Four Ways to Click

Rewire Your Brain for Stronger, More Rewarding Relationships

Amy Banks

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781925575477
• Topic: Crescita personale
• Subtopic: Miglioramento personale

Discover the tools you need to rewire your brain to create more satisfying relationships at work and at home.

Research shows that people cannot reach their full potential unless they are in healthy connection with others. Dr Amy Banks teaches us how to rewire our brains for healthier relationships and happier, more fulfilling lives.

We all experience moments when we feel isolated and alone. Research has found that many people cannot name one person they feel close to. Yet every single one of us is hardwired for close relationships. The key to more satisfying relationships - be it with a significant other, family member, or colleague - is to strengthen the neural pathways in our brains that encourage closeness and connection.

There are four distinct neural pathways that correspond to the four most important ingredients for healthy and satisfying relationships: calmness, acceptance, emotional resonance and energy. This ground-breaking book gives readers the tools they need to strengthen the parts of their brain that encourage connection and to heal the neural damage that disconnection can cause.

Chapter 1

BOUNDARIES ARE OVERRATED

A New Way of Looking at Relationships

Boundaries are overrated.

If you want healthier, more mature relationships; if you want to stop repeating old patterns that cause you pain; if you are tired of feeling emotionally disconnected from the people you spend your time with; if you want to grow your inner life, you can begin by questioning the idea that there is a clear, crisp line between you and the people you interact with most frequently.

People who talk a lot about boundaries tend to make statements like these:

“It shouldn’t matter what other people do and say to you, not if you have a strong sense of self.”

“How do parents know they’ve been successful? When their children no longer need them.”

“Best friends and true romance are for the young. As you get older, you naturally grow apart from other people.”

“You shouldn’t need other people to complete you.”

“You wouldn’t have so many problems if you would just stand on your own two feet.”

The message is clear: it’s not “healthy” to need other people—and whatever you do, don’t let yourself be infected by other peoples’ feelings, thoughts, and emotions. The statements above are intended to have an emotional effect on you. You may notice that they sound just a teensy bit judgmental and shaming. I know they make me uncomfortable; when I read them, I feel like I’m standing in a harsh white spotlight with someone pointing a finger at me, intoning You’re pretty messed up, missy, and it’s all your fault.

The ideal of complete psychological independence is one that was very big with mental health professionals in much of the twentieth century, and it still has our culture by the throat. So even if those statements about boundaries carry a sting, they also probably sound familiar to you, or even self-evident. Obvious!

So I couldn’t possibly be suggesting that they’re untrue. I couldn’t possibly say that it can be good to be dependent, or that our mental health is unavoidably affected by the people we share our lives with, or that we achieve emotional growth when we are profoundly connected to others instead of when we are apart from them.

That’s exactly what I’m saying.

This book is going to show you a different way of thinking about your emotional needs and what it means to be a healthy, mature adult. A new field of scientific study, one I call relational neuroscience, has shown us that there is hardwiring throughout our brains and bodies designed to help us engage in satisfying emotional connection with others. This hardwiring includes four primary neural pathways that are featured in this book. Relational neuroscience has also shown that when we are cut off from others, these neural pathways suffer. The result is a neurological cascade that can result in chronic irritability and anger, depression, addiction, and chronic physical illness. We are just not as healthy when we try to stand on our own, and that’s because the human brain is built to operate within a network of caring human relationships. How do we reach our personal and professional potential? By being warmly, safely connected to partners, friends, coworkers, and family. Only then do our neural pathways get the stimulation they need to make our brains calmer, more tolerant, more resonant, and more productive.

The good news for those of us whose relationships don’t always feel so warm or safe: it is possible to heal and strengthen those four neural pathways that are weakened when you don’t have strong connections. Relationships and your brain form a virtuous circle, so by strengthening your neural pathways for connection, you will also make it easier to build the healthy relationships that are essential for your psychological and physical health.

For many people, the news about the importance of relationships began with a 1998 study at the University of Parma in Italy, a study that proved how deeply connected we are to one another, right down to our neurons.

Your Feelings, My Brain

It was one of those lucky scientific mistakes, an unexpected observation that could have easily gone unnoticed if it hadn’t been for an astute researcher. When Giacomo Rizzolatti, a neurophysicist at the University of Parma, and his research team began their now-famous experiment, they were not intending to explore how human beings interact. In fact, they were not even studying people. The Italian researchers were mapping a small area, known as F5, in the brains of the macaque monkey. At this point in neurological research, it was already well known that the F5 neurons fire when a monkey reaches his arm and hand away from his body to grasp an object.

One routine day in the lab, a researcher observed something unprecedented. The researcher was standing in the line of sight of a monkey whose F5 cells had been implanted with micro-sized electrodes. As the researcher reached out to grasp an object, the electrodes placed on the monkey’s F5 area activated.

Remember: it was known that the F5 neurons activate when a monkey moves his arm to grasp something.

Then think about this: the monkey was not moving his arm; he was simply watching as the researcher’s arm moved.

