Integrating The Emotional And Thinking Brain

“No matter how much insight and understanding we develop, the rational brain is basically impotent to talk the emotional brain out of its own reality.”

Bessel van der Kolk

One of the most important shifts that happens in psychotherapy is the integration of the brain. When people struggle with overactive emotional systems like anxiety or depression it often means that there is a lack of integration in how the brain supports these emotional experiences. By bringing the emotional brain and the thinking brain into harmony people will feel a lot more freedom in how they can manage their feeling states. It often leads to less activation (less anxiety) and more vitality (less depression).

The fundamental issue in resolving traumatic stress is to restore the proper balance between the rational and emotional brains, so that you can feel in charge of how you respond and how you conduct your life. (Van Der Kolk, 2014)

Why Integration is Important

For most people growing up in even the most ideal family system there will still be some painful childhood moments that can lead to emotional dysregulation. If this happens enough it can permanently direct the brain’s chemistry to act in unhelpful ways.

For example, if you are continually harassed by a parent or sibling (who may think they are being playful) the brain can become hyper-vigilant to any kind of teasing or benign critical feedback. This means the brain can get activated by someone in your adult life joking around with you. Instead of being able to play along, the trigger initiates a defensive reaction.

What is happening in that moment is your unconscious mind is fighting back against the parent or sibling who may have disrespected your boundaries as a child. Even though you know in your head that the person in our adult life is being playful, our nervous system is still reacting defensively. The defensiveness results from a brain that is not integrated enough to know the difference between what is playful and what violates our dignity.

Most triggers or big defensive reactions are due to a lack of internal integration. People who have been severely traumatized will have such a lack of integration they will feel dysregulated much of the time. For most people, the lack of feeling safe or opening up to creative or playful moments limit our overall life satisfaction. Often people don’t even know they are incapable of something better. Our triggers delude us into thinking the world is out to get us or that we are just broken.

How Do We Integrate?

One of the challenges of our anatomy is that our thinking brain, in the prefrontal cortex (right behind our foreheads) and our emotional brain, in the limbic system (in the middle of our brain) are not joined very well. There isn’t a direct anatomical linkage. When we integrate our brains we need these two areas of our brain to talk with each other.

So how do we do this? We use a part of our brain called the Medial prefrontal cortex (knowing this brain name is not important). This part of our brain has connections to both our thinking brain and our emotional brain. The interesting thing about this area of the brain is that it is the place where self-awareness happens. When a person engages in interoception or the process of looking inward this part of our brain lights up.

For example, when you are noticing a bodily sensation or consciously feeling hungry the medial prefrontal cortex lights up. When this happens it helps to link the feeling brain (hungry sensation) to the thinking brain (“I should eat something”). It is in this process of self-awareness that we have the possibility of integrating our brains.

By developing more self-awareness we create the capacity to feel our emotions and thus we can counteract the triggering response. When you notice the sensations in your body of anger, tight forearms, contracted jaw and constricted belly you can allow the thinking brain to come in and announce “I’m feeling angry.” This interrupts the habituated response in the brain. It is in this noticing you have the possibility of responding rather than reacting.

The more we use self-awareness the more integrated these triggers become. We start to build new neural pathways and our brains become more flexible. Instead of one or two reactions we now may have 5 or 6 responses to the same environmental stimulus.

In the example above, where a friend teased you, the limbic system will pull the memory of being teased in your family system up into your unconscious mind. Then it will bring up the same defensive response you have expressed for years. However, with increased self-awareness you can sense your body getting defensive. You can tolerate these sensations and emotions and have your thinking brain in the background gently reminding you that your friend is just being playful. Over time this gets easier and it becomes less necessary to tolerate. The self-awareness has created a new more integrated brain that can flexibly handle being teased.

…the only way we can consciously access the emotional brain is through self-awareness… (Van der Kolk, 2014)

Finding Compassion For Ourselves

When we start to integrate our brains the intensity of emotional states start to relax. By having our thinking brains online when we feel a lot of emotional upheaval we have the opportunity to bring a level of care and compassion to our emotions. As we integrate we notice we are less in the emotion and more in the awareness of the emotion. When this happens we can acknowledge what is happening and bring a sense of care and appreciation for our nervous system responding to a perceived threat in order to help us survive.

When we have a better understanding of why we are reacting in certain ways (using our thinking brain) we can also know that why we are feeling triggered is based on a younger part of us that is in need of care and support. This can help to soothe our emotional brain and create more linkages within the brain structures.

When we have a greater capacity to soothe ourselves by understanding why we react to things we end the conflict that often shows up as judgment about ourselves. “I’m too anxious, too stressed, too sad…” Instead we can learn to nurture our younger parts and show compassion for how they are still trying to protect us.

When we “rest in awareness” we can sense that the lower area’s input is honored, and so it can be differentiated but it is not enslaving us…This is how an awakened mind* moves toward being more spacious and stable. It is this acceptance of our ongoing moment-to-moment experience that sets the stage for us to be present with what is and then move our internal state to a more integrated way of being. (Siegel, 2012).

How This Shows Up in My Life

Having spent the better part of nearly two decades doing lots of awareness work, meditation and other practices to know myself, it is really the embodied self-awareness that has been the most helpful. I often have an idea of why I get triggered or when I get triggered. However, this knowledge doesn’t seem to help me change my behaviors. What has helped me more than anything else is sensing in my body the emotional experience that is arising.

When I can notice in myself that I’m getting irritated, annoyed or frustrated I can actually be with this experience and redirect the habitual behavior. This self-awareness at the body level gives me a lot more freedom in how I want to respond in my life.

Although it is difficult to measure, I do believe that over time developing self-awareness has also created strong neural pathways in my brain that have helped integrate my thinking brain with my emotional brain. Creating these pathways by using interoception (noticing my internal sensations like heart rate, etc.) has made my life more satisfying by allowing these signals to get turned into different behaviors. I now have more capacity to find patience, compassion and presence with my loved ones.

If you want to develop a more integrated brain or know someone else who does please contact me here.