Brian chemistry

Brian Lynch

It is certainly not uncommon for me to run across people who will express a desire to understand the “chemical” nature of their mental problems or likewise see the problem as being fixable purely or solely based on mediation.

This is a tragic situation.

Even as a doctor knowing what goes on inside the brain in terms of the chemical workings rarely helps me help you. We have to understand that we are nowhere near the sophistication in brain science that we are in other areas of medicine. We can, for example, test for a specific infection and give a specific drug for that infection. We are not so lucky to do much of any kind of tests on our brains.

For sure we know when someone has a seizure to give anti-seizure medication. But that is a “physical problem” that has to do with the physical brain. That has to do with the “physical” electrical network of the brain. And we have learned that anti-seizure medication often helps with more “mental” problems to calm people down yet exactly how and when to give them is not exact and certainly it is very individual how they affect an individual life.

My point is more with many a patient and doctor’s fascination with the thinking that knowing about serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine will somehow help them feel much better. I ask you, do you experience these chemicals directly? No, you don’t. Can you have any idea that you are affecting the levels of these chemicals? I say not by much. And I as a doctor cannot measure them. Again, I can give you medication that we believe alters these chemical levels and that we believe logically end in affecting certain pathways that end in making you feel different. There is an important point. You feel differently. 

If both doctor and patient would focus more on specific feelings I think we would make much more progress. And note I say feelings and not acting or behavior. Specific feelings like anger, fear, shame, disgust, interest, and joy and forgo the more diffuse and imprecise words such as “depression” and “anxiety” or “panic.” These are being called into question by more and more professionals. Just tell yourself how you are feeling today. Then, if you are taking a medication which of these specific bottoms did it push? Is the medication, making you less angry? Less afraid or is it making things worse?

We live in a world of “feeling”, we do not live inside our brain. We will never be able to experience our brains. We experience what those chemicals in our brains produce. They produce in some miraculous way our feelings. If we want to affect those chemicals the road is a direct one, but one that shifts focus to something right under our noses, something palpable and real, our feelings. Work on our feelings and there will be feedback to our chemicals that will then, in turn, feedback to our feelings and help us out.

Now a final thought. Focusing on the “chimerical” seems to presume, most of the time, that the reason we feel bad is due to an ad hoc imbalance in the chemicals. Something is wrong in my head. Fix it doc! Give me some medicine. I have a cold in my head. Well, we believe that the chemicals are being stimulated by something, by what? By the world. Anger, fear, distress, disgust, and shame have their chemical equivalents in the brain. We “get our buttons pushed!” We live in a world that can push our buttons. We need to work. We need to work with the environment and do also what we can to remove the button pushers and thus the stimulus that is causing the pain and causing, yes, that neuro-electrochemical imbalance. Not easy I know.  

“’The Negative’ Is Interesting.”

“’The Negative’ Is Interesting.”

Brian Lynch

"Sometimes it hurts so badly I must cry out loud.”  Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young

One of my main messages to people in person or in writing is the idea that we live in a world of confusion and hurt and even though this is true we manage to deny this to a  great extent. 

The exact nature of what I want to explore took me about six months to comprehend so now ten years later I am reevaluating my approach. I am stepping back and trying to empathize with my reader and understand that if it took me six months what can I expect of others?

It is that and the fact that it is one thing to understand a concept and it is another to make it part of your life.

It is well known, for example, that it takes physicians about a year, on average, to fully implement some innovation in their practice. What are we to expect of patients when they learn something new from us? Many might be put off by that statement feeling I am patronizing the reader and my patients. At the end of it all, I am saying that we are all slow learners and that is not to say that many, very many are smarter and faster learners than I am.

But so I come along and I suggest something that sounds a bit crazy and that is that we need to pay very close attention to the moment when we get “hurt.” I have said that “interest in the negative brings joy.” This will bring looks of puzzlement at times, probably more often than not. Why would anyone want to look at the negative? Don’t we want to “run away” from the negative?

Well, why would anyone look at the negative? First, the negative is inevitably going to happen. It is going to happen many times during the day. We say that it happens when I don’t get what I want. So I must want something first. Well, we are always wanting something. I want my coffee and there is none. I am late for work and the train is stopped. I want to eat dinner and I get a call that my child is in the ER. I want my child to be well, thousands of wants that are stopped. I want to move forward but I also do not want to betray conflicting family values.

For me these are small and large “hurts” that cause at least a modicum of temporary “confusion.” “Now what do I do?” Often it is the confusion that leads to terrible wrenching tragedy.

