Just as the hand, held before the eye, can hide the tallest mountain, so the routine of everyday life can keep us from seeing the vast radiance and the secret wonders that fill the world.
Chasidic saying, XVIII century
Life is short, and Art long; opportunity fleeting, experience misleading, and decision difficult. It is the duty of the physician not only to provide what he himself must do, but to enable the patient, the attendants, and the external circumstances to do their part as well.
Hippocrates (460 – 375 BC)
Memory is such a wonderous thing; it must store everything, with or without our consent.
Miriam Little
One of my earlies school memories is playing with a substance which was called plasticine. Later on, this name was supplanted by the American `Play-Doh´. In German it is called `Knetgummi´, i.e., kneading rubber. The soothing feeling of exerting the pressure of my fingers in unperturbed and undisturbed creativite flow, and the surprise and joy in the results of my endeavours, remain with me even today. I would have been four or five years old then.
There are no, or only very few earlier memories. This has intrigued me from time to time considering how much had happened in those first years of early childhood. On arrival, – as the fifth child -, there was considerable stress in our household with my father building up a dental practice in one of the suburbs of Belfast, where the first harbingers of the civil war which would break out in 1968 were already in the air. He and my mother had uprooted themselves from the Irish Republic to seek their fortune in that part of the island still controlled by the British. My older sister, twenty months my senior, had been suffering from chronic ear infections since birth, which was a major cause of worry and sleep deprivation on the part of both parents.
At four months, my mother took a month-long break to visit her father who had been assigned to help establish the judicial system in the newly independent Republic of Cyprus. She took me along, I am told. Indeed, subsequently there was for years a running joke on our weekly bath night when I was told to wash my neck but then excused because; `that was the sunburn you brought home from Cyprus´. My father, though probably also needing some rest, had stayed home to mind the shop.
We had a nanny/housekeeper by the name of Agnes. Again, no memories here. Only the comment of my oldest sister many years later that; `she was often very cross with us and always threatened to leave and go to live in Edinburgh, with her brother – not a popular lady´!
I discovered around the age of thirty that the first appellation used for me was not `Paddy´ but the more vernacular `Packey´, and that I was inseparable from a soft toy by the name of `Jacko´.
In the summer of my second year, my father had an accident which left him blind on one eye, not a good circumstance for any young father, not least a dentist. This led to a period off sick, winding down his practice, and seeking employment in the state health system in the Republic.
During the next year he was often away, preparing for our new life. In spring 1963 we moved away from Belfast to Limerick, into a house of which I have no memory. We moved again one year later, around the corner. This is the first home I can remember. My mother, who had had a miscarriage in the meantime, gave birth to my younger brother, the first of five further children, in March 1964.
Then things slowly come into focus. The plasticine memory would have been from my first year of school in 1965, after which events are pretty clear, though it must be said that I seem to be quite selective in the details I store. The first family bereavements, an uncle and grandparents, with deeply felt grief, occurred in 1968, which was also the year we moved to a larger house across town. Then the completion of junior school and on to senior school which I completed in 1979, two years after my father’s untimely death, which devastated me, and three years before my mother died, by which time I had emigrated, alone, to Germany. It seems it all took place at breath-taking speed.
Two rich seams are coming together for me at the moment in which memory plays a central role. The first is my participation in the Positive Intelligence Programme, designed and delivered by Shirzad Chamine and his team in San Francisco. The thrust of this programme is to discover the saboteurs that stealthily create havoc in our lives until we bring them to light and disempower them, while bolstering our so-called innate Sage energies which recognise the gift in every single life situation, no matter how discomforting, and have the ability to provide purpose and lead us to true joy in our lives.
Sherzad draws upon the latest clinical research in neuroscience which explains that what later become our `saboteurs´ were initially conceived as survival strategies in early childhood and were pretty successful in that respect. The issue is whether the life jacket we don at the age of five can serve us in adult life or is even still necessary several decades after we began using it.
An essential aspect of disempowering the saboteurs is to become conscious of them and to regularly engage in body-centred exercises (which include beep breathing, tactile, auditive, and olfactory exercises, imagination and reframing of actual past incidents, etc.) throughout each day. These so-called PQ Reps serve to undo old neuronal pathways which are no longer serving us, and to build new ones which will help us achieve serenity, joy, and success, as we consciously unfurl our full potential. They are also applied in the same manner to build up the brain muscles of the Sage aspect, which is our true essence.
Another contemporary who draws upon the latest clinical research in neuroscience is the Canadian psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and author, Norman Doidge. His first book The Brain that Changes Itself (2007), which I am currently reading, and from which I nicked the first of the three quotes at the start of this essay, was an international bestseller and is widely recognized as having introduced the concept of neuroplasticity to broader scientific and lay audiences alike.
Doidge introduces us to the pioneers of neuroplasticity, from Freud to contemporary trailblazers, as he unfolds the story of the emergence of this branch of neuroscience over the past hundred years. One of these is Eric Kandel.
Eric R. Kandel, born in Vienna in 1929 and winner of the Nobel Prize for medicine in 2000, discovered that the brain is made up of many nerve cells, which communicate by sending electrical and chemical signals to each other. These signals control our bodies and behaviour. Kandel studied how memories are stored by these nerve cells. His breakthrough came in 1970 while he was at New York University studying a marine snail with a simple nervous system. Eric Kandel found that as the snail learned, chemical signals changed the structure of the connections between cells, known as synapses, where the signals are sent and received. He went on to show that short-term and long-term memories are formed by different signals. This is true in all animals that learn, from molluscs to humans.
