8 October 2022
Imagine young Alice waking to hear her intoxicated parents fighting in the living room below. If she hasn’t heard these frightening, chaotic sounds before, she’ll probably get up out of bed to ask what’s happening. Once experienced, Alice is unlikely to do it again as seeing one’s parents (primary caregivers) in such distress is a traumatizing sight for a child. Her entire world order has been threatened.
That sight begins a series of changes within Alice’s world and person. First, she has had her initial Adverse Childhood Experience, or ACE. That ACE both marks and changes young Alice. If the ACE is repeated, the change becomes deeper and more entrenched. In the next few blog posts, we’ll look at trauma, stress, and how they affect the whole Alice for better or worse.
Please take a look at the three-in-one (triune) image that accompanies this blog. This is the best and simplest representation I have yet seen of the human brain, though I’m now in my eighth year of studies in psychology. The explanation that accompanied this image explained the three parts as palm, thumb, and fingers. The palm is the reptilian brain responsible for the automatic functions, like the beating of your heart and the grateful rhythm of your lungs.
The thumb represents the limbic system. This is your centre of emotion. Importantly, the limbic system informs you of what to fear and desire. Through continuous interactions with your body, what you fear or desire can change. Remember Alice.
The fingers are the cerebral cortex. This is the wrinkled grey matter we often see as a typical image of the brain. The fingers/cortex wrap around the thumb/limbic system allowing people with strong executive control (part of the cortex/fingers) to override unhealthy emotional directives. Ms. Weigeldt, who presented and explained these images to our practicum class, used the expression “flipping your lid” to describe what happens when our executive control is dismissed, leaving the thumb/limbic system to run the show—usually to our long-term regret. If you lift your fingers away from your turned in thumb, you’ve flipped your lid by abandoning your prefrontal cortex. In these blogs, we’ll tie this representation of the brain to resilience.
Earlier blogs explored resilience in some detail from May through June of 2020, beginning with Resilience #1—The Bounce-back Virtue (https://understandings.ca/2020/05/06/resilience-the-bounce-back-virtue/). Resilience: the still-debated definition is the ability to achieve a successful outcome in the face of adversity (Karatsoreos et al. in Hunter et al., 2018, p. 307)
The current series is more brain and causally based than the prior blogs which were more experientially and philosophically based. More importantly, this series combines sociology, psychology, and neuroscience in a conscious attempt to achieve consilience, a new word for this blogger.
Consilience is the linking together of principles from different disciplines, especially when forming a comprehensive theory (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/consilience, 13.ix.22). It is noteworthy, at least to me, that my long-trusted dictionary—from 1975—did not include consilience. Research reveals that the word has Greek roots and a long history in philosophy, but that consilience was only brought into broader public use by Edward O. Wilson’s 1998, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. You heard it here first!
Joking aside, I think consilience is the future of science. For a few decades there has been an academic focus on cross-disciplinary research to foster common threads of exploration or even opposing threads within one or more disciplines. Airing of the linen tends to increase everybody’s knowledge of what’s visible and still in need of a second look.
Remember Alice? When people are hit with trauma (big, scary stressors) they either do the healthy work to return to base level (homeostasis) or they fail to do that work—because they haven’t learned how—and they exist at a much higher base level of anxiety. Homeostasis, which, when traced to its roots, means the ability to stay the same, was identified as a concept in 1929 by Walter Cannon (Hunter et al., 2018). At the same time, he developed a parallel concept that has not gained the same fame and notoriety, allostasis. Allostasis is adaptation (growth) through change.
Next week, we’ll return to Alice and what is happening within. What’s so interesting about Alice’s process is that it isn’t just her mind, and it isn’t just her body—it’s her consilient self doing what it can to prepare Alice for her anticipated future.
Dan Chalykoff is working toward an M.Ed. in Counselling Psychology and accreditation in Professional Addiction Studies. He writes these blogs to increase (and share) his own evolving understandings of ideas. Since 2017, he has facilitated two voluntary weekly group meetings of SMART Recovery. Please email him (danchalykoff@hotmail.com) to be added to or removed from the Bcc’d emailing list.
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