The ideal thing to do, and what is so hard to comprehend at first, is in the school days phrase “stop, look and listen.” What is the hurt and confusion telling me? It is getting my attention. It is telling me something is wrong and that I should do something about it. But that is not so easy, is it? How do I know what I do not know? It is really what I feel. I feel I want to move forward to connection in mutual positive interest with others. What is stopping me and how do I overcome it? If you are stuck with these questions and feel the pain of answering them please do not give up. Keep at it no matter how often you fall back.

So often what we do is avoid the hurt and the confusion because who likes hurt and confusion? It is very old knowledge that we go towards pleasure and away from pain.

So a very simple truth and it can take a long, long time for it to sink in and if you read this you may think I am either just dumb or useless. I hope that you will at least get a glimmer of the thought that our reaction too often is indeed to avoid instead of looking to the confusion and seeing it as a problem to be solved. That is getting interested in the negative.

Now, again, this writing has been triggered by the fact that I realize how some people that I know are brilliant in their understanding of many concepts but have not internalized them. That is they do not practice them fully in their lives. And then I say do I after more than ten years? I certainly do more and more. But it all takes time. And the more confusion, shame, and abuse you have suffered in your life it does not matter how well you “understand” the concepts it is going to take time for them to enter your nervous system and become “you.” We know that to become good at anything it takes about ten years. Any journey starts with the first step. Good luck and never be afraid to ask for help.

 

"Words"

Brian Lynch

Most of us by now have done a “search” on the Internet. Did you know that if you enter any seven words of your creation you have almost no chance of finding the phrase you made? I for example just made up the phrase “The cat went to get the ball.” and I did not find it on the Internet. The same with “The dog went to get the ball.” Simple seven-word sentences but they are not on the Internet despite the fact there are now, I have heard, about one trillion pages on the World Wide Web. I suppose that is something like at least thirty trillion sentences and not one of them the same as mine.

I mention this not just to point out the amazing creativity of language but also to relate it to our emotional lives.

I have often mentioned that we start life off with nine hard-wired emotions. That is our nervous system has developed to permit us to “feel” through this system. These feelings are interest, joy, surprise, anger, fear, disgust, contempt, and shame. Once again, I believe these are “hard-wired” in the nervous system just as we have a special nervous system to make our muscles move and another one to feel pain and another to feel pleasure and many more systems.

Words and emotions: seven words in a sentence and eight emotions so approximately the same number of possible combinations and there are not trillions of people but only six billion of us right now on earth.

The point is with just eight emotions you have plenty to work with to come up with very different personalities. And with seven words you have plenty to continue adding to 30 trillion sentences.

I, from an early age, get angry when someone laughs at me. You laugh with them. Another person feels fear, disgust, and so on. Then each of these will in turn feel succeeding emotions; after anger, I will feel shame and you will feel more joy while my neighbor will feel fear and then anger and thus we will begin to know each other as Brian, John, Jill, and Jane.

Then each of us will have our characteristic activities or behavior that accompany how we feel. I might leave the room, you will dance, my neighbor complains. Through these behaviors, we will get feedback and this feedback will cause new feelings, a cascade of feelings. But it will always be feelings first and “doing” second. But I emphasize it is all based on just these eight feelings, mixing and matching them and we get six billion personalities.

NB In the theory I most use for these pieces, Affect Psychology, innate emotion that which we call “affect” is slightly more complicated than I present here starting with the addition of a feeling we have never articulated and that is “dissmell”. Please see: Dismell

“Giving Advice is Attacking Others”

“Giving Advice is Attacking Others”

Brian Lynch

 We are exquisitely sensitive to our inadequacies and just maybe exquisitely sensitive to others' pain, although it often does not seem like it.

It does not seem like “we” or that others are so sensitive as it is so often the case that we are victims of criticism when we are looking for understanding and support. My purpose is to show that what seems like insensitivity is often the opposite. The appearance of insensitivity is a defense.

This experience often comes from a sense of insecurity, of not knowing the answer to anthers' plea for help or understanding. It comes from reliving the trauma of childhood. We were expected at an early age to know the answer, to come up with a solution, and to know what to do. 

When we are now put in a situation, one we did not ask for, of helping someone solve a problem we get “anxious”, and feel shame for not knowing the answer. We were told that “life is tough kid you better get used to it.” It is up to you to know the answer and solve the problem.

