How Bonding and Belonging Nourish Resilience
Love guards the heart from the abyss.
— WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART
RESONANT RELATIONSHIPS HELP US recognize our own deep inner goodness and feel competent and confident in the world. The film The Blind Side (2010) offers a good example of how people learn to be resilient through resonant relationships with others, even after trauma and neglect. This film is based on the true story of a homeless African American teenage boy adopted by a socially conscious family in Memphis, Tennessee. Leigh Anne Tuohy is portrayed as a fierce champion of her new son, Michael Oher, as he adjusts to life in a wealthy white family. Michael has never slept in his own room before; he has never even had his own bed. And he certainly hasn’t had the nurturing experiences that would have helped a growing boy feel resiliently good about himself. Michael is isolated from others his age and failing in school.
The rich connection and parenting by Michael’s new mom give him new experiences of himself and new ways of seeing himself. The father and younger brother pitch in, coaching, tutoring, and encouraging. Everyone’s faith in Michael’s potential, their reflecting his true self back to him, not only helps Michael learn to play football but also helps him earn good enough grades to be eligible to play on high school and college teams — and eventually to play as a pro in the National Football League. Connection — steady, loving connection — and others’ seeing Michael for the resilient human being he is, help him recover a sense of his own innate goodness and fulfill his potential.
If your earliest experiences of attachment and bonding gave you a sense of security and a sense of yourself as a uniquely resilient human being, that’s great news. Even before you had any conscious choice in the matter, your brain was able to develop a solid inner sense of safety and trust in those relationships. The reflection and encouragement from empathic, responsive people for your true self engendered a sense of trust within you as well. You learned what it felt like to be a healthy, secure “me” and knew the innate goodness of that “me.” This belief in yourself as someone who belongs and matters is what allows your inner sense of self to “gel” and creates a platform of confidence that allows you to explore yourself and the world, developing all the competencies you need to realize your potential.
Even if you didn’t get the full benefit of that trust, confidence, and resilience from your earliest experiences, it is possible to recover or develop those capacities now. The brain develops its hardware and software of resilience, for better or worse, through engaging with other brains. The prefrontal cortex matures — and is repaired — most rapidly through interactions with other mature prefrontal cortices. The most effective way to learn resilience is by interacting with other resilient human beings.
We learn the five Cs of coping from people who embody them. Michael learned to connect to resources — such as coaches, tutors, and agents — from his adoptive family. You might learn to see additional options in a situation from other people who can observe it from different perspectives. You might become more competent at negotiating with other people by carefully observing people who are skilled at negotiation. Certainly, as you spend time with people who are consistently calm or steadfastly courageous, you come to embody those qualities too.
When Past Relationships Make Us Skittish
Although relationships can be healthy, resonant, and conducive to positive brain change, they can sometimes be oppressively toxic and a cause of less-than-resilient functioning. Many people with experience of such relationships may be very wary indeed of relying on relationships with other people to gain resilience.
If we have been hurt, devalued, betrayed, or exploited, especially by people close to us, the people we wanted to rely on the most, we may be reluctant to seek any kind of healing through another person. Love gone sour or scornful can wound our hearts and break our spirits. Too many of us have experienced or witnessed deliberate cruelty or violation from other people—the unconscionable neglect, enmeshment, or abuse that threatens to annihilate or disintegrate the psyche.
Our willingness to rely on others for comfort, guidance, and support and to learn from others how relational resilience really works can easily erode if we remember a sometimes loving, sometimes raging alcoholic father chasing us through the house with a kitchen knife, or returning home from a vacation with Dad to discover that Mom had moved out, with no explanation ever given.
Our higher brains can later extend compassion — and even forgiveness — to people whose behaviors have disappointed or wounded us if we come to understand that they, too, have probably suffered in relationships in ways that shaped their behavior. And we can recognize that we may also have disappointed and wounded others along the way. But repeated toxic experiences in relationships and the wariness that results can skew our perceptions of ourselves and others, derail our capacities for trust and self-acceptance, and leave us mired in anxiety and shame. Instead of processing new experiences with naturally curious engagement, we may defensively withdraw. These conditioned neural patterns can block our ability to learn about resilience from healthier relationships.
Nonetheless, if we want to become more resilient, we need to learn how to use new experiences in genuinely resonant relationships, including new ways of relating to the self, to rewire our patterns of relating. This is the choosing part of harnessing neuroplasticity. Developing resilience requires rebuilding the resonance circuit in our brains that puts the maturation of the prefrontal cortex back on track. It means undoing any history of relational troubles and traumas that may still create mistrust and defensiveness.
Resilience allows us to use relationships as positive resources, instead of relying only on our own survival responses. We want to move from neural cement or neural swamp into a more flexible mindset that lets us develop relational resilience and relational intelligence — the interpersonal skills that allow us to meet all the storms and surges of our lives, not just the relational dramas and traumas. To develop this intelligence, we need to learn to use interpersonal neuroplasticity as a powerful agent of recovering relational resilience.
The Power of the True Other
At a conference on attachment and relationships, the keynote speaker told us: “All this talk therapy is just an excuse to hang out long enough for the relationship to do the healing.” One hour a week with a trained and empathic professional can be helpful, sometimes essential, but we have more than a hundred waking hours in the rest of the week to seek out beneficial new experiences on our own — with friends, partners, and pets, in memory and in imagination — to create new circuitry in our brains that helps us know and value who we truly are.
The speediest and most reliable way to strengthen the prefrontal cortex, and begin to recover the resilience of our true self, is through experiences with people who can be, as the clinical psychologist Diana Fosha puts it, true others to our true self.
True others are those who can see and reflect our true self back to us when we have forgotten, or perhaps have never known, who we truly are. They remember our best self when we are mired in our worst self and accept without judgment all of who we are. True others are not necessarily the people closest to us, though they may be: they are the people most attuned to us, those most accepting of our innate goodness, our essential worth as human beings. For many people, a true other can be a spiritual figure or deity; for others, it may be a counselor, teacher, or friend. When someone who is acting as a true other genuinely sees us at our best, we can see ourselves in that light, too. This mirroring helps us rediscover our resilient self.
The power of the true other can be seen in the example of the Irish playwright Oscar Wilde when he was imprisoned in England in 1895 for homosexuality. As Wilde was walking through the throngs of jeering hecklers on his way to prison, his publisher and friend, Robert Ross, quietly bowed and tipped his hat to him. Wilde later recounted in his autobiographical work De Profundis that his friend’s gesture of respect was what enabled him to endure his two years of imprisonment with his courage and dignity intact. When Ross acknowledged Wilde’s true self, Wilde’s resilience came to the fore.
Having other people reflect our best self to us can happen in the simplest of ways. A few months after I moved my eighty-one-year-old dad out to live near me so that I could care for him as his health declined, he had a stroke severe enough to land him in the hospital for a few days and in a skilled nursing facility for a while after that. One morning, he became suicidal. That behavior was more than the nursing facility could take responsibility for. At 5:30 AM the staff called me to come and pick him up. In his confused mental state, and despite his frailty, he had managed to climb onto a second-story deck overlooking the courtyard and had threatened to jump.
When I arrived, my dad was waiting in the lobby. Getting him into my car to take him home was no problem, but I was completely bewildered about what to do next. Would he be safe at home? Did I need to move him to a board-and-care facility? Before I got in the car myself, I burst into tears. Right there on the curb in the parking lot, I collapsed and sobbed. All my fear and confusion about his failing health welled up and spilled over. The nurse who had discharged my dad saw my collapse out the window, came out of the building, sat next to me on the curb, and gently took my hand. For the next fifteen minutes, she never said a word. She just held my hand and gently stroked my back as I cried out wave after wave of grief and anguish.
Eventually, as the tears subsided, I looked into the nurse’s eyes and saw someone simply seeing me and my pain, caring for my pain and all the pain of all the family members who had ever gone through what I was going through, all the pain of the human condition. In that moment I knew that my struggle was completely seen, understood, and accepted. In that moment, she was the true other to my true self, and her unspoken empathy allowed me to regroup. Her presence conveyed to me I that could find my way through this dark time and helped me recover my confidence.
In this instance, I was fortunate that the true other showed up for me. But rather than just hope or wait for someone to turn up randomly on their own, you can deliberately seek out true others; you can deliberately choose the new relational experiences that will rewire your brain for more inner security and resilience.
Creating Inner Safety and Trust
The process of being seen, understood, and accepted by an attuned, empathic other engenders a sense of genuine self-acceptance, a feeling that we are profoundly okay. We feel safe enough, strong enough, sure enough to venture courageously into the world and develop the competencies we need to deal with life’s challenges.
Among my favorite stories is one I heard from the meditation teacher Jack Kornfield. A seven-year-old boy and his family went to a restaurant for dinner. When the waitress asked the boy what he wanted for dinner, he replied without hesitation, “A hot dog and French fries!” His mother interrupted, telling the waitress, “He’ll have meatloaf with mashed potatoes and gravy.” After the waitress had taken the parents’ orders, she turned to the boy and asked, “Do you want ketchup and mustard on your hot dog, son?” As the waitress was leaving, the boy turned to his parents and said, “She thinks I’m real!”
