WE ARE MEANT TO HEAL WITH ANOTHER!

Our conditioning asserts that we should be able to work out all our struggles by ourselves. However we are complex beings. Society instils a pressure in us to control ourselves, control our thoughts, and feelings and when we can’t it’s a sign of bad character.

We are so often instructed to self-regulate, not to rely on others, to just ‘pull your socks up’. We are told we are too sensitive, too dramatic, too emotional. So not being able to manage brings huge shame and sadness; and yet we are biologically meant to heal while in connection to another.  We are given self-guided mindfulness, how to sleep guides and apps to regulate ourselves. But evidence show us that it is actually the presence of the mindfulness teacher that make mindfulness so effective.* 

Our human system is designed to respond and heal through connection with another. Bonnie Badenoch, a heart centred therapist describes how we live in a left-brain society, where dependency on another is feared. We assume that soothing our nervous system and feeling safe with another are just tools for even further distance from others, to foster our autonomy and self-sufficiency. However, as human beings we are built to connect, to seek safety in our social engagement.  We heal when our true self is ‘felt’ by another person, we can then trust them and open to feeling safe.

Neuroscience is showing us how deeply and permanently we really are connected, there are mirror neurons found in the most primitive parts of our brain, not in our cognitive brain, but in our limbic system in our reflective instincts and this knowledge shows that there is no real distinction between our self and other. Badenoch suggests that we have artificially constructed a separateness, dividing us from them. We are sold a story of outward independence and successful autonomy, but our neurobiology tells a different story. 

I am seeing how thousands of years of disconnection has led us to strive for independence and autonomy, yet this is what is destroying our world. The need to be better than our neighbour, to have more and share less, to consume and take without replenishing from our Earth.

In fact our neural processes are deeply interwoven to those around us. We resonate with others, we absorb them, we mirror them, we tune to them. If their system is dysregulated, so are we, another’s wound triggers our unfinished healing, another’s warmth and compassion strengthens our neural system, and we become more tolerant, more compassionate.

Essentially, we are never alone. So, when we attempt to only heal ourselves by ourselves, we can only partially or superficially take this journey. We have to swim against the current to heal, against the advice of our parents and scorn of our culture. Our body allows healing when we are in the guidance and presence of an attune responsive other, this is someone who has done their own inner work to regulate their nervous system, who honours the other, as different and yet connected, it is when we can do this that we can go on and do this for someone else. x

*Flaxman and Flook 2012; Bonnie Badenoch (2018) The Heart of Trauma