Language and the lizard brain
In a previous blog, we looked at the idea of self-regulation, and developing an awareness of what state we are in, and then making our choices about how we show up. Let’s look a bit deeper into what is going on in our brains when this happens.
Bruce Perry and Oprah Winfrey have a wonderful description of this in their book What Happened to You? If you imagine a view of the brain as an upside-down triangle, with the pointy bit at the bottom and the long axis along the top.
The pointy bit at the bottom represents the brain stem, the most primitive part of the brain, sometimes called the lizard brain (technically, it’s the amygdala). Its task is to be scanning constantly for threats to our safety. A perception of threat can happen easily: if someone presents us with a certain look, comment, tone or body language, we can be activated through our senses of sight and hearing directly through our lizard brain into alarm.
The next part of the brain higher up the triangle is the limbic brain. It is the relational part of the brain. It is all about connection and how we relate to one another.
Finally at the top, the biggest and most recently evolved part of the brain is the cortex, which is our centre of thinking and reasoning.
Here’s the catch: Everything that comes into our system from outside has to come up through the lizard brain through to the limbic brain and then to the cortex to get processed.
If we get a sense we are not safe, we can become dysregulated at the level of the lizard brain and the data doesn’t get any further. Our thinking brain is functionally ‘off-line’.
Perry goes on to say: “The aim of communication is to send a message from my cortex to your cortex through both our primate brains first. Firstly, down my cortex, through my limbic and then primitive brain and then up through your primitive brain, then your limbic brain and finally to arrive at your cortex.”
Just getting a message sent, and then received, by another person is an extraordinary journey we are usually totally unaware of. With greater understanding of the complexity of this journey, we can perhaps more easily allow ourselves some time, and some slack, to put a little more care into how we send our messages, and how we respond to those sent to us by others.
We can become more aware of our own felt states, our feelings, our bodily feedback system which is working all the time to help us ‘read the room’. We can listen to our own tone of voice, the actual words we speak, the timing of when we speak, the rate of speaking, and whether or not we can pause to actually listen to someone else speak.
Similarly, we can easily learn to read the feeling states of others, using this same feedback. In this way, we are doing empathy, silently, for ourselves, and for others in the room.
The good news is resetting our brain’s alarm is as simple as taking a big breath, pausing, and even naming the feeling. It can be a simple three-word sentence: “I feel X.” Fill in the feeling: upset, concerned, angry, surprised, etc.
Having a ‘go to’ list of feelings words that describes both positive and negative states of arousal and states in between is a great support in these moments. In the words of Dan Siegel, we can “name it to tame it”.