When others take us seriously, honoring our existence, we become real to ourselves. Through supportive recognition by others, we begin to reap the benefits of a secure attachment we may not have had early on; we can deepen any inner security we’ve been able to encode. The rest of this chapter discusses skills that help you to do this and presents a series of experiential exercises to help you remember your own strength, resourcefulness, and wholeness — the nature of who you are and were, deeper than any conditioning that might have obscured or derailed that essence. Because authentic relationship is critical for restoring this connection to your true self, all of the exercises involve interacting with others, whether face-to-face with a real person or in your imagination. Both are equally effective in conditioning new neural pathways. Following each exercise is an explanation of the neuroscience underlying it.
Skill 1: The Healing of Presence and Deep Listening
The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention.… A loving silence often has far more power to heal and to connect than the most well-intentioned words.
— RACHEL NAOMI REMEN, MD
When we want to listen deeply to another person, we prepare ourselves to give them our full attention. We temporarily set aside our own needs and agendas. We stop rehearsing what we#8217;re going to say in response to what we anticipate they are going to say. We become present, opening our mind and heart to the person underneath the words, underneath the bragging or the complaints. We become curious about what the person is saying and not saying, what might need more time or deeper trust to be voiced. As Henry David Thoreau said, “The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when someone asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.”
We can bring the same attentiveness and contemplative listening to ourselves. We can practice tuning into our own experience, moment by moment. We can notice tension, irritation, restlessness, impatience, and boredom, or calm, peace, delight, joy, and awe. As we listen more deeply even than the level of our breath, body sensations, feelings, and thoughts about ourselves, we can drop into a quiet space of no chatter, no agenda, no nagging doubts, no habits of perceiving or interpreting ourselves. We can enter a spacious stillness so calm and clear that we begin to sense the wholeness of our true being.
As we learn to listen skillfully, grounded in that wholeness, we are conditioning in our brains a new way of being with ourselves and with others, creating the safety and trust that is part of our psychological platform of resilience.
When we shift our attention toward listening, our whole world changes. Learning to listen is equal to learning to love.
— RUTH COX
This exercise is done with a partner. Decide who will be the speaker and who will be the listener.
1. The listener asks the speaker a question (samples below); the speaker answers as honestly and thoughtfully as she can. The listener listens silently, though attentively and appreciatively. The listener then simply says, “I appreciate your letting me know that,” and asks the same question again. The speaker answers the question again from a different angle or from a deeper level of understanding and inner truth. The listener listens as before and, when the speaker is finished, again says, “I appreciate your letting me know that,” and again repeats the question. If the speaker doesn’t respond right away, the listener simply maintains a receptive silence. This questioning and response can continue for as long as the speaker is still discovering new understandings or feelings in response to the question.
Here are some sample questions. Choose only one and keep asking it.
What brings you joy in your life?
What has brought you sorrow?
What worries you now?
When have you found courage in dark times?
What are you grateful for?
What are you proud of?
2. When the speaker is done (and thanks the listener for listening), the two of you switch roles. When you have both experienced listening and being listened to, you can debrief, sharing what you noticed about your experience in each role and what you discovered about yourself.
3. Take a moment to integrate this new learning into your ongoing sense of self in relationship to others, creating more safety and trust in relationships. Let yourself take in the good news that exercises like deep listening are strengthening your prefrontal cortex and allowing more new conditioning as you go along.
The Neuroscience of Why Deep Listening Creates Safety and Trust in Relationships
The anterior cingulate cortex — the structure we use to focus our conscious attention — also functions as a switching station between the brain’s left hemisphere (primarily responsible for processing our thoughts) and the right (primarily responsible for processing our feelings). The focused attention of deep reflection in response to a repeated question and being attentively listened to (whether in our own minds or by someone else) helps integrate the processing of the brain’s two hemispheres and helps us probe our thoughts and feelings at a deeper level. We often “hear” ourselves in a new way and then, via the prefrontal cortex, integrate these new understandings about ourselves or others.
This kind of deep listening can lead to the compassionate receptivity that is needed in moments of great loss, in realizations of truths we don’t want to hear, in times of disorienting change and transition. Compassionate listening requires us to set aside everything that is not simply presence and openness. We listen to the whole being of another with our whole being, and we attend to the whole being of our own self.
Skill 2: Sharing with Others
Kindness is more important than wisdom, and the recognition of that is the beginning of wisdom.
— THEODORE RUBIN
Sometimes we find it easier to listen to the sharing of another than to share something about ourselves. The exercise below offers a safe way to build on the skills of listening you just learned in order to build skills in speaking from your heart to another.
