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The Neurobiology of Emotions How Twelve Step Work can Repattern Our Limbic System
By Tian Dayton PhD, TEP
The thoughts we think and the emotions we feel directly affect our health Emotional and psychological pain, in fact all emotional learning, is held in our bodies, recorded on our vast, interrelated neural networks. This is why, when we’re scared, anxious or angry, we have physical reactions like muscle tension, stomach churning, shortness of breath, head pounding and aching backs. Until we honestly confront and work through our deeper truths, our bodies will hold us responsible for what we can’t “remember.” Both negative and positive emotions are corporal; we experience them in our bodies. How Emotion Travels Through the Body Until recently, emotions have been considered to be location-specific, associated with emotional centers in the brain such as the amygdala, hippocampus and hypothalamus. While these are, in fact, emotional centers, other types of centers are strewn throughout our bodies. Emotions travel through our bodies and bind to small receptors on the outside of cells, much like tiny satellite dishes. There are many locations throughout the body where high concentrations of almost every neuropeptide receptor exist. Emotional information travels on neuropeptides and is able to bind to its receptor cells through the binding substance of ligands. The information is sorted through the differentiation of receptors. That is, certain information binds to certain receptors. So our emotions are constantly being processed by our bodies. This clearly paints a dynamic, rather than static, picture of emotional development; not nature versus nurture, but nature and nurture. The brain and body are exquisitely intertwined systems that are constantly interacting with the environment. All five senses are connected to this system and field information that determines our unique response to anything from petting a soft rabbit to being slapped. In fact, the more senses involved in an experience, the more the brain remembers it, the deeper the imprint onto our emotional systems. Traumatic experiences create deep, long lasting physical/emotional impressions that do not easily yield to insight alone or resolution in ten therapy sessions, especially if they have been stored and built upon from childhood. Here’s why. The Role of the Limbic System Altering deep emotional patterns imprinted onto our limbic system is slow and painstaking work. The limbic system “sets the mind’s emotional tone, filters external events through internal states (creates emotional coloring), tags events as internally important, stores highly charged emotional memories, modulates motivation, controls appetite and sleep cycles, promotes bonding and directly processes the sense of smell and modulates libido,” according to Dr. Daniel Amen, author of Change Your Brain, Change Your Life. Our neural networks are not easily altered, “early emotional experiences knit long-lasting patterns into the very fabric of the brain’s neural networks,” says Thomas Lewis, M.D., in A General Theory of Love, “changing that matrix calls for a different kind of medicine all together.” Our emotional life is physical, it imprints itself on our bodies. When we have problems in our deep limbic system they can manifest in “moodiness, irritability, clinical depression, increased negative thinking, negative perceptions of events, decreased motivation, floods of negative emotion, appetite and sleep problems, decreased or increased sexual responsiveness or social isolation,” says Amen. Our neural system carries with it our emotional sense memories from childhood. Familiar smells, sounds or places can send a cascade of memories flooding through us that either wrap us up in their warmth, or challenge us to maintain our composure. Along with the memories, comes the cognitive sense we made of what happened at the time. That’s why when we go to the circus with our children we, too, can “feel like a kid again”; or when we get hurt by someone we love, we can also “feel like a kid again”—but this time, that may mean vulnerable and helpless. Our early emotional memories are being relived in each case. When the memories are wonderful, this is a great boon in life, our child selves color our current experience with innocence and gaiety. When the memories are painful, they can color our current experience in darker hues.
People Changing People Psychotherapy, treatment and twelve step work are some ways of repatterning our limbic systems, along with other healing relationships of all kinds. Because “Describing good relatedness to someone, no matter how precisely or how often, does not inscribe it into the neural networks that inspire love or other feelings,” says Lewis. “The limbic system is associated with our emotions and the neocortex is associated with critical thinking. Both are operative in processing emotions.” While the neocortex can collect facts quickly, the limbic brain does not. Physical mechanisms are what produce our experience of the world and we need new sets of physical impressions to change or alter those impressions. Our neural systems respond to reparative relationships, not only to insight; healing takes time and new relationships in which we can experience ourselves in different ways and explore new patterns of behavior. This is why treatment, therapy and healing networks such as twelve step work play such a critical role in out healing. Through them we inscribe new neural patterning that helps us to reregulate our neural systems thus improving mood, modulating emotion and lightening our emotional tone. This is one of the ways the “terminally serious” ACOA slowly and steadily grows freer and less burdened and the low frustration tolerance of the addict gets reregulated. The twelve step process offers us a safe container in which to experience or reexperience emotions of pain, anger, and sadness without acting out on them. (“don’t just do something, sit there!) It also sets a goal of amends making as part of the healing process. But forgiveness is a multifaceted operation. Are we making amends to those we’ve hurt, forgiving those who have hurt us, forgiving ourselves for our own hurtful actions or all of the above?
The Alchemy of Forgiveness As the twelve step network has always recognized, forgiveness of self and others provides a positive goal that can help recovering people move through sadness and hurt rather than staying stuck in it even though painful emotions may well emerge throughout life and forgiveness will happen in layers rather than all at once. Feelings of anger, resentment and sadness must be directly addressed in order for forgiveness to be genuine and useful to our recovery. There are two manifestations of forgiveness that I generally see clients struggle with. The first is rational. When our actions have directly hurt others or theirs have hurt us, and we need to forgive ourselves or them in order to move on in our lives and prevent relapsing into self medicating behaviors. The second is irrational. On the one hand we hold ourselves responsible for pain that others have caused us and on the other we feel guilty for pain we may have been a part of causing others even though we could do nothing to change the situation and did not intentionally cause pain. We feel may guilty, for example, for “getting out”, a form of the survival guilt that those who have found recovery often feel towards family members who are still mired in the disease of addiction. The beauty of the amends process is that it encourages us to work through feelings of pain and alienation toward a better psychological and emotional position; one that gives joy and inner peace a chance to grow and prosper in our inner world and our relationships. This material is excerpted from The Magic of Forgiveness by Tian Dayton PhD TEP, Health Communications |