» SURVIVING something difficult or traumatic and not knowing why the event happened can feel tremendously unsettling. Without a clear why, we can’t string together a coherent narrative, and our nervous systems cannot rest. Our defensive parts are then left with a giant, gaping uncertainty that’s endlessly frustrating to a brain whose job it is to make sense and meaning of things. In such situations, the brain tends to replay scenarios over and over again, constantly scanning for clues that’ll help us fill in the blanks, trying to find the meaning of it all. When we can settle on a why it allows us to name and put more language to our experience, to identify how we and others are impacted. This, in turn, activates the left side of our prefrontal cortex, our brain’s “executive command center.”
Research has shown that the left prefrontal cortex is associated with what’s called our approaching systems—which can help us get curious about a situation and creative in our approach to resolving it. A right-hemisphere-dominant prefrontal cortex response is associated with our more defensive avoidance systems, which can prompt us to shut down, self-medicate, and run away.
We also know that trauma is stored in a nonlinear, noncoherent system called implicit memory, which accounts for the ways in which difficult memories (sometimes including entire childhoods) so often have holes and missing pieces to them. Thus, theoretical expositions on how and why we are the way that we are can help us to pull what’s been tattered and torn in us out of implicit memory and into concious coherency. It can help bring the parts of us holding unprocessed emotional experiences out of fragmentation and into a place where emotions and narratives can finally flow. Simply put, when we are able to name the moving parts involved in an experience—especially when it’s difficult—it can restore our sense of clarity and empowerment.
It is in this spirit of the healing power of theory that, in part 3, I’ll expand our discussion to include insights from contemporary neuroscience, which align quite seamlessly with the parts work model we’ve been exploring. Learning about our brain systems and nervous systems can provide an incredibly helpful background in terms of understanding our psychological “parts.” They are, aftera all, not just idiosyncratic, not just individual in nature but partly patterned responses to societal forces. Broadening out our view in this way facilitates turning our discussion in the direction of social structures and social conditioning. To this end, I’ll be discussing some of the dynamic neuropsychological systems involved in the lived experience of social perception: namely, that our neurology and unconscious psychologies play an enormous role in matters of power, privilege, and injustice. I’ve found this way of looking at my own experience immensely helpful. Any increase in awareness fortifies our personal freedom because awareness always leads to choices. For people carrying a lot of trauma, this can mean having new options to reframe one’s past and move forward with greater empowerment. For people carrying a lot of privilege (who might also be carrying a lot of trauma), this can mean perceiving more accurately—and over time, more quickly—how our neuropsychological tendencies and social conditioning lead us to deny, protect, and perpetuate our privilege. It can mean, instead, learning how to acknowledge our privilege, use it for good, and share it.
That said, I want to be careful to acknowledge that what I am offering are plausible theories based on what we know about the brain. I aim to help us identify some of the conditions involved, not to try to pin down causation. I approach these matters as an opportunity to raise awareness and to bring a different kind of precision to an ongoing discourse. To the best of my ability, I’ve tried to use language that isn’t clinical or jargon-y, so as to keep things as accessible as possible. As a result, some of what I’m putting forth could be critiqued as reductive or apologist, especially by those who might read things out of context (as we are all prone to do). In my experience, to wade into waters such as race and oppression is a sure way to expose one’s blind spots and conditioning. Yet to avoid such topics is to sidestep some of the most critical issues that inform not only our outer worlds but also our inner ones. So, into the waters I go….