1. Invite a friend, an acquaintance, or a friendly coworker to do this exercise with you. Take two minutes each to share an experience of kindness that has happened to you today already, or earlier in the week, or earlier this year, even back in the third grade: a moment when someone held open the door, picked up something you dropped, smiled as you walked down the hallway, sent a supportive email when you were going through a hard time — any behavior that registered in your consciousness as support from the universe, something that gave just a little lift or a little steadiness.
2. Take another two minutes each to explore what it’s like for you to be sharing this story with your partner, receiving kind attention, resonance, and support.
3. Take a moment in silence to notice any effects in your body and mind from doing the exercise, such as a sense of buoyancy, comfort, or relaxation.
You can do this exercise with variations — recalling moments of courage, flexibility, or patience — with great benefit to your brain and to your capacities for resilience. Each time you explore a quality necessary for resilience, you are intentionally conditioning that quality more deeply in your neural circuitry.
The Neuroscience of Why Sharing with Others Creates Safety and Trust in Relationships
This exercise brings the vagus nerve into play. Its function in the brain’s resonance circuit is to help regulate the lower brain’s assessment of the level of safety, trust, connection, and belonging you experience in any situation. Every experience of a positive, nourishing connection with another person improves this capacity, increasing the sense of ease and well-being in relating to other people. Sharing these moments explicitly with others, as in step 1 and 2 of this exercise, strengthens the attunement and empathy functions of the entire resonance circuit in the brain, supporting your resilience in interacting with others safely, in dealings that seem not so safe, and in navigating the world in general.
As you remember experiencing a moment of kindness, your brain lights up all the networks of that memory: the visual image, the emotions, and the body sensations, as well as the thoughts and beliefs. You convey the entire experience to your partner through your facial expressions, body language, and tone of voice as well as your words. As your partner attunes to you, the mirror neurons in his brain pick up the nonverbal signals of your inner experience and begin to register in his brain as his own inner experience of your inner experience.
When your partner shares with you his experience of hearing your story and conveys empathy for your experience, he is creating what is called an intersubjective experience of the connection between the two of you, which both your explicit and implicit processing systems take in. Your mirror neurons, picking up the signals from your partner, let you know you are seen, accepted, and understood. Even a few seconds of this sharing and mirroring strengthen the resonance circuits in each of you, allowing you to engage more easily and skillfully with other people.
When you and your partner debrief about your experiences, you are encoding the content of the stories and examples into your explicit memory and enhancing your relational intelligence. Equally significant, you are encoding the knowledge of how to do something: strengthening in your implicit memory the procedural learning of how to create more safety and trust in relationships. By sharing moments of relating skillfully, you are strengthening the circuits that will allow you to rewire old patterns and support your relational intelligence. You become more competent in connecting to others — one of the five Cs of coping.
Deep listening and sharing kindness have used new conditioning to rewire your brain. Repetition of these exercises, or experiences like them, will reinforce the new learning in your brain’s circuitry in the direction of deeper resilience.
Skill 3: Experiencing the Innate Goodness of Yourself and Others
Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.
— PLATO
Just as listening to others, listening to ourselves, and being listened to help us recover a sense of trust and confidence about ourselves in relationships, experiencing goodness — in ourselves and others — deepens that trust and confidence while creating more openness, receptivity, and flexibility in the brain. We learn to access that sense of goodness through deconditioning — the process of brain change that allows us to relax old, conditioned patterns of how we relate to ourselves and others; letting go of opinions, judgments, and defenses; and returning to a clear sense of our core innate goodness, coming home to the innate nobility and wholeness that is an essential component of our resilience.
The two exercises below, drawn from the Buddhist wisdom tradition, will help you access a sense of this innate goodness, which will become part of your psychological platform of resilience.
Exercise 3: Cultivating Loving Kindness to Experience Innate Goodness
Loving kindness practice (metta) is an ancient practice of goodwill from the Buddhist tradition in which we express warmhearted wishes for the happiness and well-being of other individuals and for ourselves, even when that’s difficult. Through this practice we can learn to keep our hearts open to people we may dislike and even to parts of ourselves we may dislike. The practice leads us into a larger consciousness, to a broader perspective, independent of our personal needs or expectations, helping us meet events and other people in our lives with more openness, flexibility, and resilience.
Loving kindness practice involves the repetition of phrases of well-wishing through several categories of people, from easier to more difficult. Typically it begins with expressing wishes for ourselves. Because of our conditioning, it is sometimes easier to feel the flow of loving kindness for someone else than it is for ourselves. If that is true for you, go ahead and begin the practice by directing your well-wishing toward a benefactor or friend, and then include yourself in the practice when you are ready.
