forty percent of us have experienced at least two. Whether our own ACE was a parent who wasn’t there for us, or a parent who suffered from depression or alcoholism, or an adult in our lives who was at times emotionally cruel, we carry those stressful experiences, intermingled with whatever feelings of a loss of self-worth they engendered, into our lives now.
Brach believes we internalize this interior voice of criticism, carrying it with us into our criticism experiences both large and small, administering self-blame for everything including the cold we caught, the diagnosis we got, the ten pounds we gained, the fact that we didn’t achieve what we thought we would in our career by the age of forty.
The more trauma we faced when we were young, Brach explains, or the more we were taught by our family or culture of origin to feel that there was something inherently wrong with us, “the more separate we feel.”
To cover over our unmet need for unconditional love, we become ever more judgmental of ourselves, weaving ourselves into a deeper and tighter web of not-okay-ness. The process is so subtle we don’t notice the disintegration of our self-view happening from the inside out.
Instead of applying love or kindness to ourselves when we need it, we turn into our worst best friend, the critic in the mirror. We stop being on our own side. And we begin to feel even more separate from the world around us.
Things evolve into a superficial view of the world: either we are doing well and things are going right and others take notice of us—or things are not going right and so we berate ourselves. Because things rarely seem right enough, we are usually unhappy with who we are, what we have, and what we’ve done.
“Believing that something is wrong with us is a deep and tenacious suffering,” Brach tells me. Sometimes we project our feelings of unworthiness onto others and decide that whatever isn’t going right has to be their fault. Yet even when we blame others, there’s an undercurrent of “something is wrong with me.” We figure if only we did more and did it better, we’d be okay.
The goal is, she says, “Not to be good to ourselves because we’re afraid of what will happen if we aren’t, but because we’re really on our own side. Because we care about this life.”
This turning on self gets in the way of so much joy, I suddenly think. If we’ve turned on ourselves, we can’t love our world.
I am wondering something, however. “Isn’t this intrinsically harder when we’re facing a chronic health issue?” I ask Brach. “When we don’t feel well on a physical level?”
I am surprised when Brach tells me that she is familiar with this struggle firsthand. She has a genetic connective tissue disorder that causes her to be injury prone and decreases her muscle strength. “Eight years ago I was starting to get sicker and sicker and I didn’t want to acknowledge what was happening. I was getting more injuries and becoming weaker, but I wouldn’t stop pushing myself. I had retreats to lead, and I didn’t want to see myself as someone who was limited by illness.”
Instead of resting as needed, Brach pushed herself to the point that on the eve of a major retreat she had been looking forward to teaching, she wound up spending the week in a hospital cardiac unit instead. It was a difficult time of self-reflection. “Not being able to control what’s happening, and knowing that something is going wrong in our body, can make us feel we have to assign blame to something in order to regain our sense of control,” she says. “The thought process goes like this: ‘something is wrong and I have to assign blame in order to identify what can be fixed . . . if I can identify what is fixable, I can set out to fix it.’ And this pretty quickly translates into deciding that we are to blame—‘I don’t take care of myself well, so of course I am sick.’” This, she says, makes us feel, for a time, that we have some sense of control. Even relief. We have, we tell ourselves, identified the problem.
Recently, Brach tells me, she tried speed walking even though she knew she shouldn’t. She “completely screwed up” her knees. “I couldn’t get up or down stairs for weeks. I am a terrible patient. And I found myself starting to hate myself for the fact that all my thoughts were becoming self-centered, and that I was so impatient and irritable with others. Here I was in an enormous amount of pain and I added more pain by not being able to stand myself for who I was when I was sick.”
Struggling with a chronic illness can make it even harder to walk away from our feelings of self-dislike—even for an expert on the topic. And yet, says Brach, “It also reveals how acute and strong those feelings are, which can open the door to self-compassion.”
* * *
AFTER WE HANG up the phone I don’t have much time to process what she’s said. I’m simply caught up in my rush of thinking about what needs to be done next—finish typing interview notes, send a few must-get-back-to-them e-mails, pick my kids up from the bus. Then a few errands to round up items Claire needs for a French project. I sigh. I don’t know if I have the stamina today to run through the aisles of Target, Michael’s, and Office Depot, but we must and we will. After dinner, I’ve got so much work left to do.
Then I hear it: the voice of my own self-lashing. It is as insidious as it is stealthy. Beneath the white noise of my chattering, thinking, planning mind, there is another darker whisper.
