Bouncing Back

Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.

IN READING ABOUT less-than-secure attachment styles in chapter 2, you may have noticed that you missed out on some of the experiences that would have naturally encoded resilient coping styles into your neural circuitry. Nearly half of us do. You would have then missed out on some of the experiences that lead to development of what the attachment theorist John Bowlby called the internal secure base, the psychological capacities of resilience that are the outcome of secure attachment. Dan Siegel, creator of the discipline of interpersonal neurobiology, refers to these capacities as FACES: the ability to be flexible, adaptive, coherent, energized, and stable. These capacities, whether instilled from the beginning of our brain development or because of skillful rewiring through other relationships later in life, allow us to feel competent and confident as we navigate the bumps and bruises of the world. This base of inner security is a vital protection against trauma. It is also dynamic, more of a flow of processes (a verb) than a solid entity (noun). Neuroscience locates the neural substrate of that internal secure base, as you might expect, in the prefrontal cortex.

• a sense of safety and trust in relationships with one’s self and others, which supports neuroplasticity in the brain and keeps it open to learning;

• a flexible focus of attention on oneself, others, and the world, which permits flexibility in responses to life events;

• a flexible interdependence with others that balances a healthy independence (autonomy) with a healthy reliance on others (affiliation);

• an appreciation that healthy relationships are integral to happiness and a sense of competence engaging in relationships, believing that relationships will most likely work out and that you can act in ways that will make them work out.

The findings of the research are echoed in the words of Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama: “Consider the following. We humans are social beings. We come into the world as the result of others’ actions. We survive here in dependence on others. Whether we like it or not, there is hardly a moment of our lives when we do not benefit from others’ activities. For this reason it is hardly surprising that most of our happiness arises in the context of our relationships with others.”

Exercise 1: Taking In the Love of Others to Nourish the Inner Base of Resilience

1. Ask a friend to help you in this exercise, someone who knows both your best and your worst qualities, or enlist someone willing to work from a list you provide of these qualities you have identified on your own.

2. Sitting face-to-face, ask your partner to share the positive qualities that he sees in you, or those you have listed, saying for each, “I see your [generosity, open-mindedness, courage], and I really appreciate that about you.” Maintain eye contact with the partner during this step.

3. Let in the feeling, “This is true about me. This is okay about me. I can love and appreciate this part of me. I can love and appreciate all of me.” Close your eyes, if you wish to, while you are accepting this feeling. Notice what happens in your body and mind as you receive this care from another.

4. Your partner begins to identify your less positive qualities, saying, “I see that you can be [stubborn, jealous, bitter]. I accept this part of you as part of being a human being; I value this part of you, too, and honor it as an important part of you.”

5. Again, your job is to let in the appreciation and acceptance, without disputing or diminishing what your partner is saying.

6. Continue receiving the sharing until you feel done. Take a moment to notice any changes in your inner sense of yourself, and experience any increased inner sense of well-being and goodness. Thank your partner for his collaboration. (You may switch roles and repeat the exercise if you both choose to.)

Rick Hanson, the author of Buddha’s Brain, uses the phrase “taking in the good” to refer to the process of pausing to let positive experiences sink deeply into the mind and body. By focusing attention on the moments of generosity, patience, and honesty that we experience in our relationships with others, letting those positive moments register within us, our brains develop habits that move us beyond surviving to thriving. In the next exercise, we practice deliberately evoking positive experiences in relationships, receiving them deeply, and then reinforcing them by remembering them later. All of these steps serve the process of installing new, significant relationship patterns in the brain, strengthening the inner base of resilience.

Exercise 2: Taking In the Good to Nourish the Inner Base of Resilience

1. Practice noticing moments of kindness and understanding as they happen in your day. For instance, someone lets you cut in front of him in line at the corner deli when you’re desperate to get change before the meter maid tickets your car. Someone notices that you picked up the trash left by a park bench and smiles as you walk by. A colleague stops you in the hall to say “Good job” after a presentation or offers you a handful of cherries from her lunch. A new neighbor brings you homemade lasagna after you’ve spent six hours moving into a new apartment in the pouring rain, and then checks the next morning to make sure you’re okay.

2. Let the experience register in your mind and body. Notice how this moment of connection makes you feel: perhaps acknowledged, included, or happy.

3. Take in the felt sense of this goodness in your body: a warmth, a relaxation, an opening. Notice what fills your heart: perhaps gratitude, joy, peace.

4. You can reinforce the taking in of the good by telling supportive friends about this moment later, or by imagining telling your circle of support. You can remind yourself again through journaling or in an end-of-the-day review of “three good things I’m grateful for today.” This repetition reinforces the encoding of the event in your neural circuitry; you can draw on it again and again as nourishment for your inner base of resilience.

Exercise 3: Listening to the Intuitive Wisdom of the Wiser Self

1. Find a time and place to sit quietly without interruption. Settle into a comfortable position, take a few deep breaths, and relax into a state of mindful presence. Let any thoughts or concerns fade into the background. Then bring to your awareness a sense of your wiser self, the part of you that embodies your essential wisdom and goodness.