Doidge points out that `learning led to neuroplastic strengthening between neurons in the brain. The snails became sensitised so that they developed `learned fear’ and a tendency to over-react, even to benign stimuli´. Clinical studies also showed that this process could be reversed.
Memory plays an essential role in the shaping of our behaviours. This is the case whether we are conscious of these memories or not. Freud already wrote about short and long-term memory in his 1895 `Project for Scientific Psychology´, then stating in 1888 that `neurons that fire together, wire together´, He also drew up what he called the `Law of Association by Simultaneousity´. This led him to place such an emphasis on association in his therapy setting, even sitting behind the client, out of sight, so as not to interrupt the flow. This facilitated transference of memories and experiences from the past to the present, so that the client is re-living rather than remembering. Only in the `re-living´ can the rewiring take place. Clients project transferences onto the analyst who can then provide the input necessary to nurture the undoing of patterns of behaviour and belief which are a source of suffering to the client. This is only possible for memories which are brought into the light of consciousness.
In an aside, Doidge notes that we engage in transference not only in the therapy setting but in life in general, noting that `viewing others in distorted ways often gets us into difficulty´. Conversely, `helping us to under the transferences allows us to improve our relationships´.
Furthermore, transferences of early traumatic scenes `can often be altered, if the therapist pointed out to the client what was happening when the transference was activate and the client was paying close attention´. Thus `the underlying neuronal networks and the associated memories could be re-transcribed and changed´.
Here it is useful to point out that there are two major memory systems, both of which can be altered in psychotherapy. The initial category of memory to develop, mainly in our first three years, is called `procedural ‘or `implicit´ memory. Seated in the right hemisphere of the brain, it occurs when we learn a procedure or a group of automatic actions occurring outside our focussed attention, in which words are not generally required. All non-verbal interactions and experiences are stored in the procedural memory system. Most of us can ride a bike, for example, but few could explain, from memory, exactly how this came about. This confirms Freud’s contention that we can have unconscious memories. Indeed, in the first three years, the infant relies primarily on the procedural memory system.
Between the second and third birthday, we begin to develop the `declarative´ or `explicit´ memory, which, as you can guess, resides in the left hemisphere. Using this competence, we can remember explicit facts and events, such as we do at work on Monday when we recall the events of the weekend. As it is supported by language, it becomes increasingly important as we learn to talk.
`People who have been traumatised in the first three years of life can be expected to have few, if any, explicit memories of their traumas´, states Doidge. I struggle to find a single memory from the first three years, yet implicit memories do exist. I have experienced these being evoked and triggered in situations which bear similarities to the presumed trauma. They seem to come out of the blue, unbound by the time, place, and context, unlike explicit memories. In certain areas of my life, procedural memories of emotional interactions continue to be repeated, despite my now `knowing better´.
To explain this, Doidge cites his `Plastic Paradox´, which states that the same neuroplastic properties that allow us to change our brains and produce more flexible behaviours, can also allow us to produce more rigid ones. We all have the same plastic potential. The creativity, spontaneity, and unpredictability of early childhood can be kept, or lost. Unvaried repetition, fired by the conscious or unconscious, can lead to rigidity,
Juan Pascual-Leone (born 1933), a Spanish Canadian developmental psychologist cites the example of tobogganing down a hill on a fresh blanket of snow. At first, we have unconstrained possibilities, as the snow gives way under the sledge, and our choices are infinite. If we follow a tendency to re-use the, perhaps preferred, path again and again, however, our choices become limited. We get into a rut. Getting out of the rut is a lot more difficult than getting into it. Neuronal pathways, once established, tend to become self-sustaining.
According to Freud, neuroses are prone to being entrenched by force of habit. This is because they involve repeating habits of which we are not conscious, making it almost impossible to interrupt and redirect without special techniques.
Among these special techniques we can find the PQ Reps and further exercises developed by Shirzad Chamine in the Positive Intelligence Programme, based on the feasibility of utilizing our plasticity to grow and heal. Psychoanalysis, – plastic-therapy – , where needed, and the Positive Intelligence approach, appear to me to be a powerful and promising leading-edge combination, for as I have discovered this week; `knowing is not enough´.
Much of what I have heard so far in the first weeks of the Positive Intelligence Programme is not new to me. I have been identifying and unpacking the gifts of „bad“ situations for decades: the brutal uprooting in infancy and subsequent family turmoil, the early death of my beloved parents, emigration, addiction, divorce, professional setbacks, and – in this past decade – near-death experiences. I am so blessed to be showered with so many gifts.
In the heat of the moment, however, I forget. The saboteurs hijack me and off I go, like a torrent cascading down the mountainside after a full night’s rain.
My practice now, as I meditate and do my PQ Reps, is to imagine a deep, calm lake halfway down the mountain. It is a place to pause, to breath deeply and re-member, in real time, the truth of presence of the gift. It is here right now, whether seen or unseen.
As I do the PQ Reps, I silently say: `Calm waters, safe as the Universal Womb, I submerge my self in your depths a while, to re-member my Self´.
