Wednesday, July 15, 2015

Old Brain Seeking Soul Mate


Elizabeth Gilbert said the following about soul mates in Eat, Pray, Love:

“People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that's what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that is holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life.”

What’s funny about Gilbert writing this is that she actually wrote that while on a year-long self-discovery trip where she stayed away from men and sex….then came to find that both independence and romantic love are important.  I appreciate my alone time, my thoughts in the quiet, and self-reflecting.  But I am beginning to realize that you can get too comfortable with yourself, your ways, your habits, and while you can change for a while on your own, and while it is important to do the work independently, maybe it does take others to push you further. Maybe that’s why we were built to be social beings, so we can grasp and grow from others.  I know that the situations that make me squirm have been where I need the most work…and continue to be.

I recently wrote about attachment styles and that led me to research further…this stuff is fascinating!   If you can recall last week’s blog, keep what I said in mind as you read this one. 

I recently read a book called (BARF) Getting the love you want” by Dr. Harville Hendrix.  And while the title makes me want to puke, it’s just a spectacular book.  It really is.  I highly suggest reading it if you want to understand yourself. 

First, here is a quote from the book that leads me to believe more in the idea of soul mates, that is, in the sense that Gilbert wrote about them….

“Much of nature has a dyadic or two-part structure.  According to quantum physics, each particle that comes into being is paired with another particle.  Furthermore, each particle is both a point and a wave depending upon how it is viewed, which is why some physicists now refer to particles as “wavicles.” Sexual reproduction in the majority of species we know involves two entities; Noah included one of each on the ark. Our DNA splits into two and then generates the missing half.  Our cells divide into two.  Anthropologists tell us that in the creation stories in most cultures, people are first introduced as a couple, not as separate individuals.  Physiologists tell us that our brains are complementary-right and left brain.  Our language is binary: up and down, black and white, etc.  Our blood circulates in oscillation between the right and left sides of our body. A recent discovery in astronomy gives us another example of the dyadic nature of the universe, one that is especially appropriate for our view of love relationships.  We now know that most stars in the sky are not solitary stars like our sun.  Most of them have a “companion star.” The two stars are attracted to each other by a strong gravitational force but are kept from collapsing into each other by an opposing centrifugal force. “

So what he is getting at is that it is natural to have a need for someone else.  But pay attention to that last sentence….The perfect relationship, the one we seek, is called the “Passionate Friendship.”  But this passionate friendship often isn’t an easy road because there is a push and a pull….

The premise for the book is this, and I will do my very best to simplify big concepts, EEEK:

WHEN WE DEVELOP HOLES

We all have battle wounds from when we were kids which means that most of us fill our lives trying to fill them up or figure them out.  Every child needs an attuned parent to grow up and have secure attachments in their adult relationships, but a lot of us didn’t have that, or sometimes what’s more confusing, we had one parent who was attuned to our needs and one who wasn’t.  This says to a child “Now I need you, now I don’t,” and we unfortunately bring these wounds into our adult relationships.

To understand this book, you have to understand the concept of the OLD Brain and the NEW brain….. The book says “The unconscious mind has great difficulty distinguishing between past and present. When couples repair connection in their present day relationship, they simultaneously heal the trauma they felt as young children.”  Two people cannot connect if they live in fear of being abandoned or overwhelmed by their partners.  (We’ll get to that in a minute, these people are called Fusers and Isolators.)  What’s interesting though and really pay close attention to this-the fact that the unconscious mind doesn’t know past versus present is super important-makes sense why our coping mechanisms look close to what they did when we were children, right?  It’s hard breaking habits and patterns, especially when new hurts look and feel like old hurts….our brains simply don’t know the difference on an unconscious level.  

That is because of the…..

