Guest Post by Catherine A: The Committee

 

My friend, Catherine A., she of the croissant-making in my Buttery Bliss post, wrote an essay recently for our writing group. I persuaded her to allow me to publish it as a guest post. So, with her permission, here it is. She is an artist, writer and musician but has neither a website nor an Instagram account (she should, her work is lovely) so I cannot provide you with any links to find out more about her. Enjoy. It certainly made me think.

 A neurologist wrote that an emotion takes 90 seconds to work its way through the body. If we hook into it, it may keep on running, spoiling our day and likely someone else’s. If we stop, breathe, and let it finish, “the chemical component of my anger has completely dissipated from my blood, and my automatic response is over”.  

These are the thoughts of Jill Bolte-Taylor, whose massive stroke at age 36, led to devastating damage to the left side of her brain. Ironically, she was working in post-doctoral brain research at the Harvard Medical School. In her book My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey, she describes the event and her eight years of rehabilitation. Her book was published in 2006, ten years after the stroke.

 Things may not become easier as we age, and I would prefer not to have a stroke. I have always had a short fuse. I learned this as a very young child when I heard adults say so.  My father had one and his father too. It has always been a struggle for me. At seventy-six, I wonder if the ninety second rule could help, in the way that counting to ten doesn’t. I think my anger is more irritation, often with material objects not behaving as they ought, such as vacuum cleaners, computers, sewing machines – you know, things that are supposed to be our servants and end up running the show. Tangled thread, banging into baseboards – and I don’t have to list all the sources of irritation from computers. 

I am not sure the ninety second rule helps with the genuine anger and incomprehension that I feel about demagoguery, racism, and anti-vaxxers for starters. This is a cold anger that is tied up with notions of how people ought to be and aren’t. We ought to be aware that we have responsibilities as well as rights, including choices of what to read and believe. We human beings are deluded into thinking that we are rational, logical and balanced: but we are not. 

Just this past week, I had an episode of anger about the death of a crew member on a film set: Alec Baldwin shot her with a gun that was supposed to be a prop. Such a terrible accident, they say. It was supposed to contain blanks.  Why is that? They can do anything on film to simulate real violence. But the U.S. is constantly having terrible accidents. There is a love affair with guns which many think are an absolute necessity “as long as there are bad people out there”, said one American I discussed this with. 

 The truth is that I don’t want to be frequently in a state of irritation or anger. I think there are lots of disgruntled people about right now, and many things wrong with the world, its countries, its climate. There have always been many things wrong with the world, but this is my first time here, as far as I know.

The same neurologist quoted earlier, Jill Bolte Taylor, has written a new book about the brain, Whole Brain Living: The Anatomy of Choice and the Four Characters That Drive Our Life. I thought it might help me to understand my own molecules of emotion.

Her paradigm is a set of four characters that reside in our skulls.

In the left side of the brain, we have Number One, the rational decision maker, the chairman: this is a set of cells, she says, that form our ego, the part that is in charge of how we navigate the world and keep safe. Here lives language too; without words to indicate who she was, she lost all sense of herself. 

Beneath the chairman, is Number Two, the cell structure that makes up our left brain emotional function, called the amygdala. These emotions are tied up with threats, dangers, past mistakes and trauma. Guilt, anger, resentment, hatred, critical judgement – these all bubble away here. This is the fight or flight mode. It was this left side that was the site of her devastating stroke. 

Number Three, on the brain’s right side, is the seat of sensory feeling, the being in the present moment. She was able to observe a creeping loss of orientation, balance, language. Yet it was a very lovely feeling being released into the present moment, a sense of euphoria, along with the sadness of feeling the loss of her faculties. She retained just enough presence of her Number One, to recognize that if she lay down and gave into it, which she badly wanted to do, she would never get up again. Help came finally and she was rushed to hospital.

 Right side Number Three, non-verbal, feels and senses, seeing clearly the feelings of others as well. Jill recognized that she was having a stroke and that time was crucial. She got to the phone, unable to read now, and spent a very long time looking for the card with the Harvard crest. She had to match up the squiggles that were numbers with the squiggles on the card, push the matching buttons on the phone, which seemed an impossible task. When she got through, she heard herself speaking clearly, but in fact was barely intelligible to the doctor on the phone. 

Underneath character three is the set of emotional cells that make up the right brain area of the amygdala. Here is character Number Four which is full of gratitude and wonder at the marvel of life, a feeling of oneness with the universe. Jill felt herself wanting to melt into that, to let herself go. 

“I morphed from feeling small and isolated to feeling enormous and expansive. I stopped thinking in language and shifted into the present moment….and it was beautiful.” There was no choreographer with a schedule of things to do, just inner silence and breath.

I have always thought I had an internal committee, but never knew much about it. I was always thinking things like, 

“I ought to vacuum but really don’t want to. I should really clean that sink.  But I want to have coffee and read the paper. And if I had a cinnamon bun, I’d eat it.”

Having a strong Number One, I usually decide to do the duties first, and then take the reward of coffee and the newspaper. Generally I don’t go out and buy a cinnamon bun. For starters, Number One doesn’t want them in the freezer within easy reach.

What Bolte-Taylor suggests, is calling a huddle or a committee meeting. It starts with the breath, which is the train running automatically in the present. The meeting of the four characters helps us to know what to do, moment after moment. If I apply that to “the red mist of anger” when I think about Americans and their guns, it might go like this:

Character 1: “The gun was loaded. It happens so often. Americans insist on their guns….”

Character 2 jumps up in the growing rage. Remember all the mass shootings in the U.S. Remember the sorrow of losing a good friend at age fifteen, when he and his brother were playing in the garage with a gun that “was not loaded”. Incomprehension at the stupidity. Red mist rising.

Outside character, my reasonable husband, “Take it easy. Calm down. It was an accident.”

 “Accident, shmaccident! What are they doing with a loaded gun! Jesus. Maybe it was sabotage.” 

 So, we have red hot anger, created by thoughts, words on a page, memories. The reasonable one escapes to the basement and is lying low.

 I feel sad and spent.

 Let’s suppose, instead of going on automatic, that we decide to have a huddle as Jill calls it, a committee meeting. Everyone is present. The first thing to do is focus on breathing, to bring us into the present. Now, who called the meeting? Probably Number One, who has seen things getting out of hand; Number Two doesn’t want to feel this way at all but is having trouble letting go. Number Three is noticing my agitated breathing and heart rate as well as my husband’s discomfort. Number Four is appreciating the complexity and genius of the human condition and the plasticity of the brain. We know enough to take ninety seconds to let the anger drain away. Maybe that is all that is needed. Reasonable One speaks about things you can’t change including the memories of terrible events and that it is unhealthy to surrender to the anger. 

I have learned a new technique to try, just from a youtube video (link here). As Jill says, the brain may learn how to recognize its automatic responses and call a meeting.  Number One thinks we should buy the book. She will decide against a cinnamon bun, but Three really wants one. Maybe we’ll distract One by having a huddle. She’ll be tied up with planning, and the rest of us will nip into the bakery.