The phrases are formulated silently to yourself. However, the meditation teacher Sylvia Boorstein suggests singing the phrases to yourself: a simple melody makes the practice easier to remember and more fun to do. Moreover, singing involves more integrated brain functions than speaking does. The result of the practice is more peace of mind and heart, greater contentment and well-being. Over time, we come to increasingly know and inhabit these states of mind as who we truly are.
1. Choose three or four phrases of well-wishing to repeat silently in your mind. The traditional phrases include the following: may I be happy; may I be peaceful; may I be strong in body and mind; may I have ease of mind and heart. Practitioners have modified the phrases through the ages to include: may I be safe from inner and outer harm; may I be free from suffering, from all causes of suffering, from causing any suffering; may I be kind to myself; may I trust my goodness; may I love and accept myself just as I am.
You can invent your own phrases; many people do. I have developed phrases that have worked powerfully for me and for many clients and students: may I have compassion for myself as I endeavor to open my heart; may I know that I am held, safe and secure; may I know that I am able to trust; may I know that I am loved and cherished; may I know that I am able to love others with understanding, compassion, and forgiveness.
2. Repeat your chosen phrases of well-wishing for five minutes, three times a day, for three days, or whatever rhythm fits into your life. The important thing is the sincerity of your intention to use the practice to evoke and encode the states of mind and heart that are full of loving presence, spacious awareness, and openness to the true nature of ourselves and all beings. With enough practice, these states of mind become traits of being.
3. Begin another three-day cycle, now extending the well-wishing to other people. The Buddhist tradition identifies specific categories of people to receive this well-wishing, starting with people who are easy to open our hearts to and extending to people who are more difficult. Choose one specific person in each category to practice with, repeating the practice again for other individuals.
Benefactors: people who have helped you in some way, who have seen the best in you and helped you bring out that best, such as parents, teachers, mentors, therapists, siblings, and friends.
Dear friends: the people who, as one unknown author has said, “know the song of your heart and hum it back to you when you’ve forgotten the words.”
Neutral persons: people whom you may encounter regularly but don’t know personally: people who deliver your mail, check out your groceries, walk their dogs in your neighborhood, or vacuum the carpets at your place of work. You don’t know their joys and sorrows. You don’t know if they are good or bad. You only know that they are human and subject to all the forces and challenges of human life, and that they have an essential worth as human beings, too. The power of the practice is to feel the loving kindness flowing from your heart to a neutral person, not because of who they are or what they may have done for you, or even in recognition that they are also vulnerable to suffering of the human condition, but simply to honor their true nature.
Difficult persons: people we are most likely to have negative, even contemptuous, opinions of and are most likely to contract our hearts against. They may include the coworker who is always snippy or the politician whose behavior we find reprehensible. This is where the rubber meets the road. Sending wishes for strength, happiness, and ease even to a difficult person can train our minds and hearts to stay open, calm, wise, and skillful in dealing with them or other people like them. We come to understand that our state of mind and heart does not depend on them, on their behaviors, or on their changing their behaviors. If you lose your focus while practicing with a difficult person, return to wishing well to an easier category of people, to reestablish the flow of goodwill from your heart. Build up a head of steam, and try again.
All beings: everyone, near and far, known and unknown. This last step in traditional loving kindness practice opens our hearts “as wide as the world.”
4. At any stage of this practice, take a moment to notice any changes in your own well-being. You may feel an ease or openness that signals more receptivity to other people and to experience in general. This receptivity occurs at the neural level, too: deconditioning makes it easier for your brain to rewire.
The Neuroscience of Cultivating Loving Kindness to Experience Innate Goodness
Loving kindness practice concentrates the attention of our minds, not so much on the person to whom we are offering the well-wishing (the object of the practice) or on the phrases themselves (the vehicle of the practice), as on the flow of goodwill arising in our own hearts that is the reliable outcome of the practice. With practice, that goodwill can seem effortless. We experience that flow of goodwill as evidence of the loving, caring, and goodness of our true nature, deeper than all of our personal conditioning.
That flow of goodwill causes the brain to shift into the defocusing mode of processing, in which deconditioning takes place: a more spacious and open state of consciousness. In this state, we can let go of any stories about ourselves or other people and any personal expectations or needs. This defocusing mode of consciousness helps our brain stay more receptive to new experiences, making it easier for us to encode new insights and more wholesome patterns of relating into our neural circuitry. This new relationship to relationship supports the development of the five Cs of coping. With practice, we become calmer, clearer-sighted, more connected, more competent, and more courageous.