OLD BRAIN

The “Old brain” refers the portion of the brain that includes both the brain stem and the limbic system.  It is the hard-wired stuff and determines most of your automatic reactions.  Old brain asks “Is this safe?” The only thing your old brain seems to care about is whether a person is someone to nurture, be nurtured by, have sex with, run away from, submit to, and attack.  Your old brain takes images that say whether someone is a stranger, if there are dangerous episodes associated with that image, or whether pleasure has been associated with it. 
Your old brain has no sense of linear time.


NEW BRAIN

The “New brain” is the cerebral cortex, the part of you that is conscious, alert, and in contact with your daily surroundings.



So here is the deal…a lot of the decisions we make regarding partners happen without even knowing it.  We often pick people based on our old brains.  Your old brain reads signals and bases the findings on your parents within a matter of seconds without your even knowing it.  The reason that you often find yourself with someone like your parents, or with people who have the exact characteristic that scares you is because your old brain believes that it has finally found the candidate to make up for the psychological and emotional damage you experienced in childhood.  Then with our new brain, we think “Why did I do that?  I knew better!” 

Here is an example of how our New and Old Brains are at war….


WHY DO OPPOSITES OFTEN ATTRACT?

Let’s use two examples, even though there are many in the book….

ISOLATOR: A person who protects his or her autonomy could be someone with an insecure mother or father.  Maybe the parent impeded on the child’s independence and the child always fears becoming engulfed.  This person is likely to become an “isolator.”  They unconsciously push others away.  They keep people at a distance, need a lot of space, want freedom, they don’t want to be pinned down to a single relationship. 

FUSER: This is a person who experienced the opposite, who felt abandoned as a child, who didn’t have a lot of stability, someone with wishy-washy parents.  Fusers crave attention, physical affection, they will need stability.  They have an insatiable need for closeness.  Divorce fills them with terror, they need reassurance, verbal contact, etc.  and they feel abandoned and unloved when they don’t get it.

These two people often wind up together and get married.

On a conscious level, it makes little sense that if you have a fear  of being suffocated or losing your freedom that you would wind up with someone who has an insatiable need for affection, just like it makes little sense that if you have a fear of abandonment, you would seek out an isolator. But according to the book, it happens and it’s because your old brain tries to recreate the conditions of your childhood in order to correct the wounds. The really awesome thing though is that because your old brain has no concept of time, if you can fix the outcome with the person you are with currently, you can heal the same wound from when you were a child—because your brain doesn’t have a concept of time.

Obviously, a cycle is going to emerge and it might be very hard.  The relationship might end because of the push and pull, only to try a relationship with someone else, and that ends, and so on and so on.  Patterns emerge.  A person who gets freaked out by closeness is going to pull away, causing the person who needs closeness to panic and pull more until the Isolator runs away.  But what the Isolator doesn’t realize is that the Fuser has the key to helping him/her heal his or her wounds, just like the Isolator holds the key to healing the Fuser’s wounds. This takes me back to the quote about soul mates…if it’s too comfortable and no one is pushing the other to be more, then what is the point?  Are we stars in the sky with that force pulling us toward each other and yet there’s something keeping us apart?  What if we can fill those holes with each other, with one swift motion, together? 

What is this “Passionate Friendship?”  Hendrix boils the phenomenon down to 4 sentences….

Phenomenon of recognition-This is when you click, you feel like you have known each other forever. You bond naturally.  
Phenomenon of timelessness-It feels like you have known each other forever, even if it hasn’t been very long.   
Phenomenon of reunification-You feel filled up. This happens because, for example, a person who is not at ease with his or her sexuality will wind up with someone who is sexual and free.  A person not attune with their feelings will wind up with someone who is very expressive.
Phenomenon of necessity-This is when you can’t imagine the other person not being in your life.


Maybe this is what Bono meant when he said “I can’t live with or without you,” and maybe Ovid was an Isolator in love with a Fuser when he wrote “So I can’t live either without you or with you.”  The push and pull seems to be a theme throughout history.  Maybe Hendrix is right and there is something to this…maybe this is what a soul mate is.    



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