As I look back on what I learned in Grade School, High School, my Associate’s Degree, my Bachelor’s Degree in Family Life Education, and even my Master’s Degree in Clinical Mental Health Counseling; nothing I learned is nearly as important as the information I learned about by reading the book Widen the Window: Training Your Brain and Body to Thrive During Stress and Recover from Trauma by Elizabeth A. Stanley.
Grasping how stress and trauma affect my brain and body, even in everyday moments like conversing with family or delivering an impromptu speech where I am expected to say something that sounds remotely intelligent, would have greatly benefited me throughout my life. It’s striking that I’m only discovering this at 50. Reflecting on my experiences, I now understand my past inefficiencies with a sense of compassion, thanks to the insights from this book.
Did you know we have two brains? I surely didn’t! We have a Thinking Brain and a Survival Brain and both of them have very different jobs in our mind-body system.
Think of our mind-body system as something that should run smoothly—like a supercharged engine in a Ferrari or Porsche. All we have to do is slightly tap the gas pedal and we instantly sense the power that is at our fingertips (or toe-tips in this quirky analogy).
In Widen the Window, Dr. Stanley describes the mind-body system as our entire human organism which includes our brain, the nervous system, neurotransmitters (how the brain and nervous system communicate), the immune system, the endocrine system (our hormones), and the body, organs, skeleton, muscles, fascia, skin, and fluids. When everything functions harmoniously, we’re operating at full capacity, like a well-oiled machine, and our system feels completely at ease. But when we are unable to effectively recover from stress and trauma, our entire mind-body system goes haywire, and what should be our Ferrari or Porsche actually turns into a Ford Escort with a cracked engine block, or worse yet, an Amish buggy being pulled by a three-legged mule!
As a counselor, I see a full range of clientele who have been struggling for years (or, like me, decades) with the negative effects of having a mind-body system that is often running on its last leg. Most of their “problems” are a sign of dysregulation in their mind-body system that manifest as a broad range of emotional, physical, cognitive, spiritual, or behavioral symptoms. They show up for their sessions to work through the various internal and external stressors which are causing them all kinds of problems in their lives. Whether they are able to pinpoint their problem or not, they are certainly able to feel the effects of their dysregulation which, by the time they come in to see me, are often manifesting as depression, anxiety, PTSD, chronic nausea, racing thoughts, insomnia, hypervigilance, chronic physical illnesses, and a range of unskillful coping behaviors.
I am by no means scoffing at or judging my clients. The same results of dysregulation were 100% me for most of my life and were the same reasons I sought out counseling for myself a few decades ago. I am still working through many of my unconscious modes of dysregulation that serve as my default coping mechanisms. When I look back at the way I willingly chose chaos and extreme behaviors, it’s so easy for me to see now just how much extreme dysregulation I had in my life at the time. Dr. Stanley says it best so I will quote her directly here: “Extreme behavior is usually linked to extreme dysregulation—the hallmark of someone masking, suppressing, denying, self-medicating, or coping with extreme dysregulation the best way they know how.” Wow! This has been my life to a tee!
We are so quick to judge people who are using extreme behaviors to cope with their extreme dysregulation. But since I have read Widen the Window, I instantly noticed a huge dose of compassion well up inside of me for all of us who are simply struggling with being human.
Again, I desperately wish we would have learned this stuff in school! Imagine how beneficial it would have been to know what was going on inside our brain and body when we were experiencing the effects of stress and trauma. I really liked what Dr. Stanley had to say about this: “Rather than self-improvement, the most direct path to feeling better, thriving during stress and trauma, and making effective choices is actually self-understanding.” Understanding what is actually happening inside ourselves makes a world of difference.
What Is Going On Inside of Me?
Our mind-body system was actually designed to work together cohesively but it doesn’t always go according to plan. Dr. Stanley uses the term the thinking brain to describe the neocortex region of our brains—the newest part evolutionarily speaking. She says: “The thinking brain engages in top-down processing—our mostly voluntary and conscious cognitive responses to our experiences. The thinking brain is responsible for our conscious decision making; ethical choices; and reasoning, abstraction, and analytical capabilities. It allows us to focus; recall, keep in mind, and update relevant information; and make decisions. To support these functions, the thinking brain has an explicit learning and memory system, situating information within space and time, which we can access intentionally. We know the thinking brain is engaged whenever we hear that running commentary of thinking, comparing, judging, and narrating in our head. Its strategy for protecting us is to anticipate, analyze, plan, deliberate, and decide.”
It wasn’t until I began learning about the survival brain and how it engages in bottom-up processing that I really experienced a profound shift in my life. I was first introduced to the potential of bottom-up processing when I read The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk and then I became trained in EMDR (Eye-Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing). Seeing clients release their previously “stuck” trauma and then have significant relief from their negative symptoms from those traumas profoundly impacted me. Up until that point, I believe I was using my thinking brain to try and understand what those survival brain approaches were trying to do. However, it wasn’t until I experienced IFS (Internal Family Systems) for myself where I genuinely felt the positive effect of bottom-up processing. Since I have personally experienced the profound effects of experiential psychotherapy techniques (bottom-up processing), I have fully committed myself to learning all I can about them and incorporating them into my sessions with my clients.