Skill 4: Honoring the Innate Goodness of Others
Loving kindness is considered in the Buddhist tradition to be one of four “sublime attitudes,” states of mind and heart that develop naturally when you are in touch with your true nature and that lead to the deepest happiness. The other three are compassion, joy in the welfare of others, and equanimity. Together, these four attitudes help you keep your heart and mind open in the face of all kinds of adversity and suffering.
The next exercise leads you and a partner through an experience of all four of these sublime attitudes. Although the exercise is done in silence, you maintain eye contact throughout the exercise. The gazing, even without words, can evoke a profound sense of intimacy and trust as you open up to the nobility of your common humanity. This perspective is important for learning to relate to others resonantly and skillfully.
Exercise 4: Honoring the Innate Goodness of Others
1. Invite a friend to do this exercise with you. Sit across from each other so that you can maintain eye contact. Do the entire guided meditation together in a spacious silence.
2. Simply gaze into your partner’s eyes, allowing yourself to see in her the nobility of her true nature, the innate goodness and radiance of her being. Silently wish her well, sending the expressions of loving kindness: may you know the deepest happiness; may you have ease of mind and heart. Let yourself know that at the same time, your partner is sending you expressions of loving kindness as well. Let yourself take in the kindness being offered.
3. Then allow your awareness to shift. Imagine what human sorrows your partner might have experienced in her journey, what losses, what griefs, what pain of the human condition. Silently begin to send her expressions of compassion: may your sorrows be held in loving awareness; may your sorrow ease; may you feel my care for your suffering. Let yourself know that, at the same time, your partner is sending you compassion for your own sorrow and suffering as well. Let yourself take in the care and compassion being offered.
4. Then allow your awareness to shift again. Imagine what human joys your partner may have experienced: what accomplishments and competencies she might have achieved; what blessings of abundance and love she might have experienced. Silently begin to send her expressions of sympathetic joy, happiness for her happiness: may you fully delight in your delight; may you feel your joy deeply. Allow yourself to know that, at the same time, your partner is sending you expressions of joy. Let yourself take in the sweetness of her joy in your joy.
5. Allow your awareness to shift again, to expressing wishes for calm abiding and equanimity: whatever happens on your journey, may you perceive and respond to it with a calm ease of mind and heart; may you have deep inner peace. Allow yourself to know that, at the same time, your partner is sending wishes for equanimity and calm abiding for you as well. Let yourself take in the calming energy of her well-wishing.
6. Allow your awareness to shift one more time, to simply being, noticing whatever is going on for you right now: awareness of your inner experience, and awareness of your awareness. Notice and reflect on any changes in your inner, subjective sense of self. You may notice a sense of spaciousness, less defensiveness, more openness.
The Neuroscience of Honoring
the Innate Goodness of Others
The steady eye contact of this exercise activates the fusiform gyrus, a small structure in the right hemisphere of the brain that recognizes faces and reads their emotional expressions. Research has found a correlation between high activity in the fusiform gyrus and low activity in the amygdala when we perceive a sense of safety in another person. Specifically, the perception of safety and trust in the facial expressions of another can calm our own nervous system.
When you deliberately maintain eye contact with another person while experiencing and expressing positive emotional states like kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity, you are evoking experiences of safety and trust that encourage your brain to relax and open into the neural circuitry of a defocusing state. The deconditioning of this state allows new experiences of relationship — of safety, respect, honoring, and trust — to be wired into your circuitry more easily.
Skill 5: Rewiring Negative Views of Yourself
If we are to rewire our sense of self to acknowledge our strengths and competencies, we need to be able to accept the goodness that others see in us. But we may find it much more difficult to receive the love and compassion in the previous exercise than to give it. We may “smallify” ourselves, as my friend Daniel Ellenberg would say, rather than let the love and goodwill of others nourish and resource us. We may receive compliments quite regularly: “You handled that attorney’s questions really well.” Or “Nice job getting the teachers and parents to talk to each other.” But beliefs we hold about ourselves from previous experiences in relationships might cause us to block or deflect these comments and reply, “No, not really; I actually thought I was lousy” or “Anyone could have done that; it was nothing special.” We need to be able to take in the positive views others have of us and encode them into our neural circuitry in order to rewire our old views of ourselves, especially when we might believe something quite different.
When you see someone looking at you with unconditional positive regard, mirror neurons evoke the sense of goodness within you that the other person is seeing. I present the next exercise in the form of a guided visualization so that you can do it easily on your own, anytime, anywhere. Practicing letting yourself take in the love of others is an important step in rewiring any negative views of yourself that may interfere with your resilience and sense of well-being.