It is the voice that often sets in when I’m in physical pain or fatigued. You’re always tired, what the hell is the matter with you, you always have some impediment. You’re robbing your kids by being so tired all the time. You never get enough work done; you’re always behind. You’ll never be who you dreamt you’d be. No wonder you got the lemon body that’s always breaking down, that you can never count on—you deserve it.
And then it hits me: this is my interior default setting. If things are not going swell—and how often are they going swell?—this is my brain’s screensaver. This self-loathing gives birth to the Pain Channel. While I may not say the actual words, the effect is pretty much the same: You loser.
Suddenly I get it. How deep my sense of not-okay-ness is, like a scaffolding beneath everything I am and do.
And what is this default setting doing, I wonder, to my cells?
I recall the controversial work of a scientist who set out to document in photographs how human consciousness affects the molecules in water. In his book, The Hidden Messages in Water, Masuro Emoto found, he says, that when you wrap a glass of water with a piece of paper that says “love and gratitude” or “thank you,” the water forms perfect, stunningly clear crystals. “I hate you,” on the other hand, causes misshapen crystals to form.
Most particle physicists discount Emoto’s work. But it’s the image not the science that interests me here. I find the metaphorical idea behind his work intriguing. What is You loser doing to my molecules?
* * *
TRISH HAS GIVEN me a second piece of homework: to contemplate what my greatest stressors were when I was young, and to consider what early habits of mind I might have set in place when I met those stress points. Whether I was kind to myself in the face of long-ago adversity.
She’s found that many of her mindfulness-based stress reduction, or MBSR, research participants have dealt with varied forms of childhood distress. Along the way, as Brach’s work suggests, they’ve stopped being kind to themselves. For Trish’s study participants, MBSR has proven quite useful in helping to bring a new perspective to the negative thoughts they have about themselves and others—and reverse the damaging floating brain that was set in motion in the earliest stages of their lives and in the worst of circumstances.
I don’t have to think hard. Whenever my feelings back then were too much, when I just couldn’t take anymore, I would imagine myself building a thick, red brick wall in my mind between what was happening around me and what was going on inside my own head.
I built that thick, red wall one brick at a time, carefully stacking each brick on top of the other so that no one could get past it. In my imagination I’d add mortar, place another brick on top, scrape off the excess, and add more bricks. I’d tell myself that on my side of the thick, red wall, I couldn’t hear or feel anything. The adults around me could say what they wanted.
I filled my brain with my own mental churning—toward all the adults who’d let me down. What do they know, why don’t they all just shut up, what’s wrong with them, didn’t they even love him, if he were here he wouldn’t put up with this . . .
It cut the feelings of missing my father, the ache I felt for him. It cut the ache of feeling that none of the grown-ups around me had my back. It obliterated everything: my mother’s tears, the late-night conversations I’d overhear. The bitter blame. The criticisms.
I fed myself. I did my homework. I went to work right after school at the public library. I took care of what I could take care of, though it would be a stretch to say I took care of myself.
If I think about it clinically, yes, all of that probably constitutes childhood adversity. And those were surely less than productive habits of mind. But I just thought of it as one thing: lonely.
* * *
SUDDENLY, WITHOUT KNOWING how I got here, I’m pulling into the parking lot at the old, white mansion that houses Trish’s office. I sit in the car for a moment or two until my eyes clear.
* * *
A FEW MINUTES later, upstairs, in Trish’s office, I find myself relating all of it to her.
“I imagine I did a lot of damage to my young, neuroplastic brain,” I confess to Trish now.
“Those angry tapes—and your red brick wall—served a critical purpose when you were young,” she says, reading the look on my face. “They kept you alive. You didn’t know a better way. You need to honor the role those tapes served for you when you were young; they were a tremendous coping mechanism in the face of untenable loss and confusion and fear. And they helped you to be less afraid in the face of your world coming down around you.”
It’s no surprise, she says, that I’ve continued to run angry and fearful thought tapes in my adult life—on topics and in situations now that are of course very different from those I faced when I was young. My health. My stamina. Even smaller irritations. Now, just as then, these negative thought cycles tend to surface when I feel I’m under stress—and I sure can’t stop those tapes from playing when I try to sit still now.
“And yet now they really serve no good purpose,” I confess. “I feel as if they’re covering up my soul’s inner language.”
“Use a few describing words to name that language,” Trish prompts. “Your soul’s language?”