Evolutionarily speaking, the survival brain is what we sometimes call the lizard brain because it’s the older limbic system, brain stem, and cerebellum which play key roles in our emotions, relationships, stress arousal, habits, and basic survival functions. Some basic facts about the survival brain really floored me: it gives us “involuntary emotional and physiological responses to our experiences, including emotions, physical sensations, vocalizations, and action tendencies in the body” (we all know that person that anxiously rocks back and forth, twitches their eyes, twirls their hair, or bounces their knees up and down). Dr. Stanley says, “One of the survival brain’s most important functions is neuroception, an unconscious process of rapidly scanning the internal and external environment for opportunities/safety/pleasure and threats/danger/pain. In turn, the survival brain’s protection plan is quite simple: Approach the former (opportunities) and avoid the latter (threats). To support neuroception, the survival brain has an implicit learning and memory system—fast, automatic, and unconscious, bypassing the thinking brain. It constantly acquires implicit memories through every experience, without conscious intention or effort. Importantly, the survival brain isn’t verbal, so it can’t communicate with us via thinking or narrating. Instead, it activates neurotransmitters and hormones, which produce physical sensations and emotional cues, each associated with conditioned impulses to approach opportunities and/or avoid threats. That’s why it’s called bottom-up processing. Once we become aware of these bodily cues, however, the thinking brain can use that information for conscious decision making. Although we can’t know directly what’s happening in the survival brain, we can see its effects in our emotional and physiological arousal. Together, the thinking brain and survival brain comprise what many people call ‘the mind.’”
It took me several readings to fully comprehend the depth of the last paragraph. Each read-through unveiled new insights and connected to my five decades of navigating life through ‘neuroception’, a concept I was unaware of until now. This realization prompts a critical question: Why didn’t my education ever cover this? Throughout my academic journey—from elementary school to graduate studies—I never encountered such vital information. The knowledge and application of this could have significantly benefited both me and those around me, far more than the memorization-focused methods aimed at acing standardized tests.
While reading this book, I instantly understood that I have spent the majority of my adult life operating out of my thinking brain. I was driven to “figure things out” which I now see as the top-down processing that Dr. Stanley described. I have spent years unable to control my impulses and urges without so much as a clue to what was happening within me (or to me). Which means I was completely clueless to the sensations and feelings my survival brain was trying to tell me. To be clear, I am very proud of how far my thinking brain has been able to get me to where I wanted to go. Even though I was extremely dysregulated, my thinking brain’s strategy of “anticipating, analyzing, planning, deliberating, and deciding” has produced a lot of wonderful outcomes for my life.
I cannot forget to add one last point that Dr. Stanley makes about the brain: “Awareness does not belong to the thinking brain or the survival brain. It functions distinct from the thinking brain’s cognitive activity and the survival brain’s stress and emotional arousal. Awareness is greater than all of these things—which is why we can pay attention to thoughts, emotions, physical sensations, and the body’s posture, temperature, and movements. Mindfulness-based training helps us learn how to direct and sustain our attention—and thereby stabilize awareness—so that we can become aware of, learn from, and modulate these different mind-body experiences.” I actually used to think that awareness was completely a thinking brain activity. I can see how my previous meditation practices have been mostly about quieting my mind and forcing my thinking brain to be quiet in much the same way I might train our dog to sit or shake. Now I can see that utilizing mindfulness practices like meditation and deep breathing are extremely beneficial for understanding what is going on in both my thinking brain and my survival brain. Bringing awareness to my thoughts, narrating, judgments, physical sensations, emotions, and bodily cues helps me stay fully present and in tune with my surroundings.
The first half of Widen the Window describes in great detail how our mind-body system works, understanding the continuum between stress and trauma, the science behind our window of tolerance including neuroplasticity and epigenetics, what is happening in our body and brain during stress and trauma, three pathways to narrowing our windows (childhood adversity, shock traumas, along with chronic stress and relational trauma in everyday life), what happens when we find ourselves stuck outside our window, recognizing that we have a stress capacity threshold (the amount we can take before we “blow up”), and the negative effects to our health once we become dysregulated.
The second half of Widen the Window does a wonderful job of recommending all the things we can do to help our thinking brain and survival brain become allies: like building resilience through recovery; accessing choice with stress, emotions, and chronic pain; working skillfully with limits and resistance; thriving during uncertainty and change; choosing habits that widen the window; and widening the collective window by adding regulation, presence, creativity, wisdom, courage, and connection with others.
I cannot stress this enough. I genuinely think EVERYONE would benefit from the information in Widen the Window. If I had my own show like Oprah, I would be walking through the audience saying, “You get a copy of the book. You get a copy of the book. And you get a copy of the book.” Get a copy for yourself and let me know how much you wish you learned all of this in school, too.
Peace my friends,
~Travis
