When People Entrust Us With Access to Their Unconscious

I have a perspective that people in my community have often heard me share: “Healing’s always trying to happen.” I frequently express it in the aftermath of people perpetrating some kind of unskillful, ignorant, unconscious act upon me or other people.

Admittedly, it can take a bit of dot-connecting to make sense of something like Covid-19 being an expression of “healing trying to happen,” since it’s currently killing so many people. And yet most Covid-19 patients die as the result of a “Cytokine Storm,” which is essentially the healing response going into hyper-drive and damaging healthy tissue. Turns out too much healing trying to happen can sometimes be fatal. For any of us.

Embracing the Familiar

Many of the people, places and things in our current lives are there because at some level and in some ways, they feel familiar. I’m still wearing the same brand of Levi jeans I wore as a kid and many of the people I interact regularly with on my little island nation have the feel and flavor of the people I grew up with. They are a great many people who spend part of each day working with both their brains and their back – doing all kinds of manual and mental labor around their various homesteads.

Similarly people often become committed partners and marry people who “feel familiar.” These are the people with whom we “have chemistry.” If we don’t and they don’t, given enough time, it seems our brain will do its best to morph them into significant people from our past. They will often morph into people with whom we have “unfinished business” (you know, like mom and dad).

Depending upon how traumatic and disorganized our early beginnings were, we may have to engage in a string of serial relationships until we find the exact “right wrong person.” That will be the person to whom we can mostly likely safely entrust our unconscious.

Here There Be Dragons

If we believe the extensive research of “The Einstein of Self-Regulation Theory,” UCLA Medical Center’s Allan Shore, it’s in much of the wiring on the right side of the brain that a preponderance of our traumatic memories get stored, since that’s the side that develops first and fastest. It’s also the hemisphere that ends up processing and storing overwhelming early, dysregulating emotional experiences. And it’s those early, painful traumatic memories that we don’t allow just anyone easy access to.

Which would be fine, except for one thing: those memories live in our neural network under wraps and can keep a significant portion of neural real estate out of commission. The way the brain seems to accomplish this is by taking the excitatory neurons that become activated during a highly emotional or traumatic experience – usually in the right hemisphere – and wrapping them in a protective cloak of inhibitory neurons. Too many wrapped traumatic memories can often result in chronic energy deficiency – depression or chronic fatigue (or any number of other stress-related (often auto-immune) illnesses). The white neurons in the illustration above (from the Blue Brain Project) are inhibitory, while the pink ones are excitatory. As far at the brain and it’s real estate is concerned, this the equivalent of a neural slum. There’s little life energy energizing this neck of the woods.

Surprise! Surprise!

This then is where the work of entrusting our unconscious to the right wrong person comes in. It’s not an accident that a life partner overdraws the checking account, or leaves their dirty clothes on the bedroom floor, or never puts tools back where they belong. It’s no big deal, really, except that’s exactly what my mother/father used to do! Along with dozens of other things. And when it happens my nervous system invariably goes on red alert – “I’m back in an unsafe household, with unsafe people.”

More precisely, threat detection neurons signal the adrenal glands to prepare for battle. Or flight from battle. Or freezing in place – depending upon the degree of activation and the amount of stress hormones a pile of dirty clothes can activate. 

Anecdotal reports suggest this neural real estate can actually be reclaimed through any of a wide variety of methods. The Scientology auditing process seems to work. Somatic Experiencing (SE) seems to work. The Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT- Tapping) seems to work, often. Essentially, each of these methods seems to work by re-activating the excitatory cells storing a traumatic memory, and then finding ways to move the body that deliberately and intentionally work to discharge the stress hormones that are triggered all over again once the inhibitory neurons set them free. Once that happens, the emotional charge is no longer associated with the traumatic incident. All that’s left is a memory of what happened as a fact of living. The memory no longer has energy bound up in it. And now that neural circuitry is free to flow. When it works, it’s kind of like a successful neighborhood reclamation project. Here’s to your own healing trying to happen!