This one is about alligators which is especially poignant now that I live in Florida and there’s a pond right behind my house that I am quite sure has at least one in it.
OK so I want talk to you about brains. Dan Siegel uses a fist model so that’s what we’re going to use. This is your brain stem, no thinking going on here. You could be brain dead and your brain stem could still be active.
Sitting directly on top of that, back here, right on top of your brain stem is your limbic brain; some people call it your downstairs brain. I call it your alligator brain and the reason I call it that is because that is exactly how evolved it is!
There’s an organ in here that has just one job and that is to keep you alive. It’s called your amygdala.
When you put your hand on a hot stove, what happens? You pull it back. You don’t stop and think, is that 212°? Right? That’s your amygdala, telling you to pull your hand back. Now, suppose you were chewing gum and talking on the phone and you put your hand on that stove. You’re still going to jerk it back, first and foremost.
You could be singing the ABC’s backwards on roller skates, put your hand on the hot stove and you will still jerk your hand back. Your amygdala has the master switch for your entire brain. It does its job really well. When it senses a threat, it prioritizes your physical safety above everything else and gets you focused on what you need to do to either fight or escape the danger.
So, your fight, flight, and freeze reactions all live here in your limbic brain. If you’ve seen the movie inside out, do you remember the character anger? He was the one with the flames shooting out of his head, played by Lewis Black. He lives right there.
Now, sitting on top of that, functioning kind of like a lid is your upstairs brain. You might think of it as your thinking brain. Some people call downstairs your feeling brain and upstairs is where thinking takes place. Think of an air traffic control tower that has its power cord hanging out of the bottom of it. Planes going in, planes going out. It’s controlled chaos with lots of moving pieces. Flooding is when your alligator pulls out the power cord and the whole thing just shuts right down. Now we’ve really got chaos, right?
Think of your upstairs brain fitting like a lid. When your amygdala feels threatened, your lid pops off. It is not connected, so when you’re jerking your hand back, you don’t have access to the stuff that’s up here. What kind of things live up here? Language, empathy, compassion, the ability to anticipate consequences or delay gratification. These are all upstairs functions. Many times when I’m talking about upstairs brains, I’ll say “please pass the butter.” In my flat tone of voice. If you can say please pass the butter in that really just basic tone, that’s the sound of upstairs.
If it were downstairs, it would sound like “PASS THE FREAKING BUTTER!” See the difference?
So let’s talk about how human brains evolve. When we are first born, all of our sensory input gets filtered by our amygdala first and foremost and that’s to keep us safe. Makes sense! Human infants are helpless and so they need all of the warning signals that they can possibly get.
Over time as we have new experiences, we grow new neural pathways in our brains and the beautiful thing about brains is that you’re going to continue to grow new neural pathways till you die. The old ones that aren’t being used just wither up and die off, making room for the new ones to function more directly and efficiently.
So let me give you an example. Imagine with me. Little kid, three years old, complete rotten snot. You take that kid to IHOP for the first time. You can probably just picture the menu. 18 different color pictures of pancakes in every imaginable permutation. I mean, just completely overwhelming! That kid is not going to know what to do! Mom or dad is going say, “hang on, you eat pancakes at home. You love them! they’re your favorite thing to eat! See? They have pancakes here.”
So, the kid has pancakes and neural pathway is created – IHOP pancakes are legit! A week later and you take the child to Denny’s. Now we’re in a completely different circus! The menu is yellow, the seats are red, everything’s different. Mom says, “hang on. you have pancakes last week at IHOP and you loved them. You love pancakes at home. Why don’t you try the pancakes?” and so the kid will try the pancakes.
Fast forward to week 3. The family goes to cracker barrel. talk about a sensory overload circle of hell for a three-year old. Dollars to Donuts, that kid is going to look at the wait staff and say “I’d like pancakes!” The reason is because they have grown a neural pathway upstairs that says “I don’t care what my amygdala says, I want pancakes. I like pancakes more than I am scared of crazy, new, weird restaurants.
Now, what we know about brains is that when young people, kids especially, have any kind of trauma, (doesn’t have to be big T trauma it can be little T trauma, really anything less than ideal – so guess what we all have a little) the wiring of our brain can physically change. You will find in folks who have some neuro spiciness and folks that have had major traumas or major losses very often live in a limbic dominant state all the time, constantly on alert for threats.
Their nervous system has static electricity energy going all the time. It often feels like they walk on eggshells through life, never fully able to relax and feel safe. Let’s say you grew up in an alcoholic family where things got scary. When it got scary, it got scary fast and unpredictably. It is much more likely that those kids grow up with limbic dominant brains.
One of my favorite creators, Danny Reedy, from Asperger experts, talks about the experience of being in a foxhole during a gunfight. Bullets are flying overhead, landing in the dirt around you, kicking up clods of dirt. Can you imagine what that would do to your nervous system? You’re going to have adrenaline and cortisol coursing through your veins. Then, this lovely old lady walks up and says I’m ready to teach you crochet now. Fat chance! Never going happen! You’re not in the right mind space to learn a new skill. You’d be fully in the alligator brain.
Now here’s where we go wrong in relationship with others. When people are in their alligator brains, we try to negotiate. We try to create learning moments. We argue our positions. Just picture that I’ve got an alligator cornered in here and I say, “now listen you eat that prime rib, it’s not good for you. You’re not eating red meat.” That alligator is going to say “Not only I am having prime rib and I might eat you afterwards just for sport.”
We cannot teach crochet in foxholes; we cannot stop alligators being carnivores.
The skill here is in learning how to moderate your own emotions while also reading the emotional state of your conversational partner. When your amygdala flips out, it is going to tell your glands to emit adrenaline and cortisol into your bloodstream. Adrenaline is your Hulk hormone. That release of adrenaline happens in a nanosecond; you aren’t even aware at the time that you touched the hot stove. When you cognitively become aware that it burned, your body has already responded in the most primal of reflexes. Digestion stops. Your body will draw all of the blood to the core so that if you are fighting with the imaginary lion, it’s less like likely you will bleed to death. Your awareness shifts into hyperfocus on your surroundings and becomes all about getting you safe, by any and all means possible.
So, our brains are miraculous places and they take really good care of us. However, when people get flooded during an argument or when they get easily frightened, you aren’t talking to “please pass the butter”, you are talking to their alligator. The best thing you can do with a cornered alligator is to give it space. Think of the conflicts that can be avoided if we were able to walk away with our power intact until calmer minds prevail.
I used to say that I would not assign discipline to my son until after I’d had a good meal and at least 8 hours of sleep. I honestly am a different human being when my amygdala is not driving my emotional bus. I don’t like the person I am when I’m scared or hurt. I don’t make good decisions and I certainly don’t treat people well, even if they are the people I love the most.
Learning how to “lose” an argument in the immediate term can very often shift the outcome and certainly helps us not make things worse in the moment.
Can you think of a time when your alligator took over? I get it. It’s one of our most basic instincts and the biggest lesson I’d like you to take from this is that our alligators are merely trying to find safety. They aren’t anticipating the consequences. They can’t understand delayed gratification. They can’t even find the words to explain their actions. So when we understand the context, what is going on inside our brains, it gets a whole lot easier to find compassion for ourselves and others in those moments.
Key takeaway – When we are limbic, our emotions take over and we lose access to higher level thinking.
That’s it for Lesson 1…stick around for more in Lesson 2.