Exercise 5: Rewiring Negative Views of Yourself through Seeing the Goodness That Others See in You
1. Sit or lie comfortably. Allow your eyes to gently close. Focus your attention on your breathing. Rest comfortably in the simple presence of awareness. When you’re ready, let yourself become aware of how you are holding yourself in this moment. Are you feeling kind toward yourself? Are you uneasy with yourself? Are you feeling critical of yourself? Just notice, just be aware and accepting of what is, without judgment — or if there is judgment, notice that.
2. Then, when you’re ready, bring to mind someone in your life who you know loves you unconditionally, someone in whose presence you feel safe. This could be a teacher or dear friend; a partner, parent, or child; or a beloved dog or cat. It could be a spiritual figure — Jesus or the Dalai Lama, or your own wiser self. Or it could simply be a memory from any time in your life when someone accepted you as you are and loved you.
3. Imagine yourself sitting with this person face-to-face. Visualize the person looking at you with acceptance and tenderness, love, joy. Feel yourself taking in his or her love and acceptance of you.
4. Now imagine yourself being the other person, looking at yourself through their eyes. Feel that person’s love and openness being directed toward you. See in yourself the goodness, the sacred humanness that the other person sees in you. Let yourself savor this awareness of your own goodness.
5. Now come back to being yourself. You are in your own body again, experiencing the other person looking at you again, with so much love and acceptance. Feel yourself taking in that love and acceptance. Take the love deeply into your own being. Feel it in your body. Notice how and where you feel that love and acceptance in your body — as a smile, as a warmth in your heart — and savor it.
6. Take a moment to reflect on your experience. You are learning to recondition past negative views of yourself. Set the intention to remember this feeling any time you choose to.
The Neuroscience of Rewiring Negative Views of Yourself
This exercise uses our mirror neurons to do some reverse engineering. When we intentionally evoke the sense of being seen by someone who loves us and is looking at us with loving kindness, with appreciation, with compassion, our mirror neurons begin to fire in response. We can feel those feelings in our own bodies, even if we are holding quite different, contradictory feelings about ourselves at the same time. Imagining the other person’s kindness begins to rewire our previously conditioned views of ourselves. This reconditioning strengthens our prefrontal cortex in its function of attuning to and being empathic with ourselves and, of course, with others.
Because this form of reconditioning with mirror neurons is powerful, it’s important to spend time with people who see our goodness, our capacities, our resilience and mirror them back to us; likewise, it’s important to protect ourselves from people who hold negative views of us. Chapter 9 picks up this thread again.
Skill 6: Befriending Yourself
The psychological self is made up of many selves, an integration of different patterns of neural firing that encode various memories or mental representations of different aspects of the “self.” Your self might be made up of the self who was brave enough to run back into the burning house to save the family dog, the self who was generous enough to bring casseroles three nights in a row to the neighbors with newborn triplets, and the self whose nose got pushed so far out of joint at not being invited to a second cousin’s wedding that you didn’t speak to that side of the family for two years. These many selves can manifest a wide range of resilience in their connections with others. Resilience depends as much on how skillfully we relate to all these inner aspects of ourselves as it does on how intelligently we relate to others.
Resilience can be impaired by old messages that tell us we can’t possibly run our own restaurant or can’t start over again when our restaurant burns to the ground, by old voices that tell us we’ll never get a PhD and don’t deserve to anyway, or by old parts of us that are stubborn, shy, mean, devaluing, and not fully on board with this resilience thing.
Resilience requires acknowledging, allowing, and accepting all of the rebellious or reluctant parts of the self simply as parts of the self. It requires honoring their reactions as their best strategies to protect us from harm — perhaps misguided or outdated now, but at one time deeply believed to be necessary, even adaptive and brilliant. Embracing these inner parts and integrating them into an authentic sense of self is one of the capacities of the mature prefrontal cortex, one that is essential to strengthening our inner base of resilience.
Befriending ourselves simply means being willing to look at all parts of ourselves — the good, the bad, the ugly — with honesty and clarity, with kindness and tenderness; to open our hearts and minds to the truth of this multiplicity of selves, without flinching, without self-hatred or condemnation, and with an eye to appreciating how we have come to become who we are.
Many techniques are available to help us become aware of all the patterns we call voices, parts, aspects, or facets of our selves; engage in a dialogue with them; and accept, honor, and integrate them into one coherent narrative of the authentic, whole self—even the ones that seem harmful or bad at first glance. The next exercise is a simple guided visualization developed by Virginia Satir, a family therapist who specialized in self-acceptance and self-esteem. The exercise uses the wiser self (see chapter 4) to conduct a sophisticated and productive inner dialogue with these parts. You might want to keep paper and pen handy to jot down notes as you go through the exercise.
