Using imagination to change and rewire the brain

The healing power of imagery can and does affect our biology and neurobiology.  Most of us are being fed images every day and there are links between watching violence and damage to the immune response in viewers.  Likewise, the viewing of positive, uplifting images have the capacity to raise our energy.  When feeling depressed on lonely afternoons, late in my sobriety, I started to watch a lot of comedy which would alter my energy.

When we suffer from the affects of carried trauma, depression, anxiety, fear and hypervigilance are often the result.  We can stay locked or imprisoned in our mind with painful thoughts, sensations and reactions playing over and over again.  When we are focused in this way we can, with mindfulness use our awareness to bring our focus onto something loving, calming, nurturing, funny or soothing.  It does take work.

One of the leading exponents of the brain’s neuroplasticy (ability to rewire itself and alter when fed new stimuli which are healing and more positive and uplifting in nature) is Norman Doidge.  His work is explored in Mark Wolynn`s book on intergenerational trauma that I have been quoting from and sharing in posts over past days.

In an earlier post I shared the following :

Psychotherapy is often about turning our ghosts into ancestors.

As Wolynn explains, the ghosts that haunt us often have ancestral connection with a life of their own which can keep repeating.  He notices in his own work that core sentences and words can repeat which indicate the presence of past trauma.  In a similar way powerful new healing, images and language connections can be used in order to forge new connections and pathways in the brain and psyche of sufferers.

Doidge revolutionised our understanding of how human brains operate by identifying a paradigm shift away from viewing the brain as fixed and unchanging to see it as flexible and capable of change.  His work demonstrates how new experiences can create new neural pathways.  These…..become strengthened through repetition and deepened through focusing attention…. the more we practice something the more we train our brain to change.

It is known that what tends to replay becomes ingrained and sadly we are wired with a bias towards remembering and reinforcing negative events and experienes.  We can however work to change this by changing our focus in a more positive expression.  But first we need to recognise where our focus is and how it might be being unconsciously replayed or re-inforced.

When we make the link to what sits behind our fears and symptoms, we are already opening up new possiblities for resolution.  Sometimes the new understanding is enough to shift the old painful images we hold and initiate a visceral release that can be felt in the core of our body.  In other cases, making the link merely increases understanding, but more is needed to fully integrate what we have learned.  We will need sentences, ritual practices, or exercises to help us forge a new inner image.  The new image can fill us with a reservior of calm, becoming an internal reference point of peace that we can return to again and again.   With new thoughts, new feelings, new sensations, and a new brain map ingraiend, we begin to establish an inner experience of well-being that starts to compete with our old trauma reactions and their power to lead us astray.

The more we travel the neural and visceral pathways of our new brain map, the more we identify with the good feelings that accompany that map.  Over time, the good feelings start to become familiar and we begin to trust our ability to return to solid ground even when our foundation has been temporarily shaken.

Doidge tells us that we can change our brains simply by imagining.  Just by closing our eyes and visualising an activity, or primary visual cortex lights up, just as it would if we were actually performing that action.  Brain scans demonstrate that many of the same neurons and regions of the brain become activated whether we`re imaging an eventor actual living it.   Doidge describes visualisation as a proces that uses both imagination and memory.

Imagination is the beginning of creation, wrote the playwrite George Bernard Shaw… What we imagine we can make possible.

Plastic change, caused by our experience travels deep into the brain, and even into our genes, molding them as well, according to Doidge.  Another researcher Dr. Dawson Church describes how visualisation, meditation, and focusing on positive thoughts, emotions, and prayers – which he calls internal epigenetic interventions – can activate genes and positively effect our health, reinforcing the healing process.

Meditation has also been shown to alter gene expression, decreasing levels of pro inflammatory genes, which helps cells to recover from stressful situations more quickly.  According to Chuch when people meditate they bulk up the parts of the brain that produce happiness.

New brain cells are continually being generated in our brain throughout all of our lives.  This new growth takes place in the hipposcampus.  Learning alters gene expression, according to Doidge.

A life totally devoid of trauma… is highly unlikely.  Traumas do not sleep, even with death, but, rather, continue to look for fertile ground of resolution in the children of the following generations.

But trauma can always be healed if we have the right tools and insights, Mark Wolynn writes.  He shares some ways of doing so in subsequent chapter of his book It Didn`t Start With You :  How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and What We Can Do About It.  

Trauma leaves clues in the form of emotionally charged words and sentences we hear inside or repeat to ourselves, even if unconsciously.  Mark calls this core language.  In the case of Gretchen whose ancestors perished in the ovens at Auschwitz her core languagea was depression, despair, anxit and an urge to vaporise herself.  According to Wolynn core language acts like the breadcrumbs Hansel and Gretel dropped on the way into the woods to ensure their return to safety.  These words, if we can trace them, have the power to lead us back on course.  They may appear random, they may emerge from the unconscious as metaphor, often for example we may find them through poetry.

Understanding how trauma memories are stored is important because we have both declarative memory and non declarative memory.  The former is explicit or narrative in nature, the ability to consciously recall facts or events.  The later is implicit, sensorimotor, procedural and operates without unconscious recall.

Traumatic memories are stored as nondeclarative memory,  we lose our words after an overwhelming event, it exists only as a torrent or a flood within that may threaten to emerge at any time.  In fear of it we may batton down the doors or run in flight.

Without words, we no longer have full access to our memory of the event.  Fragments of experience go unnamed and submerge out of sight.   Lost and undeclared, they become part of our unconscious.

But even though we may feel we have lost our language in or after overwhelm it does still live deep inside of us.  It sifts back into consciousness.   According to Ann Rogers, a psychologist with an interest in trauma the only way to hear it, is to stop imposing something over the top of it – mostly in the form of your own ideas – and listen instead for what she calls the unsayable, which exists everywhere in speech, in enactments, in dreams and in the body.

To be contineud