This seemed impossible. At the time of this observation, scientists believed that the nerve cells for action were separate and distinct from the nerve cells for sensory observations. Sensory neurons picked up information from the outside world; motor neurons were devoted to acting. So when the F5 area, known for its link to physical action, lit up in the brain of a monkey who was only watching action in someone else, it was a clear violation of this known divide. It was as if the brain of the monkey and the brain of the researcher were somehow synchronized. Even more unsettling, it was as if their brains overlapped, as if the researcher’s physical movement existed inside the monkey.¹

As Rizzolatti and other neuroscientists pursued this odd observation, they found that human brains also demonstrate this mirroring effect. In other words, you understand me by performing an act of internal mimicry—by letting some of my actions and feelings into your head. Ask a friend to briskly rub her hands together as you watch. Chances are that as her hands become warm from the friction, your hands will start to feel warm, too. In the aftermath of the monkey experiment, it was hypothesized that our brains contain mirror neurons, nerve cells that are dedicated to the task of imitating others. Most scientists no longer feel that specific mirror neurons exist; instead, there is a brainwide mirroring system whose tasks are shared by a number of regions and pathways. The imitating effect—the reason your hands warm up when your friend rubs hers together—happens because neural circuits throughout your brain are copying what you hear and see. Nerves in your frontal and prefrontal cortex (the same ones that are activated when you plan to rub your own hands together and then execute that plan) begin to fire. At the same time, neurons in your somatosensory cortex, which is the area of the brain responsible for bodily sensations, activate and send you messages of friction and warmth. Deep inside your brain, your hands are rubbing themselves together—even if your hands don’t actually move.

Actually, the process goes far beyond the mere reflection of another person’s actions. Your mirroring system is made up of neurons that can “see” or “hear” what someone else is doing. The system then recruits neurons from other areas of the brain to provide you with input not just about sensations and actions but about emotions, too. This input lets you have a comprehensive, detailed imitation of what the other person is experiencing. That’s why you can almost instantly pick up on the emotion of another person. If you watch as I rub my hands together, your brain might read the excitement on my face as I demonstrate how the mirroring system works—and you may feel some of that excitement. If you’ve ever “caught” a smile that you spotted on the face of a complete stranger, or if the silent tension of your partner has caused your own heart to race, you’ve experienced the effects of the mirroring system. This emotional contagion is caused by a neural pathway that can, in effect, take in another person’s feelings and replicate them squarely inside you.

When I ask groups of people to try the hand-rubbing experiment, there are usually two sets of reactions. Some people are amazed, as if they’ve just watched themselves pull a rabbit out of a hat. Their neurological connection with others feels like magic. But other people immediately say, “This is creepy!”

I get it. When you’ve been taught all your life that your mind is its own little castle, one that’s surrounded by a thick, high wall that’s designed to keep your thoughts and feelings in and everyone else’s out, it can be unsettling to learn about the power of the mirroring system. And in fact, the discovery of our mirroring ability challenges some traditional assumptions about how our brains and bodies are wired. Vittorio Gallese, a neurophysiologist in the Parma lab, described the role of the mirroring system in human interactions this way: “The neural mechanism is involuntary, with it we don’t have to think about what other people are doing or feeling, we simply know.”² Marco Iacoboni, a professor of psychiatry at UCLA, takes it one step further in his book Mirroring People. He says that the mirroring system helps us in “understanding our existential condition and our involvement with others. [It shows] that we are not alone, but are biologically wired and evolutionarily designed to be deeply interconnected with one another.”³

When you and I interact, an impression of the interaction is left on my nervous system. I literally carry my contact with you around inside me, as a neuronal imprint. The next time you hear someone say, “Don’t let other people affect how you feel,” remember the mirroring system. Because we don’t really have a choice. For good or for bad, other people affect us, and we are not as separate from one another as psychologists once thought.

Maturity Has a New Meaning

When I say that boundaries are overrated, I don’t mean that there are absolutely no boundaries, or that all of humanity is just one big, undifferentiated, brownish-beige lump. Nor am I suggesting that anyone give up her or his own distinct personality for the sake of fitting in with a cozy, companionable group. No therapist I know believes that it’s healthy to abandon your beliefs, preferences, and quirks for the sake of a smoothly running—and bland—larger whole.

For decades, in fact, psychology moved in the other direction, in the belief that the only path to human growth was traveled via emotional separation. According to separation-individuation theory, which was most energetically advanced by Margaret Mahler in the 1970s, we all begin our work of separation in the first six or seven months of life, when we start to realize that our caregiver is a person distinct from ourselves. Separation-individuation theory holds that the rest of life is a variation on this discovery. In the practicing stage of human development, we supposedly practice separation by crawling or toddling away from our mothers and then returning to their arms. In the object constancy stage, we develop the capacity to hold an abstract image of Mom in our minds, meaning that we are secure enough to venture farther and farther away from her, thus developing our independence. As school-aged children, we become more aggressive in an attempt to move forward with our individual desires. In adolescence, we move further away from our parents by developing a sexual identity and pairing off with our peers. Adulthood? It’s a constant process of refining our ability to stand on our own, soothe our own distress, and solve our own problems. With each stage, the boundary between the self and other people grows stronger, more solid. Separation-individuation theory has been written about in thousands of books and dissertations, but here’s a micro-summary: in order to grow, we must step farther and farther away from others. The fully mature person may enjoy other people but doesn’t really need them. He is defined by the firm boundaries between himself and other people, and within those boundaries he is a self-sufficient being.

