Understanding the Integrated Brain 

A new book discusses the importance of holistic brain integration for healthy functioning—the aim o fpsychotherapy.

Is your brain integrated? Maybe not. Your schooling probably made you learn to focus on abstractions, deliberation, planning, judging, analyzing, and categorizing. It’s a helpful set of skills, but it’s exhausting, and it’s not the kind of orientation that is related to being happy and centered.

In extreme, this style of thinking is warned against in traditional religions for its disconnection from emotion, relationship, and the present living moment. If you spend a lot of time in this mode, the danger is that you’ll start to believe all you are is a thinker, rather than a creator, relator, and feeler (Bourgeault, 2003).

Although Western culture has assumed for centuries that this analytic and linguistically adept aspect of the mind/brain is dominant, it turns out that our decisions and actions are often guided by the nonconscious aspects of the mind/brain (Bargh & Chartrand, 1999). The unconscious steers our decisions and is associated with nonverbal communication, subjective emotional experiences, and social interactions—all critical to our survival, so it is important that these functions work properly.

At the societal level, the dominance of the intellect has characterized recent centuries, at least in Western countries. Iain McGilchrist (2021), who reviewed a host of experimental studies examining brain hemisphere differences (e.g., by numbing one side of the brain and examining the responses and orientations of the other hemisphere) wrote about their different forms of attention:

“I believe the essential difference between the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere is that the right hemisphere pays attention to the Other: to whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves, with which it sees itself in profound relation. It is deeply attracted to, and given life by, the relationship, the betweenness, that exists with this Other. By contrast, the left hemisphere pays attention to the virtual world that it has created, which is self-consistent but self-contained, ultimately disconnected from the Other, making it powerful—but also curiously impotent, because it is ultimately only able to operate on, and to know, itself.” (p. 103)

McGilchrist suggests that the common modern condition—feeling fragmented, devitalized, depersonalized, depressed, or dissociated, along with lost emotional depth and empathy—corresponds to an overbearing left hemisphere (LH) and underactive right hemisphere (RH).

We can think of the different forms of attention as complementary. In a healthy brain, the RH collects experiences, passes them to the LH, which unpacks and analyzes them to identify algorithms and generalize for predictions and then sends those back to the RH for intuitive assessment and integration into an experiential wholeness. When the RH is underperforming, it doesn’t do a good job passing experiences along or integrating them.

Unfortunately, the way we raise children in industrialized societies may undermine the development of the right hemisphere (Narvaez, 2014), which in early life, governs self-regulatory processes by synchronizing with mother and other caregivers (Schore, 2021). In the early months, responsive care co-constructs the rapidly developing social brain through soothing caregiver touch and vocalization, eye contact and facial expressions, and stimulating exchanges.

“Sensitive caretakers learn to respond to their children’s responses and synchronized engagement and disengagement. As children and caretakers move in and out of attunement, the cycle of joining, separating, and reuniting becomes the central aspect of developing psychobiological regulation.” (Cozolino, 2021, p. 112)

Many of the caregiver-child interactions operate implicitly, body to body, in a type of rhythmic musicality. The neurons in the baby’s brain resonate with those of the mother’s brain, requiring the mother to have a well-functioning right brain to be communicating fully in the moment. Mother and infant learn to interact reciprocally, to attune to one another, in a kind of ongoing call-and-response. The infant builds their “internal working model” of attachment from these early experiences.

Schore (2021) argues that psychological and psychiatric disorders have their roots in RH “relational processes and resulting affect dysregulation” based on unhealthy early life experience (p. 74). For example, maternal hostility (nonresponsiveness to the affiliative needs of the infant) becomes ingrained in the child’s internal working model for intimate relationships and guides the ill-treatment of romantic partners later.

The Healing Therapeutic Encounter

Psychotherapy can retune and integrate mind/brain functioning. The way we attend to the situation matters for what we experience. For therapists too. A skilled therapist must hold both LH’s alert attention to detail in the client’s expressions and the RH listening attention that is open, broad, relational. The LH’s self-protective ego defenses may subvert healing through censoring, editing, and controlling expression. But the reverie of free-floating RH attention can penetrate the ego defenses. As Tweedy (2021) points out:

“It is precisely the maintenance of the critical and judgmental state that maintains the distress and the neuroses in the patient, and that blocks access to both their causes and their treatment. By shifting to the right hemisphere mode (in Schore’s terms) the analyst can thereby bypass, or shift their attention, from that critical, repressive mode to a deeper, more receptive, more embodied, more open, more knowing, and more empathic state.” (Tweedy, 2021, p. 15)

This is the treatment! Skilled therapy can reveal truths that the resistant, repressive ego, unconsciously, does not want to admit. When active, the ego prevents the expression of the emotions and self-knowledge that is uncomfortable to the ego, preventing healing. Psychotherapy, then, is not simply a talking cure but a cure for affect communication and regulation (Schore, 2012). Note that social playing, described in earlier posts, also has the effect of loosening ego defenses and promoting healing through emotional self-expression in role-playing. Imaginative social free play can retool the right hemisphere to get it up to speed.

How do you know if your brain is operating in an integrated way?

You know your brain is working in an integrated way if you are kind and compassionate rather than competitive, utilitarian, or judgmental in your relationships (Siegel & Siegel, 2021). Mental illness represents a disconnection from others and a retreat into self-centeredness.

References

Bargh, J.A., & Chartrand, T. (1999). The unbearable automaticity of being. American Psychologist. 54, 462-479.

Bourgeault, C. (2003). The wisdom way of knowing: Reclaiming an ancient tradition to awaken the heart. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Cozolino, L. (2021) In Ron Tweedy (Ed.), The divided therapist: Hemispheric differences and contemporary psychotherapy (pp. 108-128). London: Routledge.

Dowds, B. (2021). Going beyond sucking stones: Connection and emergent meaning in life and in therapy. In Ron Tweedy (Ed.), The divided therapist: Hemispheric differences and contemporary psychotherapy (pp. 181-201). London: Routledge.

McGilchrist, I. (2021). Ways of attending: How our divided brain constructs the world. In Ron Tweedy, ed., The divided therapist: Hemispheric differences and contemporary psychotherapy (London: Routledge, 2021, 93-107), 103.

Narvaez, D. (2014). Neurobiology and the development of human morality: Evolution, culture and wisdom. New York: Norton.

Schore, A.N. (2011). The right brain implicit self lies at the core of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 21(1), 75-100.

Schore, A.N. (2012). The science of the art of psychotherapy. New York: W.W. Norton.

Schore, A.N. (2021). The right brain is dominant in psychotherapy. In Ron Tweedy (Ed.), The Divided therapist: Hemispheric differences and contemporary psychotherapy (pp. 70-92). London: Routledge.

Siegel, A.W. & Siegel, D.J. (2021). Distinct but linked: Wellbeing and the multimodal mind. In Ron Tweedy (Ed.), The Divided therapist: Hemispheric differences and contemporary psychotherapy (pp. 129-148). London: Routledge.

Tweedy, R. (2021). Introduction. In Ron Tweedy (Ed.), The divided therapist: Hemispheric differences and contemporary psychotherapy (1-69). London: Routledge.