It is being exquisitely sensitive to our shame and humiliation being triggered by old memories. This trumps our ability to be empathetic with others at the moment. This leads so often to a critical response or useless advice. We would not be thrown into these “attacks” unless we recognized the immediate pain of the person in front of us. But our pain is triggered and memories of having to have the answer interfere and we give what we got and tell the person often the first “suggestion” that comes to mind or return to the “life is tough kid you better get used to it.” 

This is the same kind of dynamic where the person is always telling you that they will be “right there.” It will be a “few minutes” or a “just an hour” and then they show up three hours later and act as if nothing had happened. Yes, they were trying to please you. They also are having a knee–jerk reaction to their shame of not being in control of their actions. They probably would be in control if they were not sabotaged by the memory of a father, mother, or brother telling them to constantly “hurry up.”

So in giving “advice” we attack? So often I have been on the receiving end of “advice” that has been, even well-intentioned, but useless.

The attacker needs to “fill the space”, the silence that is causing shame. The advice giver relieves this shame and distress by saying something and pretty much anything. Useless information is shaming and humiliating, of course, to the listener.

I want to be clear that the point is we are driven( Always the question is what motivates us?) by our shame and distress for whatever reason. We give advice on a knee-jerk basis. One of the most irritating situations is when the advice giver more or less knows he or she is giving “lite” advice, that is the first thing that comes to mind and they are called on it and then say “I know, you’re right.” Well, are we paying attention or not?

Meaningful advice should be given after knowing a great deal about the other's situation. What the individual seeking advice more than anything is to be listened to.

A favorite of mine is that when I have needed help with something the advice is “Why don’t you find someone to do this or that to help you out? Get a college kid.” Well, have you ever tried to do that? It is quite an undertaking. Nothing is truer than “good help is hard to find.”

It more and more amazes me how I can be in what I think is a safe and trusting environment and I share some problems and what happens is the worst kind of dressing down or a flippant comment.

"Actions do speak louder than words"

Brian Lynch

What has been fascinating in my  study of human emotions is how everything has come into question.

Like what? Such as conventional wisdom that if someone treats you badly or does not recognize your distress, they are not empathetic.

Now what is empathy? Usually, it is the concept of “putting oneself in the shoes of another.” It can be distinguished from sympathy as empathy can imply great concern for another or, and this is crucial, simply understanding the feelings of another.

For example, I can be happy and you can be happy and I can be empathetic to your happiness. We usually tend toward thinking it only has to do with “bad” feelings.

Then, what do I do with that empathy? I can be “sympathetic”, sympathy being that I “feel with you.” I care or am concerned about your feelings or I can abuse you. Yes, just because I can be attuned to your feelings, just because I am empathetic, does not mean that I care about them! It is “this guy is a sucker, let's take him!” It is an interesting and disheartening thought that to take advantage of your emotional state, it seems logical that the person must be attuned to your emotional state!

These distinctions are surprisingly recent, within less than the last two hundred years, that is the distinctions between sympathy and empathy.

So with that background, I said “we”, which is generally felt that if someone does not recognize our distress they are not empathetic. From what I just said that may be entirely not the case. I will offer several possibilities. 1), it is that they indeed do recognize our distress, but as I just said, they are after something else or 2) they are suffering from so much distress/shame/fear that they are incapable of sympathy, of expressing in word and action their concern. Or 3) they simply are not empathetic or sympathetic.

Now, why would the third possibility happen? Well, it is not settled by a long shot, but the possibility exists that some people just cannot feel sympathy or empathy. Autism, for example, seems a clear example of someone without this capacity in various degrees. A less severe form of Autism called Asburgers Syndrome is very much a problem in “reading” other people’s emotion. This is to say nothing of the origin of what we call psychopathology or sociopathy.

Given that high-order investigational tools, such as PET scans and Functional MRI have only been available for some 10-15 years it would seem logical that we might find that there is a continuum throughout humans concerning the ability to feel others' distress or other emotional states.

But that is biology. What of the environment and the phenomena of empathy?

I return then to the first two possibilities: Let’s say I tell you of my distress and you tell me to “grow up”, you get angry, or you go away.

The purpose of writing this is to point out that we just do not know why the other acted as such. It may be that they do “feel for you” but due to overwhelming “empathy” in the form of remembering their pain they simply are incapable of responding. Or they may be “after something else” which will leave us feeling manipulated. But even at this if they are “after something else” and are “manipulating” it does not mean that they do not “feel your pain” but simply something else is more in their “interest.” They simply do not have the knowledge or learning to handle their interest in you and what their needs are at the same time. And indeed their interest in you might be quite nil. Will not most of us not betray someone dear simply for a greater interest? We will as long as we feel isolated.