In a relationship, one mind revises another; one heart changes its partner. This astounding legacy of our combined status as mammals and neural beings is limbic revision: the power to remodel the emotional parts of the people we love, as our Attractors activate certain limbic pathways, and the brain’s inexorable memory mechanism reinforces them. Who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love.
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Everything a person is and everything he knows resides in the tangled thicket of his intertwined neurons. These fateful, tiny bridges number in the quadrillions, but they spring from just two sources: DNA and daily life. The genetic code calls some synapses into being, while experience engenders and modifies others.
The United States alone sports an inventive spectrum of psychotherapeutic sects and schools: Freudians, Jungians, Kleinians; narrative, interpersonal, transpersonal therapists; cognitive, behavioral, cognitive-behavioral practitioners; Kohutians Rogerians, Kernbergians; aficionados of control mastery, hypnotherapy, neurolingustic programming, eye movement desensitization- that list does not even complete the top twenty. The disparate doctrines of these proliferative, radiating divisions, often reach mutually exclusive conclusions about therapeutic propriety: talk about this, not that; answer questions, or don’t; sit facing the patient, next to the patient, behind the patient. Yet no approach has ever proven its method superior to any other. Strip away a therapist’s orientation, the journal he reads, the books on his shelves, the meetings he attends- the cognitive framework his rational mind demands – and what is left to define the psychotherapy he conducts?
Himself. The person of the therapist is the converting catalyst, not his order or credo, not his spatial location in the room, not his exquisitely chosen words or denominational silences. So long as the rules of a therapeutic system do not hinder limbic transmission - a critical caveat - they remain inconsequential, neocortical distractions. The dispensable trappings of dogma may determine what a therapist thinks he is doing, what he talks about when he talks about therapy, but the agent of change is who he is.
The person of the therapist is the converting catalyst, not his order or credo, not his spatial location in the room, not his exquisitely chosen words or denominational silences. So long as the rules of a therapeutic system do not hinder limbic transmission - a critical caveat - they remain inconsequential, neocortical distractions. The dispensable trappings of dogma may determine what a therapist thinks he is doing, what he talks about when he talks about therapy, but the agent of change is who he is. (187)
From birth to death, love is not just the focus of human experience but also the life force of the mind, determining our moods, stabilizing our bodily rhythms, and changing the structure of our brains. The body’s physiology ensures that relationships determine and fix our identities. Love makes us who we are, and who we can become. In these pages, we explain how and why this is so.
A culture wise in love’s ways would understand a relationship’s demand for time. It would teach the difference between in love and loving; it would impart to its members the value of the mutuality on which their lives depend. A culture versed in the workings of emotional life would encourage and promote the activities that sustain health — togetherness with one’s partner and children; homes, families, and communities of connectedness. Such a society would guide its inhabitants to the joy that can be found at the heart of attachment — what Bertrand Russell called “in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined.
you might think that treatments like group therapy after breast cancer would now be standard. Guess again. Affiliation is not a drug or an operation, and that makes it nearly invisible to Western medicine. Our doctors are not uninformed; on the contrary, most have read these studies and grant them a grudging intellectual acceptance. But they don’t believe in them; they can’t bring themselves to base treatment decisions on a rumored phantom like attachment. The prevailing medical paradigm has no capacity to incorporate the concept that a relationship is a physiologic process, as real and as potent as any pill or surgical procedure.
Recordings of encephalographic electrical waves show, amid their jagged spikes and hieroglyph swirls, a signature downward dip signifying that a neuronal mandate for motion is under way: the so-called readiness wave. While the motor cortex produces motion, the readiness wave appears to signal intent. So we should look here for will.
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On the other side of the aisle are evolutionary psychologists and cross-cultural sociologists, who point out that the American habit of sleeping separately is a global and historical singularity. Almost all the world’s parents sleep with their children, and until the last sliver of human history, separate sleep was surpassingly rare. The burden of proof thus falls upon our culture to justify its anomalous nighttime practices.
Evolution is a wandering process wherein multiple simultaneous influences, including chance and circumstance, shape biological structures over eons. A more capricious designer than any committee, evolution is a story full of starts, setbacks, compromises, and blind alleys, as generations of organisms adapt to fluctuating conditions.