Graham blvd i hate myself for loving you3/16/2023 ![]() Our brain becomes so used to firing in this repeated pairing it generates a kind of neural cement. That pairing can become a self-reinforcing recursive loop. That neural pairing becomes an unconscious implicit memory even before we have the self-consciousness to create a story about being unlovable. ![]() If our experience of reaching out and being met with nothing or with pain, and then our retreating for protection is repeated often enough, the amygdala, which is both our fear center and our emotional meaning center, begins to encode a memory, a warning, around our yearning paired with an anticipation of hurt and rejection. We literally feel the sensations of heartache or a broken heart. The visceral experience of that hurt or rejection is encoded in neural cells around our heart. We begin life primed to reach out and connect - and we learn to fear wanting or needing connection. We withdraw back in to ourselves for protection. I’ve written here before ( September 2008 Healing Heartache) about how, from a neuroscience of attachment perspective, when the earliest, earliest experiences of reaching out for connection, like when we’re six months old, are met with non-response, indifference, disregard, dismissal, or with anger or critical blaming-shaming, that experience of reaching out gets paired with a feeling of hurt or rejection or confusion. The more I understand the neuroscience of attachment trauma, especially from reading Bonnie Badenoch’s Being A Brain-Wise Therapist or Louis Cozolino’s The Neuroscience of Human Relationships: Attachment and the Developing Social Brain, the more I respect the power of our earliest relational experiences to live on in implicit memories that can de-rail our trust in ourselves from time to time, even when we’ve experienced genuine love and acceptance in our lives later. It’s almost endemic in our Western culture. As a therapist, or even as a vulnerable human being, I encounter these deeply tormenting feelings of unlovableness all the time. If any part of the story goes in the direction of “It must be me I must be bad,” we’ve tapped into an old embedded shame circuit of feeling unlovable, unworthy, undeserving. There’s a uhh!! in our body, coming from the brainstem that triggers a moving toward or a pulling away or a well, fu– you! Or often an even larger cascade of feelings and stories that try to make sense of what just happened. There is an automatic, unconscious, “separation distress response” when someone we are connected with turns away, or in this case someone we want to connect with doesn’t respond. Simply notice what happens inside as you perceive and react to not being seen nor responded to by them. You’re fine, humming along, and then across the street walking toward you, but on the other side of the street, you see someone you know and you wave hello – and they don’t wave back. When you’re ready, imagine yourself walking down the street on the sidewalk someplace familiar to you. They use this exercise in their MBCT groups at UCSF.Īllow yourself to sit quietly for a moment, eyes gently closed. and Ronna Kabatznick, PhD, at a daylong on Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy for Depression at Spirit Rock Meditation Center. I learned this one from Stuart Eisdendrath, M.D. Here’s a simple exercise to evoke the sense of contraction we often experience at a cellular level when we experience an unexpected hurt, rejection, or disconnect. May you find the reflections and tools in this month’s e-newsletter useful and helpful in cultivating a steady sense of your own self-worth and feeling lovable, loved, and loving. In these uncertain times, when we’re especially vulnerable to the fear and self-doubt and second guessing creeping in, it’s skillful means to learn how to re-program our body-brain’s conditioning and generate new neural circuits that support our feeling lovable, loved and loving. ![]() When we’re not caught in the suffering of feeling unlovable, it’s fascinating to learn just how those afflictive pockets of inadequacy, unworthiness, failure, shame, get so deeply embedded in our neural circuitry in the first place. I had the privilege of teaching “The Neurobiology of Feeling Unlovable”– and what relational psychology, Buddhism, and modern neuroscience teach us that we can do about that – to my colleague Rick Hanson’s meditation group for the last two Wednesdays. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |