gearhead mama

(Apologies to David Servan-Schreiber, from whom I stole the title for this post. If you haven’t read his book, you should. It’s fantastic, and I recommend it to all. It is also the source of the following quotes.)

As Darwin had anticipated, the human brain comprises two major parts. Deep in the brain, at its very center, lies the old, primitive brain, the one we share with all other mammals and, for the deepest nuclei, with reptiles. This brain was the first laid down by evolution. Paul Broca, the renowned 19th-century French neurologist who first described it, called it the “limbic” brain. Around this limbic brain, in the course of millions of years of evolution, a much more recent layer has formed. This is the new brain, or “neocortex,” meaning “new bark” or “new envelope.”

When the emotional and cognitive brains work together, however, we feel just the opposite – an inner harmony. The emotional brain directs us toward the experiences we seek, and the cognitive brain tries to get us there as intelligently as possible. From the resulting harmony comes the feeling, “I am where I want to be in my life.” This feeling underlies all lasting experiences of well-being.

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Although my mother punished me physically when I was a child – using her hand, a wooden spoon or belt – our daily clashes were more apt to occur on an emotional level. She demanded absolute obedience – physically, emotionally, spiritually. She needed me to be a mirror image of herself in order for her to feel validated and safe. Naturally, I rebelled. I was not a mirror image of her … I was myself. All children are born with the impulse to be true to themselves, until our parents come along and fuck it up. Children, as my craniosacral therapist says, are limbic creatures.

But she was bigger and stronger, and I left these clashes dazed, bruised and bloodied. I sought refuge from her turbulent, angry nature in the calm harbor of my father’s lap. He was rational, predictable and kind. I looked to him for the things my mother was clearly unable to give – unconditional love, acceptance, validation. It took me a very long time to realize he was just as incapable of giving these things as she was, and in fact, perhaps did even more damage. Even as a child, it was obvious to me that my mother’s behavior was “off,” that something wasn’t quite right, that she was not to be trusted. My father, on the other hand, was gentle and kind, logical and reasonable, and his words and behavior carried enormous weight with me. I trusted him implicitly. He was the island of calm in the storm of our home.

As a limbic being, I was instinctively in touch with my emotions. But it is natural – human – for a child to look to her parents for validation. In a healthy family, the parents act as a mirror to their children, saying “I hear you, you are real, your emotions are okay.” In a dysfunctional family this rarely happens, and my family was no exception. My father lived in survival mode, which meant every waking moment was spent trying to contain my mother and her bottomless rage. No expense was spared in this quest, including the mental health of his children. I was told I was overreacting, that things weren’t the way I saw them, that mom was doing the best she could, that I needed to be better. In short, that my limbic brain – the one sending all the messages that things were not at all right in our house – was betraying me. But it was done so nicely, calmly, kindly, lovingly, that I swallowed it – hook, line and sinker. I bought into the lie that my heart (the direct line to the limbic brain) was a false guide and not to be trusted.

So to navigate the murky waters of my family, I learned to ignore my heart and live in my head. Beaten down from the pain of endless rejection by those who were supposed to love me most, my heart went willingly into hibernation, silenced itself, became invisible to me. It kept a tiny spark glowing, not enough to attract my attention, knowing that one day in the distant future, it would be called to serve me again. But I did not know that at the time. And with my feelings, instincts and intuitions dismissed, I learned instead to rely on research – whether in the form of reading books or reading people. My thoughts and feelings were dependent on outside information, and I lived in constant terror that I had made a mistake, that my information or reasoning was somehow faulty. This was only reinforced by my mother’s unpredictable and irrational behavior. I suffered from a sort of paranoia, always second-guessing myself and looking over my shoulder. Obsessed with working ever harder to do a better job of collecting, synthesizing and analyzing outside information, so my choices would be more “accurate.” Perhaps, one day, if I tried hard enough, I might just find a way to feel loved.

And so began my lifelong separation of heart and mind, emotional and cognitive, limbic and neocortex. And just as Servan-Schreiber predicted, “competition between the two, whatever form it takes, makes us unhappy.”

But the instinct to heal did not die, and I worked tirelessly to uproot and banish the unhappiness that suffused my life. For many years that work took place in my cognitive brain. I was a cognitive woman after all, skilled in the art of words, talking, proving, justifying – it was all I knew. I was in and out of talk therapy for years, read book after book after book, joined online support forums for children of borderlines, and talked and talked and talked. I grew to understand my mother’s illness, my father’s complicity, the ways it affected me, why I was so unhappy. And yet, the unhappiness persisted. I made leaps and strides, changed behaviors, started setting boundaries and protecting myself. But still there was something missing.

I spent years talking and reasoning, spinning my cognitive wheels, while shunning my limbic brain. It was not to be trusted, remember? My cognitive brain clung fiercely to the control it exerted over me, and refused to relent. It was protecting me, keeping me safe. No one could be allowed to see my heart. Under no circumstances could I risk a repeat of the pain I had endured as a child. Years in therapy and I can count on one hand the number of times I cried during a session. A small part of me knew that I would never progress if I couldn’t get past this, but the fear was so enormous and consuming, I could see no way around it.

And then my daughter was born, and for all the misery of those early months, there was a silver lining after all. My desperate quest to help her heal set me on a new path of healing myself. It led me to craniosacral therapy, and to my homepath/healer. And finally I set off, tentatively at first, to reunite my head and heart – although I had no idea at the time that this is what I was doing.

You see, by starting CST sessions, and later seeing my healer, I had unwittingly stumbled onto a way to circumvent my cognitive brain, to reconnect with my limbic brain in spite of the overwhelming fear. Because as Servan-Schreiber says, “it is often easier to access emotions through the body than through language.” Not that my cognitive brain went willingly – hell no. But I had finally found a secret passage, a back door, and working through my body tumbled me out of the lofty, ungrounded perch of my mind, and hauled me back into my heart, rooted me in my body, grounded me in the earth.

This was horrifically frightening at first, but I knew I had found the key, that I had to keep pushing, going for sessions, even as my cognitive brain rebelled and resisted, told me I was a fool, to stay home. It protested bitterly at the detour I had found and indignantly tried to shut me down, only to be outwitted time and time again (and for this I thank my healers, who gently guided me, giving me nudges at just the right moment and waiting patiently when I needed more time). I have finally reached a point where I plunge into these sessions fairly willingly. My cognitive brain still complains, crying, “No. Wait. Stop!” But that little spark in my heart has been fanned into a raging fire, and it won’t be so easily silenced. It carries weight now, too. It has a say in things. I hear it speak to me in whispers that grow louder with each passing day.

It is my heart that leads me on the journey to this birth, that hears my uterus and helps it heal, that sees and honors my child and gives her the love and validation that is her birthright. It speaks up in ways big and small, asking my husband to please not say that to our daughter, and when he asks “why,” replying, “I don’t know. It just feels wrong to me.” My cognitive brain caught up within minutes and was able to articulate a logical and rational reason. But it was my heart that led the way, opened my mouth, urged me to speak even though my case (“It just feels wrong to me”) would not stand in a court of law. I am beginning to realize I don’t live in a court of law, that I don’t have to play by those rules.

It is sometimes startling to listen to and honor my feelings. The simplicity of the whole thing – if it feels good, it is good; if it feels bad, it is bad. To tune out the chattering of my brain and sink into my heart; to wait for the feelings to bubble up and guide me. And they do, they always do. Faster and faster now that they know I am there, waiting, listening. And how true and right it feels to follow my heart. There is no more agonizing over my decisions, fearful that I haven’t done enough research, that I haven’t explored every option, that maybe there is something better. My heart whispers, “Do it. This is the right thing,” and I step forward with confidence, relieved of the paranoia, the constant what-ifs, the endless tail-chasing. It amazes me that I survived for so long carrying that burden, that I managed to navigate life with at least some semblance of success … that I accomplished anything while operating in that mode. I am constantly amazed by this rediscovered wisdom, and the ease with which it carries me forward. Life suddenly doesn’t seem so damn hard.

My heart and mind may not work together all the time, but we are making progress. I have moments of doubt and indecision, and will surely continue to do so forever. I am human, after all. But it is no longer an outrageous event for my mind to cede control to my heart. It is not an anomaly for the heart to set a path, and the mind to help move us along. There are moments when my Self feels full to the brim with the feeling that “I am where I want to be in my life,” with the happiness that has eluded me for so long. For this, I am grateful.