Exercise 6: Befriending Yourself by Accepting the Many Parts of Yourself
1. Settle comfortably in your seat. Allow your eyes to gently close. Focus your attention on your breathing. Rest comfortably in the awareness of simply being.
2. When you’re ready, imagine you are outside a theater. Imagine the building, the doors, the posters outside. Walk up to one of the doors, open it, and walk into the lobby. Open another door and walk into the empty theater. Walk all the way down to the first or second row and take a seat in the center of the row. An empty stage lies in front of you. All is quiet.
3. Now imagine that the first figure to come out on the stage is your wiser self, standing in the center. This figure represents all the qualities you aspire to: wisdom, strength, courage, compassion, competence, acceptance.
4. Now imagine other characters coming onto the stage one by one. Each of these imaginary characters embodies a particular quality in yourself. These characters could be people you know, yourself at a different age, people you know from the movies or history or literature, animals, or cartoon characters.
The first character embodies a quality in yourself that you really, really like. Take a moment to let that character take the stage. Notice and relate to that character kindly and remember it (perhaps make a note).
A second character comes on stage embodying another positive quality in yourself. Again let that character materialize on the stage and remember it.
A third character comes on stage embodying yet another positive quality about yourself. Let the character materialize, and remember it.
Look carefully at these three characters, which embody three different, positive qualities in yourself, standing with your wiser self. Take a moment to notice, relate to, and remember them all.
Now bring a fourth character to the stage that embodies a quality in yourself that you really don’t like all that much. In fact, you wish it weren’t part of you, but you know it is. Let this character materialize and take a moment to notice and relate to it kindly, and remember it.
Bring on a fifth character that embodies another negative quality in you.
Bring on one last character embodying just one more negative quality in yourself.
Take a moment to materialize all these characters, notice and relate to them, and remember them; jot them down.
5. Now you have onstage your wiser self, three characters embodying positive qualities, and three characters embodying negative qualities. Ask each character in turn what special gift he or she brings to you by being part of you: ask the positive ones first, then the negative ones. As you listen to their responses, notice what lessons you learn from their being a part of you. Each one has some wisdom or learning to offer.
6. Next, ask your wiser self what gifts and lessons these parts have to offer you. Listen carefully for the answers.
7. Briefly thank each character for coming to be with you. Watch as they leave the stage one by one, the wiser self last. Then imagine yourself getting up out of your seat and walking back up the aisle, through the lobby and back outside the theater. Turn around to look at the theater where all this happened. Then slowly come to awareness again of sitting quietly, and when you’re ready, open your eyes.
8. Take a moment to remember and embrace the lessons of each of these six characters, especially the negative ones: each is an integral part of you, essential to your wholeness.
The Neuroscience of Befriending Yourself
When we don’t accept all the aspects of who we are, it requires effort on the part of our prefrontal cortex to keep the unwanted parts of ourselves out of awareness, outside the coherent narrative of ourselves. When we deliberately become receptive to those parts of ourselves we may have pushed away or forgotten and allow them back into the sense of our authentic self, all of the energy that was used to keep them out of awareness is available to use for more fulfilling purposes, helping us be more responsive and resilient. And any wisdom from their efforts to keep us safe from harm is now available to guide us rather than derail us. We can take wise counsel from the thirteenth-century Sufi poet Rumi:
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
Some momentary awareness come
As an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you
out for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
The prefrontal cortex allows us to create the coherent narrative of ourselves: this is who I am, this is how I got here, this is how I choose to develop next. All of the exercises in this chapter strengthen the prefrontal cortex to function even more efficiently in encoding new strategies for resilience. At the same time, the exercises help you deepen your capacity to trust yourself and others. That trust opens myriad options and opportunities for well-being.
Pulling It All Together
You have just completed an important phase of learning to use relationships to rewire your brain for resilience and move in the world with competence and confidence. This rewiring can happen even when experiences in past relationships have made us wary of trusting others.
• We can use the power of interactions with a true other to strengthen the prefrontal cortex and recover a sense of our true self and a secure inner base of resilience.
• You can repeat the exercises as often as you wish to enhance your capacities for deep listening, relational engagement, loving kindness, honoring the nobility in others, taking in the goodness that others see in you, and befriending yourself.
• All of these exercises strengthen the resonance circuit in your brain, which creates a sense of safety and trust in relationships, relationships that you can use in turn to increase your resilience.