Raging and brain science

Tonight H. and I are going to a benefit gala for the organization that runs her Friday gardening program. I was going to just post a picture and leave it at that, but I've been reading a book and absolutely needed to share a quote from it. Maybe you'll get the picture later.

The book is The Biology of Belief by Bruce H. Lipton. Now, I have to warn you if two things if you're going to read it (and at over halfway through I do recommend it). The first is to ignore the cover. It gives off a really sketchy New Age-y vibe and I'm sorely tempted to wrap the book in brown paper. The second is that because brains are weird, it ventures into territory that might not be comfortable for you. Except for brain science books that maintain a hard mechanistic line (an example is Behave by Robert Sapolsky which is interesting, a bit of a slog, and vaguely depressing), most brain books end up there. There is a lot of hard science in this one. 

I have another blog post also related to this book, but I need to stew about it some more. This excerpt has to do with what happens in the brain when a person is afraid. I teach this all the time and it is one of the things that forms the basis of connected parenting, but I have rarely seen it spelled out so succinctly. 

"Activating the HPV axis [the Hypothalamus-Pituitary-Adrenal axis that is engaged when the brain perceives an external threat] also interferes with our ability to think clearly. The processing of information in the forebrain (conscious mind), the center of executive reasoning and logic, is significantly slower than the reflex activity controlled by the hindbrain (subconscious mind). In an emergency, the faster the information processing, the more likely the organism will survive. Adrenal stress hormones constrict the blood vessels in the forebrain, reducing its ability to engage in conscious volitional action. Constriction of the forebrain blood vessels redirects vascular flow to the hindbrain. The increase in nutrition and energy enhances the hindbrain's life-sustaining reflexes to more effectively control fight-or-flight behavior. While it is necessary that stress signals repress the slower processing conscious mind to augment survival, it comes at a cost... diminished conscious awareness and reduced intelligence." (p. 154)

Why is this vital to parenting children? Because tantrums, melt-downs, rages, whatever you want to call them, are a result of a brain that feels threatened and moves into fight mode. These behaviors are a reaction to perceived external fear and are out of the control of the child. The diminished conscious awareness also confirms my experience that often children don't even have accurate memories of they have any memories of them at all. They are at the mercy of a brain in full out protective mode because the perceived threat became too great. 

But what you also need to know is probably that perceived threat had been building like the pressure in a volcano for much longer than the parent is aware of. Things can look calm on the surface, but it takes just one little frustration to cause the fear to completely take over. This is why parents living with a child prone to these behaviors as liken it to walking across a mine field or living with a ticking time bomb. 

Felt safety is crucial for moving past the need for the HPV axis to take over. Probably the biggest challenge for parents is to figure out what felt safety actually is for their child. Perfectly safe and well-meaning parents can still unknowingly create situations where their child doesn't feel safe on a subconscious level. It takes some detective work and some experimentation to begin to figure these things out, but understanding how the brain works and accepting that this is not a child trying to manipulate their parents is a very good place to start.