Unfortunately, we tend to glorify left-brain activities to the neglect of the right. We expect the left brain to fight our battles, particularly, the internal enemies. We do this without taking into account that left-brain development came into being much later in evolutionary history than the right brain, and in each of our individual lives, in part as a means of disengaging us from the other side. One kind of brain tissue cannot do the work of another. The left brain developed different abilities to avoid a redundancy between left and right. The left brain’s activity helps soothe and calm us. It allowed and continues to allow us to defend against feelings that were too much to bear. We use the left hemisphere to rationalize a hurt or insult so it won’t create so much pain. Or, at the mercy of needs of which we may be only dimly aware, the left brain can superimpose all kinds of needs onto a romantic object and imagine her to
be wonderful, only to be disappointed two years down the line because the left brain didn’t perceive reality. It didn’t listen to the right because communication was either reduced or nonexistent. When perception is detached from need and feeling, we misperceive. For instance, if we need a strong protector, we will overlook the other person’s weaknesses and ignore his flaws. We “see” protection
where it may not exist, or we get protection accompanied by total domination.
The left frontal area is also where we conjure up or embrace beliefs. Insights given by a therapist are ultimately beliefs to soothe and ease pain. Indeed, the words of a therapist, no matter whether right or wrong, can be soothing to our agonies. It is not only the content of what the therapist says, but just his words offered in soothing tones. Oddly enough, that tone affects the right brain, not the left. The
content of the insight remains in the left. We can be fooled into thinking that the content of an insight is what makes us feel better, but in reality it is the reassuring tone, all along. It dampens right-side pain—the pain of a father who never cared, was never soft, and whose tone was unrelentingly harsh. The therapist’s presence says, “I’m here now. It’s going to be all right.” Just being in his office can make us feel better. In other words, the left side allows us to be partially oblivious to ourselves. This is particularly egregious when it comes to psychotherapy, which traditionally has been left-brain focused for more than 100 years.
There is still this focus on discussion, still a concentration on the relationship between patient and doctor, rather than on the relationship between the patient and herself. We go to cognitive therapy to enlist the armies of the word against the ranks of feelings. With this understanding, we can see how futile it is to use ideas in treating the effects of deeply ingrained traumas. It is not just ideas that are
involved in therapy. The therapist is not only the purveyor of ideas, she is also the filler of needs (symbolically) and in that way we can only get well symbolically; therapy is yet another form of act-out. What is real is the patient’s unresolved childhood need and the dislocation it caused long ago. No current therapeutic caring can undo childhood deprivation.
Remember, insights are a set of belief systems. What a therapist tells the patient is often part of his own apperceptive mass, of his own beliefs that the patient must adopt. Insights are not neutral; they are multi-determined. There is a theoretical frame of reference behind them, a system of beliefs, which is inculcated into the patient. Often, the cognitive therapist is using words to activate the patient’s left prefrontal area, thereby strengthening the defense. The Freudians don’t call it cognitive, but they rely heavily on words to accomplish their goals. They want to reorient the patient to more rational ways of thinking. So here we have a paradox: the therapist’s words strengthen the left-brain defense while the tone calms the right brain; together they seem to help. It is not the content of the
insights a therapist gives, but the fact of the insights; proffering ideas as a balm to soothe those inner wounds that do not bleed.
What is the meaning or subtext of the therapist’s insights? “I care. I listen. I want to help. I talk to you with empathy. You are worth talking to.” All that is the “healing” subtext, which is symbolic. Whatever reinforces our defenses tends to make us feel better. It puts an ideational salve over the hurt so we won’t feel it, when it is the opposite that must take place. No psychotherapy can alter our unresolved childhood needs and the act-outs they drive once they are sealed in. We can beat or exhort smoking and drinking away, but their motivating forces remain. Or we can go to psychotherapy where the therapist encourages us to understand and forgive our parents for their weaknesses even while our systems are in agony from deprivation. It is the left brain that forgives while the right
suffers, and forgiveness will never change that suffering. Forgiveness is a religious notion, not a scientific one. Forgiveness is best left to the church.
We tend to think that ideas change our behavior when in fact it is our feelings. It doesn’t matter whether our feelings
are conscious or not; they still affect all of our biological mechanisms, including hormones, our circulatory system, muscles, and so on. Left-brain insights decades later in therapy are not going to change those physiologic imprints, our memories, our critical right-brain history, because they are not directly connected to that history. Indeed, they are disconnected from that history.4 The real challenge in
therapy lies in how to address another human being’s right brain without words. The right side always tells the truth because the imprint leaves it no choice; yet that truth often forces the left to lie, mostly to ourselves. In the October 2005 issue of the British Journal of Psychiatry, there is a study indicating that the ability or facility for compulsive lying lies, not surprisingly, in the prefrontal cortex, away
from the feeling level.
Once we understand that only the patient can transform himself, then we can move beyond trying to make him into what he is not. Reality lies inside of him, not in the head of the therapist. We need to help him find that reality.