Even before the mirroring system came on the scene, and before relational neuroscience began to turn up additional evidence for the biological basis of human connectedness, some in the field wondered whether the separation model had gone too far. In the 1970s, a forward-looking group of Boston mental health experts—psychiatrist Jean Baker Miller and psychologists Judith V. Jordan, Irene Stiver, and Janet Surrey—noticed that their patients weren’t suffering from poor boundaries. They weren’t suffering from a lack of personal independence from others. What they suffered from was a lack of healthy human connection. As Judith Jordan notes, “The Separate Self model has wrongly suggested that we are intrinsically motivated to build firmer boundaries, gain power over other people in order to establish safety, and compete with others for scarce resources. Mutuality helps us see that human beings thrive in relationships in which both people are growing and contributing to good connection.”⁴

When you look at relationships this way, it’s possible to take the stages of development according to separation-individuation theory and cast them in a warmer light. When an infant crawls away from her mother, she’s not trying to separate from humanity. Instead, the baby is expanding her relational world; she’s moving toward more connections, toward the big world and the people who populate that world, before scooting back to enjoy her relationship with her mother. A toddler who learns object constancy isn’t building the ability to get away from Mom; by developing a mental image of her mother, she’s able to carry Mom with her wherever she goes. She’s learning a skill necessary for sustaining relationships over distance and time. As school-aged children interact with their peers and make mistakes, they learn how to manage relationships. Teenagers expand their relational worlds even further; they negotiate sexual relationships, and they have to learn how to become part of a group without succumbing to peer pressure. This reinterpretation of developmental growth has an overarching theme: human beings don’t mature by separating. Instead, they grow toward a greater and greater relational complexity. This approach to human development has a name: relational-cultural theory, or RCT. As a young psychiatrist, I found that RCT was more effective than any other theory, including separation-individuation, in helping people heal and helping them grow. I’ve spent twenty years applying RCT to the problems of my patients and the disconnected world they—and we—live in.

Separation theory and RCT have a few ideas in common: to be healthy, you have to know who you are; what your feelings and thoughts are; that other people have thoughts and feelings, too; and you have to be able to differentiate yourself within a relationship. But in separation theory, you’re learning all this in order to eventually walk away. You can still forge bonds and be part of a community if you want to, but your role as an adult has to be earned by your ability to tough things out on your own. This is a psychology that emphasizes a defensive stance, because you’re always defining and protecting your boundaries. You’re wary of being invaded by other people’s emotions and problems. In fact, this is how Freud saw the condition of being alive: “For the living organism protection against stimuli is almost a more important task than reception of stimuli.”⁵ It’s sad, isn’t it? In separation theory, there is always a wall between you and other people.

In RCT, there are no walls between people. Good relationships are the rich soil in which people grow and bloom. A good relationship with your parents helps you feel safe enough to approach other people and make a connection with them. A good relationship with your peers helps you try out who you are, practice your skills of empathy, and learn communication. As your skills for relationship grow, so does your desire for more relationship.

Relational-cultural theory doesn’t imagine people as defined by boundaries; it sees relationships as more like a magician’s linking rings. The rings are a set, but they are not stuck in a rigid configuration. They can move far apart and they can move closer together. And they can—this is the magic part—temporarily interconnect and overlap, just as they do when you watch someone rub his hands together and feel the warmth in your own. Or when you sometimes feel like you’re in another person’s skin, finishing their sentences or feeling their sadness. There’s flexibility and movement in this definition of relationship. You come together, experiencing each other; and then you move away again so that you can absorb what you’ve learned. Relationships are a dynamic process of experiencing, learning, and integrating your knowledge so that you are able to see both yourself and the other person more deeply and more clearly.

Jean Baker Miller liked to talk about “growth-fostering relationships,” a wonderfully descriptive term that suggests just the right idea: relationships aren’t an end in themselves. Although a relationship can be a safe harbor, it is never just that. It also helps you grow. A good relationship helps you and the other person develop clarity about yourselves; promotes your self-worth; makes you more productive at your work; and it gives you an appetite for more relationships. In Baker Miller’s language, a growth-fostering relationship brings more “zest” to everything you do. When you’re in a growth-fostering relationship, you’re not being belittled or silenced, and you’re not hiding from the things that bother you. A growth-fostering relationship is the opposite of having to put up walls and fortify the battlements. Instead, you...