Transcript
SARA WATKIN
The Scottish Centre for Conflict Resolution are really happy to work together on a project about the connections we believe exist between your bodily energy and your thinking mind, what role that plays in relating to one another. Because, ultimately, the SCCR is about helping us have better relationships and stay together in our families.
This project took me back to the very beginnings of medical school where you understand how the nervous system develops, and you learn that the outer layer of cells forms the central nervous system, nerves that control your legs and your arms and your facial muscles, how you smile, and controls everything from the basic brain areas that keep you breathing and your heart beating to the very high levels that allow you to think and work out problems and look before you leap. The Glasgow Science Centre’s has got a wonderful sculpture of the beautiful, eccentric sensory homunculus. It’s something that makes us curious about, how on earth can we have a virtual self within our self? From that came the idea, well, can we depict visually a sort of virtual emotional self within our self, and how many emotional selves do we have? And can they all be alive at the same time? What part does each have to play? So coming up with the sort of emotional homunculus, different emotional state, it seemed like a magical idea that we could build upon. Our emotional experience of what’s going on within and around us can create changes in the mind that create changes in the brain that are translated to changes in neurochemicals and neuron firing and messages to the body.
We all have an amazing drugs cabinet in our brain. It’s phenomenal. Our natural service to ourselves is more powerful than anything you could get really from a pharmacist. We make our own lovely neurochemical diet all the time. You can encourage, through the way you use your body and through relationships, release of really good chemicals in your body and mind. How are we self-regulating? How do we achieve that balance? We can almost sit in a variety of emotional states, but one or other might be playing a more dominant part at any point in time. It’s almost like you can be thinking about different things at the same time. It’s that idea. Your head might be busy at times with thoughts, but your body might feel quite floppy and relaxed. It’s not as simple as you’re either in rest-and-digest mode or alert and engaged. Things are very close together. The neurochemicals mix up. And if you’ve got more of one than the other at one point in time, you might be tipping towards, say, rest and digest. Are you going to move into a more alert state of mind? It’s happening unconsciously, and other people are doing it around me. It’s not just me regulating my state or trying to. It’s as if you’ve got a telephone operator, and they’re going to disconnect things from one area and connect them in another part of the brain. So all the memory of the person you’re arguing with, actually someone that you love and is normally really reasonable and thinking about them as a whole person and trying to put yourself in their shoes and imagine why they’re behaving this way, because perhaps they are being unreasonable. If, in an ideal world, you’re able to notice ‘I am so angry right now’ and just register it, if you’re that angry, it’s probably not a good time. Your emotional homunculus is going to be your fight-or-flight mode. So noticing that you’re really angry, perhaps registering context so that you can later make more sense of why.
Make a decision about whether or not you’re ready and in a state to have dialogue with yourself and then even the other person. Whether they’re ready, whether they’re ready to discuss something that was really upsetting, painful, hurtful if you are ready to talk but they’re not, then you’re going to have to wait, and you’re going to have to find a way to put those emotions on hold, but not forget the whole scenario. And then choosing a time when you’re both in your alert-and-engaged to rest-and-digest emotional states, where all the drug cabinets are flowing and there’s a little bit of oxytocin coming out now, and you’re probably therefore able to see a broad perspective and stand in their shoes for a moment. It doesn’t mean you have to agree. Learn something from it. We are an embodied mind within other embodied minds who are constantly relating to each other. Some people talk about an autobiographical self, a continuous life story that you have to make sense of things. The child will string together events and try and come up with a story that explains these events. They'll create links, events happened that you can remember, and you’re trying to understand why you live as you do and why you have certain habits and why certain things trigger certain emotions and behaviors in you. And, at times, the fragments you’ve had to put together have probably not sat easily, but they’ve made sense, which feels better.