2. Bring to mind someone you are currently having difficulties with: a neighbor who turns up the television too late at night; a coworker who misses important deadlines; a sister-in-law who dominates every discussion at the dinner table. Imagine that you can introduce this person to your wiser self and then stand to the side as you overhear the conversation between them.

3. Listen to how your wiser self handles the conversation with the difficult person: what it says, how it handles the energy of the difficult person. You are overhearing your own inner wisdom being patient and skillful with the difficult person.

4. When the conversation between your wiser self and the difficult person is complete, notice how the difficulty is resolved. Notice what you overheard, what you learned, what advice you are taking in from your wiser self.

5. Let the difficult person fade from the scene. Imagine that your wiser self turns to you, offers you a word or phrase of advice, and offers you one symbolic gift you can hold in your hand to remember this conversation by. You may choose to write down your reflections for future reference.

Relaxing into the defocusing mode of processing in the brain allows you to “surprise the unconscious” and access the intuitive wisdom of your wiser self. The defocusing network, which operates especially on the right side of the brain, shifts our focus to the big picture, where we can comprehend things holistically and connect the dots in a new way. The right hemisphere of the brain also processes the rules of social relationships and our sense of self in relation to others. When we relax into the defocusing network, we can access these rules of relating in a more flexible way. In that process of decon-ditioning, our wiser self can intuitively create new options to solve problems in relating. You may not be able to access this intuitive wisdom very often at first or to trust it when you do. But the more you practice listening to your wiser self, the more you strengthen the internal secure base that it informs and guides.

A teaching story in the Buddhist tradition can guide us in repairing and rewiring any troubling experiences in relationship in the present or traumatizing memories that still hijack us from the past. If you take a teaspoon of salt, dissolve it in a glass of water, and then take a sip of the water, the water tastes disgusting — it’s too salty to drink. But if you take a teaspoon of salt, dissolve it in a large freshwater lake, then dip the glass into the lake and sip that water, the salt has dissolved in the larger lake; there’s no taste of it at all.

We can dissolve teaspoons of relational upset or trauma in the vast lake of mindful empathy, positive emotions, and our own deep goodness through reconditioning. Old memories of difficult experiences seem to dissolve. They no longer have the power or charge they once had to derail our resilience.

Because reconditioning is a powerful tool for altering the brain’s circuitry, and because we want to make sure we’re rewiring old memories and not reinforcing them, I’m going to remind you of the ground rules before you begin the next exercise.

1. Anchor your awareness firmly in the present moment. You are safe here and now and will still be safe even when you retrieve a troubling memory of what happened back there, back then.

2. Focus your awareness on your positive resources: positive self-regard, self-acceptance. Trust your innate goodness, and evoke the wisdom of your wiser self.

3. Start small! Work with a teaspoon of trouble, not a ton. Recall one small, specific relational instance when resilience went awry:

Exercise 4: Imagining a Wished-For Outcome to Rewire Difficult Experiences in Relationships

This exercise creates the resource of a better outcome to recondition a troubling or traumatizing memory.

1. Find a time and place to sit quietly without interruption. Focus your attention on your breath, beathing calmly and deeply into your heart center. Call to mind a particular moment of ease and well-being, a particular sense of your own goodness, or a moment when you felt safe, loved, connected, and cherished. Or think of a moment when you were with someone who loves and believes in you. Remember this moment in as much detail as you can, in as many levels of your body and brain as you can: a visual image, the feelings in your body that the memory evokes, any thoughts you have about yourself now as you remember the sweetness of that moment. Let yourself savor this moment in a mindful and compassionate “holding” of the memory.

2. When you feel bathed in the good feeling, and still anchored in the awareness of safety in the present moment, call to mind a moment when things went awry between you and another person. It might be slight or terrible, but if it’s terrible, break down the experience into little chunks. (Again, start small.) As you reimagine that moment, remain in your observer role rather than reliving the experience. Evoke this memory to light up all the neural networks — visual images, body sensations, emotions, thoughts, or beliefs at the time. Recall memories of what you said and did; what someone else said or did; who else was there; how old you were and how old the other person was; what you were wearing and what that person was wearing. Maybe you wish you had said or done something different at the time. Maybe you wish someone else had done something different, even if that could never have happened in real life.

3. Then begin to visualize a wished-for outcome, even if this never could have happened in real life: what you would have said or done differently; what the other person could have done differently; what someone else not even in the original scenario could have said or done. If you simply wish that none of this had happened at all, you can imagine what would have happened instead. Let the new story unfold as you would have wished, in as much detail as you can. You are creating a scenario that completely disconfirms or contradicts what happened before.

4. Hold the two scenarios in your awareness at the same time, or switch back and forth between them, always refreshing and strengthening the newer, more positive scenario. After a few moments, let go of the old memory and just rest your attention on the new scenario. Let your mind play out this new scenario, and then notice how you feel. Notice any emotions or thoughts or beliefs about yourself that come up now, and if they are more positive and resilient, let them soak in. Then bring your awareness back to the present moment.