The Taproot Podcast - 🤯How to Use the Subcortical Brain in Therapy - www.GetTherapyBirmingham.com

Episode Date: April 5, 2022

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Hey guys, it's Joel and today we're going to talk about the subcortical brain. I talk about the body brain or the subcortical brain, the part that is on the back of the brainstem quite a bit on here, and I've gotten a couple questions that say, hey I really liked the video, the talk about trauma was interesting, but what I'd like to know is what is the subcortical brain? And so I thought that was a pretty good question to answer. So the way that the subcortical brain enters into psychotherapy is like one of the key ingredients for change and healing for me. It's where, it's why I distrust a lot of models that are cognitive only or only focused on the ego, which is how we perceive ourself right now and kind of what we want to be, but not really what we actually are.

You kind of have to crack the ego open to facilitate change. So when you look at the brain, there is the prefrontal cortex, like I've said before, is our personality center. It's what you shave off if you're going to get a lobotomy, where you can still eat and breathe, but that little spark that makes you you and makes you sort of an individual, right, is not there. It makes you, you know, a person with a personality. And so we spend a lot of our time in our ego, in our prefrontal cortex. Language is there. The philosopher Martin Heidegger said language is the house of being. I don't really agree with that statement, but what he's saying there is that our existence is contained in language because it's the only way that we can express

ourselves and communicate it, our experience. I would argue that sometimes we have an internal experience that's beneath language and that that is valid too. And that a lot of the therapy modalities that really work are getting at that. So what is outside of the ego? If this prefrontal cortex, you know, front brain knows that I'm a therapist, that I have two kids, that, you know, maybe I like that I made this cool artwork. I got a degree. You know, it knows all. That's actually my wife's degree. But if you're watching the podcast, then that doesn't make sense.

But I pointed to a degree that's on the wall behind me. Now, all that stuff about my identity and like who I am what I value is is tied up in that so when you turn that off when we when we let go of like language what are we right what is in that subcortical body brand and I've said before in like other videos that what you have down there is something that's hard to describe because it doesn't fit in language. When the ego is dissolved in a breakthrough moment of psychotherapy where you you're not thinking and analyzing anymore you're just feeling something big. What is that? You know if you take psilocybin, if you take LSD, if you take ketamine, if you do brain spotting, if you have a spiritual experience on a mountaintop

and you really feel this thing, what is that? You know, a lot of ink has been spilled trying to fit that into language. And some of the history of psychotherapy is kind of invented with people trying to talk about that. You know, the first is Freud. Freud saw as kind of a reaction, I think, an overreaction maybe, to Victorian society and all of its social mores and wanting to put this beautiful facade over everything. Freud wanted to crack that open and say, no, what's underneath humans in our deep unconscious is just this urge for sex and violence that civilization is trying to turn off.

And our early formative experiences with our parents, with our family, that all goes back to sex and dominance. He saw the unconscious as the id, you know, as this place that was dark and underneath all of us. Now, I think that that says a lot more about Freud's psychology than it does about a universal psychology. But, you know, props to him for figuring out what was in his own mind. If you aren't familiar with Freud's life story, I promise this is going somewhere. He was a, his dad was Jewish, for for one and his dad was incredibly passive so anti-semites would beat his dad in the street and his dad would just smile and put his hat on and freud had journals as a kid where he would write fantasies about hannibal of carthage was his real dad this conquering

you know general that was so brave because he had all this shame about his father but then freud's mother saw freud as this genius he was born in a call and it was this sign that he was going to change the world and be famous and he was brilliant and you know we learn one of the things from freudian psychology that i kind of like was we learn from the parent of the opposite sex what makes us lovable or what our purpose is in freud's mind it was to be brilliant and he was he was a genius but he had to be changing the world but we learned from the parent of the same sex how to be in the world what our coping mechanism is what our personal interaction style is a lot of the time and so freud is extremely passive he can't handle any conflict.