Three words rise up in me. “Joy. Creativity. Grief.” I pause. “The mental churning, my racing thoughts cover up whatever joy and creativity might be there. I know the negative ruminating isn’t good for me, but I can’t shut those thought tapes down,” I say. “And I don’t feel justified in just sitting there, breathing, trying to harness an unquiet mind when there is so much else to be done.”
“The first tenet of Buddhist teaching is that the mind is a waterfall,” she says. “The awareness that it’s rushing with thoughts is the first awakening.” She pauses. “We first have to be aware that our mind is racing in order to begin to transform it. Often those of us who’ve been intellectualizing our feelings for so long are able to take note of how quickly our mind is racing once we watch for it. But for reasons having to do with our own history we may lack the self-love, the compassion for our own experience, to help us take the necessary and crucial second step.”
That second step, she explains, is to have compassion for the way our mind works, for the thoughts we have, for the way in which our worry, angry resentments, jealousies, fears, and obsessive thoughts spin out of control. “Often when we have trouble meditating it’s not due to a lack of awareness,” Trish says, “but to a resistance to self-love.”
Until our ability to be compassionate to ourselves becomes as strong as our awareness, well, then, we are not going to get very far when we sit down to try to quiet our mind.
“Our ability to be self-compassionate and forgive ourselves for having an unquiet mind, for having the thoughts and emotions we have, has to be as strong as our ability to be self-aware of how busy our mind is.”
The Buddhists teach that the first arrow that strikes us is the experience we have. The second arrow is the shame we have about it and the blame we direct at ourselves. We find ourselves judging someone harshly or caught up in a torrent of tumbling grievances, and then we find ourselves judging our judging—blaming ourselves for being so unkind, for something we said or did, and asking, “How could I?”
The little things we get down on ourselves about—the lost piece of paper we put down somewhere but now can’t find, the words we regret saying to the cable service person on the phone who has nothing to do with the highly annoying fact that our Internet is out for the third time that week—all seem, individually, to be so small and fleeting we don’t realize they add up to one big negative state of mind.
If we’ve never turned a friendly eye on ourselves, we certainly won’t recognize all this self-judging for what it is. We have no point of comparison. We just know it feels really bad to be in our own skin.
And that’s where the part about childhood trauma makes things even trickier. When our world blows apart at a very young age, when we have to deal with adversity we don’t understand and can’t defend ourselves against, when there are no grown-ups to help us process what went wrong or offer us unconditional love, or to help us decode our feelings of loss and unworthiness when we need them most, we go into high-distress mode. We know on a biological level from epigenetic research on gene methylation that our PIN response gets stuck in the on position. We also know, on a psychological level, that when we are afraid our efforts at self-defense often devolve into churning out obsessive thoughts, spitting blame and anger at those who hurt us—all the while believing that we’re rejected and unloved because there is something so fundamentally flawed with us that we’ve merely gotten what we deserved in the first place.
If we’ve been caught in that low-grade assumption of our own unworthiness from the time we were very young, if we can’t relate to ourselves in a tender or sympathetic way because we never learned how, if we can’t embrace our fears or flaws or pain the way we might if tending to a hurt child because no one ever modeled that for us, we have no way to cope but to just keep on churning angry thoughts and feeling unworthy. The lifelong pattern is set in place.
And so. If that is me, if that is the brain I have, how do I switch gears after so many years of negative mental churning? If I have been taking myself—and my negative brain—with me wherever I go for so many decades, how can I possibly set that brain down and create a new one?
Trish asks me to try the following at home, in the week before her MBSR training class begins:
1. When my tapes are spinning, take note of my mental speedometer. Notice where it is. One hundred fifty or ninety-five or twenty-two? Be aware.
2. See my mental churning as nothing more than a “habit of mind.” It may or may not have relevance to the particular moment I’m actually in. If I’m ruminating over something that happened hours or years ago while folding laundry, it clearly doesn’t.
3. Come up with a descriptive word or two to name my habit of mind. She asks me to offer up a few now. I come up with mental spitting, fuming, churning. She also suggests that I label my feelings: “This is anger,” or “This is anxiety.”
4. Ask myself if there is judging of my judging. In addition to the churning, am I judging myself for having my negative thoughts and feelings?
5. If so, actively place some words in my consciousness to be a balm to this second arrow, to lessen the sting of self-blaming.
