08. It's Not Me, It's You 😅

Hi friends,

Welcome to the eighth dispatch of How Humans Flourish, a research-informed newsletter on how humans thrive. 

It’s already our last week with New York Times reigning #1 bestseller The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, and while we’ve covered a lot of fantastic material the last month, today is when we really get to explore the profundity of his research. 

The only way I know how to bring us closer to Dr. van der Kolk’s world, is by sharing an intimate, yet sad story from my own world. About a year and a half ago, I learned a cousin of mine died of an ectopic pregnancy, a rare occurrence where a fertilized egg implants and grows outside the main cavity of the uterus, and sometimes like in the case of my cousin, ruptures. I at once felt beset with grief, and for weeks, found myself wondering what those last few weeks had been like, had felt like in her body.

I had so many questions, and would ask those close to her during that time, “But, what were her symptoms? Was she in pain? Did she complain?” 

With hindsight, I suppose the true question I was asking was, “How did this happen?”, but the answers I received were not so simple.

Over and over, I heard the same thing– sure, there’d been complaints of pain, but no, there’d been no medical follow-up, no appointment made to go see the doctor. 

It was a startling revelation to me. Had my cousin endured so much in life, she couldn’t prioritize getting help, even when her body showed severe symptoms? 

Dr. van der Kolk writes, “Coping takes its toll. For many…they survive by denying, ignoring, and splitting off large chunks of reality: They…suppress their rage or despair; they numb their physical sensations…Many adults…including those who are functioning well—even brilliantly—in some aspects of their lives, face another, even greater challenge: reconfiguring a brain/mind system that was constructed to cope with the worst. Just as we need to revisit traumatic memories in order to integrate them, we need to revisit the parts of ourselves that developed the defensive habits that helped us to survive.” (pg. 107)

He continues, “In 2000, a study by my friend Alexander McFarlane and his associates... documented clear differences in information processing between traumatized subjects and a group of ‘normal’ Australians. The researchers used a standardized test called ‘the oddball paradigm’ in which subjects are asked to detect the item that doesn’t fit in a series of otherwise related images (like a trumpet in a group of tables and chairs). None of the images was related to trauma.

In the ‘normal’ group key parts of the brain worked together to produce a coherent pattern of filtering, focus, and analysis… In contrast, the brain waves of traumatized subjects were more loosely coordinated and failed to come together into a coherent pattern. Specifically, they did not generate the brain-wave pattern that helps people pay attention to the task at hand by filtering out irrelevant information. In addition, the core information-processing configuration of the brain was poorly defined; the depth of the wave determines how well we are able to take in and analyze new data. This was important new information about how traumatized people process nontraumatic information that has profound implications for understanding day-to-day information processing. These brain-wave patterns could explain why so many traumatized people have trouble learning from experience and fully engaging in their daily lives. Their brains are not organized to pay careful attention to what is going on in the present moment.” (pg. 313-324)

Last week, I wrote about neuroplasticity, the property of the brain that enables it to change its own structure and functioning in response to activity and mental experience. The implications of Alexander McFarlane’s research– that highly traumatized people have less executive functioning than “normal” people– is both critical to understanding the core of Dr. van der Kolk’s fascination with neuroplasticity, but is also highly uncomfortable. 

In my former career in media and entertainment, we often discussed populations within the confines of their social determinants (“poverty-stricken,” “disenfranchised,” etc.). These labels tell us something about a group’s societal condition, but there is still a distance, a “those people over there” aspect to it. I often wonder, what would happen if we analyzed communities as traumatized and untraumatized? What if we analyzed individuals within the spectrum of work they were doing to heal themselves? It provides a fundamentally different way of seeing and understanding the people around us. 

In the text we read last month by University of Pennsylvania professor, Dr. Seligman, he writes, “Conventional wisdom and political correctness have for almost a century blamed the teachers, the schools… the funding…the politicians… the parents for the failure of [an individual]—putting the blame on anything or anyone but the [individual] themselves. What? Blame the victim? Blame the character? What nerve!...

Notice the cascade of changes that follow from giving up character as an explanation of human misbehavior in favor of the environment. First, individuals are no longer responsible for their actions, since the causes lie not in the person but in the situation. This means the interventions must change: if you want to make a better world, you should alleviate the circumstances that produce bad actions rather than waste your time trying to change character or punishing bad behavior and rewarding good behavior. Second, progressive science must isolate the situations that shape crime, ignorance, prejudice, failure, and all the other ills that befall human beings, so that these situations can be corrected. Using money to correct social problems becomes the primary intervention…

Sometimes people are indeed victims (I am writing this on the day after the horrific Haitian earthquake, with hundreds of thousands of genuine victims now suffering or dead), but often people are responsible for their actions… Responsibility and free will are necessary processes within… psychology. If the circumstances are to be blamed, the individual’s responsibility and will are minimized, if not eliminated. If, in contrast, the action emanates from… choice, individual responsibility and free will are, at least in part, causes.” (p. 122 - Kindle).

Self-responsibility can be painful, and the most accessible avenues to safely look at one’s self (therapy, coaching, etc.) are often expensive. In the world as is, it’s easy for me to envision the next decade of existence– where machine-learning applications further economic disparity by allowing those with better executive functioning to thrive and make best use of the opportunities afforded to them, while those languishing continue to languish.

But, the optimist in me also sees the flourishing of empathy-driven applications that allow traumatized individuals to rebuild trust with themselves, others, and institutions in cost-effective ways.

While my cousin is no longer here, her legacy lives on. As I build break*through, I continue to think of what would have worked best for her:  to have been able to share her fears in a nonjudgemental virtual container, to be placed in a cohort of like-minded women who would have encouraged her to seek medical support, and to leverage a decision making algorithm that would direct her to the most cost-effective health care resources within her locale.

What does a society look like where we speak about health not just as a litany of ills, but in how we imagine a more beautiful, thoughtful, generous way of existing that is neither hopeless nor naive optimism? One that measures and addresses our inner and outer lives as part and parcel of our overall health, which has ramifications for us as individuals, but also our families and the communities we are a part of.

Hopefully, what I’ve been able to relay well from Dr. van der Kolk’s work is: in all the ways an individual can experience heartbreaking, devastating turmoil that disconnects self from body and mind, so are there inspiring avenues and pathways the body can follow to come back to itself.

With gratitude,