Everybody who comes into his orbit, Jung, Adler, Rank, he says, oh, you're going to be this disciple that's going to follow my footsteps and carry on my legacy. And then they start to have kind of individual ideas or maybe a challenging idea, challenging Freud's idea and he he can't handle it he cuts them off and you know the last conversation that Jung has with Freud Jung just says you know I don't think that my dream about the basement the well in the basement and the that um I forget the word for it he sees a giant bacteria underneath his house underneath his soul and Freud interprets the dream sexually. And Jung says, I don't think that's what it's about.

You know, I don't know. I think that this is about that there are universal forms of consciousness and I'm stumbling on them. And Freud has a panic attack, says, you have a death wish against me. You want me to be dead. And they never talk again. It's the last time they speak so this disagreement about what is down in the unconscious how do we bring it into language which may or may not you know depending on how mystical you are it may seem like it's a fool's errand like you can't bring it up into consciousness that's in the realm of the

church or the realm of the the shaman or the realm of the you know in the the man who makes the project of the mind his journey and then once you notice the subcortical unconscious brain notice all that stuff how do you use it in therapy to help people heal and if you read the history of the profession where people really get into fights, where the therapists writing about the historical tradition or publishing in academic journals fighting each other, it's disagreements about what the unconscious is know, Freud cuts Jung off because Jung says, Carl Jung says, I think that the unconscious is this place where there's these sort of forms that we can map. I don't think it's just a trash can where we stuff down sex and violence that society tells

us to turn off. Maybe there's a lot of that going on in Victorian society, but that's more cultural. There's something down there that's more universal. And so Jung gets criticized for being monistic and making everything this, the universal monism and for being woo-woo. He, a lot of people who are cognitive therapists who write these books to this day about just attacking this guy that's 100 years old who has very little influence on the medical practice of therapy. But there's something about him that just gets under their skin. So what is in the unconscious? I mean, I don't know. It's a hard thing for me to put into language to explain this, but I think it's one of the most important places that you have to take patience to

in therapy if you want them to grow and change and heal. So what Jung says is that we have these artifacts, basically, from evolution, or from something. I don't think he ever says that specifically, but I think that's what he's implying. And maybe they come from a materially scientific evolutionary process, but when we encounter them, they feel spiritual. Because what is us, as an individual, is turned off, and we're in contact with something that is universal,

that is bigger than us. So this is a liminal place to go into the unconscious. It's where, you know, the self that is me encounters the self that kind of feels like me, but also is outside of me and bigger than me. It's a spiritual place. And so a lot of Jungian thought there gets discredited for a long time where people won't look at it and they don't like it because they say the unconscious isn't real. You should just be a cognitive therapist. Trying to do psychoanalysis takes too long. Trying to do depth psychology takes too long. And you have all these academic journals that say the unconscious isn't real, basically,

which is kind of funny because you open academic journals now and some of those people are still the same ones that publish this stuff in the 80s and they're still publishing and you read it and their their journals say well we think that trauma is caused by the fact that there are first second and third order cognitive processes and we are not directly aware of our second and third order processes they are on an emotional and physical level of cognition in the deep brain. It's like, that is the unconscious. You just took what somebody else said a hundred years ago that you made a career on saying was wrong. And then you changed the word and rediscovered it through research. So it's one of the ways that research

kind of wastes time and leads you into the woods when people can't see past their degree to just see what is intuitively true. That is a felt sense. So, you know, Jung says there's these things left over from evolution that we can kind of feel that are older than us, you know, in our cognition, but we have to turn our ego off. And a lot of the therapy modalities, even though they don't use the language of the unconscious, the ones that are the more popular ones now that are really working, that's what they're doing. Because in order for me to let go of trauma, I have to be able to go back into the place where that trauma is imprinted on my earlier kind of reptile brain. Now, you know, reptiles, the brain, the part that sees the color red and then has to jump away from it because I'll get eaten or sees this and knows that I have to do