6. Bring my focus to my breath as it is. Feel my breath filling my upper chest, my lungs, my abdomen. When my mind wanders, as it will, bring my focus back to my breath.
* * *
“WE ARE OFTEN stung by many self-judgments at the same time,” Trish says. “Anger at someone, anger at ourselves for our own role in things, and anger at ourselves for how our mind is reacting to what happened.” If we are judging ourselves, we have to step in and lessen that sting. She asks me to think of a phrase that might be my balm. Something along the lines of “Let it go,” or “It’s okay.”
I can’t think of a thing.
“What do you do for friends when they are going through a difficult time?” she asks.
“I make sure they know I love them.”
“How?”
“I ask them to tell me all about it. I listen. I let them know that I love them and that I want to understand.” I pause, searching for the right words. I say what comes to me: “I place my heart right next to them, as if it were a listening ear.”
“Can you move in in that close and loving way for yourself?” she asks.
I’m silent. Tears well. The image in my mind is of a fire hose that’s been stopped up with cement. Completely blocked. Some strong surge wants to come through but it can’t. “I’m not so sure,” I confess.
She suggests that I try placing my hand on my heart, or wherever I feel the sting. “Try saying just one word to yourself, whatever comes.”
I put my hand to my heart. “Forgive me,” I whisper. My heart thumps in my stomach.
She is quiet for a moment. Neither of us says anything. “It might help to try saying, ‘Forgiven.’”
I am not sure why this one word hits me so hard. Why these tears from nowhere? At the thought of this one word?
Trish reads the question in my eyes. “If,” she says softly, “after a lifetime of judging others as a survival mechanism, and judging yourself most harshly of all, one day you come to yourself with a loving heart, it may awaken old emotions, grief, that you don’t yet understand.” Yes, maybe it has to do with grief over what happened to me when I was twelve, or with a different kind of grief over the realization that I don’t seem to care for myself. Or something else entirely.
I think she’s going to tell me to try to delve into those emotions. Break them down. Unpack them. But she doesn’t. “You needn’t ask yourself what this experience means,” she cautions. “It’s not important to know anything about why those tears come up for you to practice mindfulness successfully.
“All that’s needed is for you to stay close to your own experience,” she says. “Be with whatever is happening. Feel it, experience it, but try not to entertain the question, ‘What does forgiven mean?’ Just go back to naming the experience. ‘Here is grief. Here is doubt. Here is fear. Worry. Loss.’ Parse out the narrative about why that feeling may be there. Catch the habits of your mind that are strong, name them, and drop in that piece of friendliness to yourself. Apply balm to the sting of self-judgment. Focus on working this new muscle over and over and over again.”
She’s seen in her research, she adds, that the practice of mindfulness retrains the brain toward a calmer place of wisdom and balance for those who’ve had a history of traumatic stress. This, in turn, allows deeper memories that are hard to deal with to arise for the first time. It becomes suddenly safe to deal with what we haven’t dealt with before.
Hard-to-deal-with feelings or memories might arise—but when and if they do, she assures me, I’ll be better able to see them for what they are and disarm the traumatic feelings and emotions that entrap me onto the distress highway. I’ll be aware enough to separate out the here and now from the trauma of then, and deal with what I recall in a healthier way.
She suggests, meanwhile, that in an all-out effort on my own behalf, when I get home I write the word forgiven on sticky notes and paste them on the back of my hairbrush, on the bathroom mirror, in as many places as I can. Say “forgiven” to myself one hundred times a day if I have to.
Still, I can’t help but wonder, exactly what do I need to be forgiven for?
* * *
WHEN I GET home I post sticky notes everywhere: the inside of a kitchen cupboard, the underside of the sun visor on the driver’s side of my car. But I’m still curious about how the process of repeating a word will help me. If I am to name my feelings or apply a word to soothe myself one hundred times a day in order to feel better, I want to know why such a trick of the mind works. To really invest myself in the process, I want the science.
Certainly cultural wisdom tells us that talking out loud to a friend or a therapist, or writing in a journal, will make us feel better: when we put our loss, our fear, and fury into words, we heal. That’s why if a friend is in pain, we encourage him or her to talk it out with us. If our children are hurt or afraid, we ask them to talk about how they feel and worry if they won’t tell us.
It turns out, according to a team of neuroscientists at the University of California, Los Angeles, that these cultural instincts match up precisely with new scientific findings about how our brain functions. When we name our feelings we change the activity in our brain and bring ourselves into a calmer state of mind. We stop the negative floating brain in midflow.
