The Heart of Time Travel

My mother came to stay with me over the holidays.  Our visit wasn't always easy but it turned into one of those times in which I'm grateful to have tools and support that allow conflict to be an opportunity for deeper connection and greater awareness.

I'm sure none of you is surprised that our visit had some challenges.  Family members push our buttons better than most.  My study of Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB) has helped me better understand why this is.

When we have painful, stressful, or traumatic experiences that don't get processed and resolved, the memory gets stored implicitly but not explicitly.  Implicit memory is memory that is stored unconsciously and includes five aspects: the perceptions, emotions, behaviours or bodily actions, bodily sensations, and subconscious beliefs or mental models related to an event (it also includes a sixth-priming--but I won't go into that here).  These five aspects of implicit memory are unconsciously activated in the future when we experience things that are similar to unresolved events.  Because the original painful experience wasn't processed and resolved, our amygdalae keeps activating the implicit response without a conscious decision from us to do so, until we process and resolve the origins of the implicit response.   The amygdala lives in the ever-present past and isn't aware that things have changed and that things that were once threatening are no longer so.  (For more on implicit memory I suggest empathybrain.com and the work of Daniel Siegel).  Once we process our painful experiences, we turn the implicit into explicit.  Explicit memory is the kind of memory we're familiar with, memory that we have an internal experience of recalling and making sense of.  

So, as my mother was going about her visit and acting in ways that many would find pleasant and respectful, warm and generous, I'm quite sure, at times, I had implicit memory activated in relationship to my upbringing: the perceptions were some of her ways of speaking and some of her facial expressions;  the emotions I felt were irritation and anxiety (not overwhelming amounts and not constant, but I could feel both at different times); my bodily action was an impulses to physically withdraw (which I did a couple of times); one bodily sensation I was aware of was constriction in the chest, belly, and face; and I believe my subconscious belief was something like, "There isn't space for my needs around my mother."

I'm grateful for the IPNB awareness because it can be very confusing and disappointing to be feeling irritated and to want to withdraw around my mother, especially because I have tremendous love and appreciation for her.  When people ask me about my relationship with my mother, I always say that we are very close (she is supporting me to write and post this on my blog).  Understanding how painful experiences get stored in our brains helps me understand one reason why I can both love and appreciate my mother while feeling irritated or anxious around her.

My learning from IPNB also confirms for me that it doesn't make sense to blame my mom for the past.  She was doing her best to raise me with all her implicit issues as were her parents, and so on.  My mother has done a great deal of inner work to heal these things and inspires me to take the torch and do my inner work so that I can help further transform patterns that have been implicitly passed along through generations.  These implicit issues don't just show up in familial relationships; they affect all relationships.  Therefore, I'm not just committed to my inner work because I want to enjoy my family more; I'm also doing my inner work because I believe it's an essential ingredient for social change-unfortunately, our implicit issues don't dissolve just because we share values and a vision with a people who want to create a different world.

As luck would have it, I was able to do some deep inner work over skype with an empathy buddy during my mother's visit.  After that call, I went to connect with my mom.  I started with empathy for her, guessing at needs and feelings that were alive for her beneath some of her comments and actions that I had found challenging.  She seemed open to my empathy and we even explored some of her implicit issues beneath her actions.  At one point she acknowledged, without my requesting it or even mentioning it, that she had not been considering my experience when speaking up about things.  That brought tears to my eyes.  I felt much more relaxed and loving around my mom after our conversation.  We went for a wonderful bike ride by the ocean and played tourists at Granville Island.  (Yes, there was one more triggered conversation over dinner, but we found our way through again and each owned our part.)

I don't believe it's healthy to dwell in the past, and I'm learning that our brains are not wired to just decide to let go of painful or traumatic events.  What is working for me is to be fully present with the past, embrace it with resonant empathy, and give it the care that it wanted back then. I like to think of it as heartfelt time travel.  When I do this, the amygdala gets soothed and relaxes enough for the hippocampus to come online.  The hippocampus is the part of the limbic system of the brain that learns and makes meaning and puts the events of our lives into an accurate chronological order-it helps the past stay in the past.

We know the healing is happening when we can recall the events with more peace, better understand how they've affected our lives.  We also know healing has happened when we have different experiences with similar situations that arise in the present, experiences in which we stay more relaxed and open, where we can care about and empathize with the other and be flexible, creative, and collaborative with our responses.  Doesn't that sound like more fun?

                I love to learn about IPNB, and my learning is informal and ongoing.
                If you disagree with some of the above or have more to add, please post
                your comments below.

Eric