that. That part of their brain is set. It can't be changed. It's how they're programmed. You know, you hit the reset button on the cell phone or whatever, it reprints the same memory. You can't, it's always going back to that. Humans have an adaptable brain. We have that reptile reactive system that is in our unconscious, that is our deep emotional response to things and our deep physical response to things that is preconscious. Before we are thinking in language, our body and our emotional system are already taking in information,

reacting to the world based on how we learned, inherited genetically, somehow we learned to handle that in life, like the way our parents talk about emotion, let us feel emotion, and based on the way that trauma has affected us. You know, if I'm in a car wreck, I learn to be afraid of certain stimuli. Now you have to crack the ego open, go back into the deep body and emotional system to process that stuff. EMDR uses back and forth bilateral stimulation eye movement therapy to do that. Brain spotting is using an eye position that sometimes is the same eye position that you were looking during trauma that your brain associates with this set of places. It's not

always where you were looking during a traumatic event. Sometimes it's where you looked at self as a kid or you don't have to figure it out. You find the place that that body system associates with it. But there's a lot of other ways that this is done too. I mean, Sidra and Hal Stone separate the unconscious into sub personalities and they say, you know, we're learning how to have certain relationships to cognition emotionally. And so there's the inner critic and there's the pusher self that says one more thing, one more thing. It's obsessive.

And, you know, internal family systems is a lot like that. You know, Schwartz says these are, you know, these are the protective parts that arise from trauma or through the ego needing to cope with feeling. These are the different parts of self. And he's not talking about things that are conscious, cognitive all the time. He's talking about things that are emotionally coming up and hijacking cognition. So you can bring them into a patient's awareness, which is very Jungian. Schwartz is very inspired by Jung. I mean, Jung said there's this huge well of feeling

and emotional history and complex in the unconscious, and the therapist's job is not even really to interpret it as much as just hold the patient's experience so that they can bring it up into cognition. Because if you just rip that gate open and all this stuff comes up, the person can't handle it, and they become psychoticotic or they become alcoholic or they become, you know, depressive or suicidal. You have to keep the gateway to the unconscious open.

That's the therapist's job. And help them bring this stuff up and integrate it into cognition so they know it's there and how it's affecting them experientially, not intellectually, that they felt it. But also you have to be able to do it at a speed that doesn't break them. A lot of mindfulness-based practices, Hakomi I think is one of the early ones, they have this DBT makes a whole lot of hay with mindfulness, that you don't have to, you can get out of cognition and you can feel your own truth just because this person says that's true I don't have to fight them two things can be true I can help hold mine and they can hold theirs there's a lot of muscle relaxation stuff with dbt

they'd say I have a language in dbt of the deep and aware self this is what they're talking about the unconscious subcortical brain the thing that is felt experience of me emotionally and physically regulating and knowing that that is who I really am, not what I'm thinking about or the suffering that I'm experiencing, that deep and aware self, an intuitive self. That sounds very much like Hinduism, you know, the idea that there's a great self, a deeper self, layers of a lot of that you get in Eastern religion. You also have things like somatic therapy and sensory motor psychotherapy. Those are saying, okay, here's how you learn to hold certain emotions in your body

when you're a kid. And now we're gonna go in and unlock these things. And we learned how to feel emotion, not just thinking about it, we learned how to feel it, if we're allowed to feel it, and then what it is gonna do to our body. So, I mean, I hope that answers the question of like, what is the subcortical brain? What is the body brain? What is the unconscious?

It's a big question. In summary, the unconscious does not fit into language. And because it doesn't fit into language, we have to try and invent language to describe something that we fundamentally can't describe. And we also have to invent models of therapy that are taking people back into that place and then teaching them how to do something with it. And that's a hard task because we all think differently. And people who don't have experience with this are like, what do you mean? And I think that's why a lot of shamanic traditions and tribal cultures and things, in a very Jungian way, the shaman is helping somebody hold a part of their experience. They're not telling them something or even giving them something. They're just being

there with them in the emotion to teach them something and to teach me that I can go into my own experience. So I hope that's helpful. If you have a question, let me know and I appreciate you listening.