Cognitive neuroscientists have long known that when they show subjects a picture of an angry or fearful face, the brain region known as the amygdala lights up. The amygdala, you might recall, is the same center that sparks the fight-or-flight process, raises the PIN response, and kicks the negative floating brain into fast and furious action. This heightened amygdala response holds true even if an individual views an angry facial expression subliminally—for such a split second he or she can’t even recall having seen it a moment later.
Matthew Lieberman, PhD, UCLA professor of psychology and a leader in social cognitive neuroscience, along with his colleagues, decided to find out what might happen to an individual’s amygdala response if he or she named the feelings associated with seeing those angry and fearful faces.
In the study, conducted at the brain-mapping center at UCLA, thirty subjects were shown faces that appeared angry or fearful. Below each face they saw one of either two words, such as angry or fearful. They were asked to choose which emotion applied to each expression they saw. Or, they saw two names, “Harry” and “Sally,” and were asked to choose the gender-appropriate answer for each face. Meanwhile, Lieberman and his colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to study each participant’s brain activity.
When participants attached the word angry to an angry face and labeled the feeling, researchers saw a decrease in their amygdala response. When participants simply attached a name, such as Harry, their amygdala response stayed fired up.
But something else happened that researchers found quite intriguing. When study subjects labeled the feeling associated with each face, another area of the brain, known as the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, became more active. This area, which sits just behind the forehead and eyes, is associated with thinking about emotional experiences in words, helping to process emotions, and helping us to change our behavioral response to them. Researchers are, frankly, still a little fuzzy about everything the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex does, but two things are clear: it is the area responsible for helping us to name our emotions and, when it lights up, the amygdala-driven fight-or-flight response goes significantly down.
UCLA researchers wanted to investigate this one step further. They wanted to know whether labeling one’s thoughts through practicing mindfulness meditation—saying, for instance, “I’m feeling angry right now” or “This is fear”—would also light up the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex and turn down the amygdala alarm center response in the brain.
They scanned individuals’ brains while they practiced mindfulness meditation and had them fill out fine-grained questionnaires afterward about how often they had mindfully labeled their feelings.
It turned out that the meditators who reported labeling their emotions the most by employing mindfulness also had the greatest activation in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex and this, in turn, decreased activity in the amygdala. In fact, the more mindful participants were in labeling their feelings with words, the less amygdala activation researchers saw.
The more we utilize the center of our brain that names feelings, the less stressed we feel by them.
That’s pretty big news.
Lieberman likens the process of naming your feelings to hitting the brake when you’re driving along and suddenly see a yellow light. “By putting your feelings into words,” he says, “it’s as if you’re hitting the brakes on your emotional responses.”
You feel less angry, less sad, less afraid.
Lieberman’s work may also help, in part, to explain why talk therapy has been found to be as effective as medication for moderate depression; that patients who undergo talk therapy show brain pattern changes similar to those seen in people taking antidepressants; and that talk therapy is more effective long-term for seasonal affective disorder than the traditional treatment, light therapy, alone.
Lieberman’s research likewise suggests to us that one neurocognitive mechanism that might explain how meditation improves health outcomes is the decreased amygdala response that occurs when we label negative events. That, in turn, decreases the level of stress hormones and inflammatory cytokines rushing through the body.
One other interesting finding from the study also jumps out at me.
Lieberman believes that this newly understood right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex may be particularly affected by what happens during our preteen and teenage years. This area of the brain undergoes much of its crucial development during that time. It may be, he hypothesizes, that a young person’s emotional interactions with family and friends shape the strength of this brain region’s response and impact it for life—depending on how healthy his or her emotional environment was. If a teen is coming of age in an emotionally healthy environment, this area of the brain should be strong and resilient. If his or her environment is less stable, this area of the brain may be less capable of ameliorating the amygdala response.
I think about this, in the context of what we know about the legacy of adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs. It would seem that if one had little help or support during traumatic preteen or teen years, it may be harder later in life to recognize one’s emotions for what they are, name them, voice them, and feel better—and heal from tiny hurts and large ones. The right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex’s processing abilities might be compromised for life.
We don’t have any studies on this yet. We don’t know if kids with significant ACE scores have more trouble when they grow up being mindful, naming their feelings, or being kind to themselves in the face of their emotional reactivity.
But I suspect that even though the hard science on this is still outstanding, we already know the answer.
I think I do.