Remember How They Made You Feel

I am struck by clients’ comments about their time spent with Ella and how viscerally they remember how they felt.  It is as if bringing up the memory of being with her also activates the emotions and sensations they felt in their body at the time. It seems that this ability to recall somatically (in the body) what happened is what is truly healing about their encounter.

Maya Angelou knew this instinctively, but I think I can explain it physiologically as well.  We remember emotions, feelings, sensations through our limbic system, the center of emotion in the brain.  The human brain (and all mammals) has three parts – the survival or reptilian brain, the feeling or limbic brain, and the thinking brain, or neo-cortex.  The interesting thing about the limbic brain is that it doesn’t recall with a time-stamp.  When a circumstance brings up an emotional memory, we feel it like it is happening right now.

Bruce Ecker, in Unlocking the Emotional Brain, explains how the emotional brain works:

. . . emotional memory just doesn’t fade out over time – that’s how the brain evolved. . . The emotional brain mixes up the past and the present.  It uses the past to make sense of what’s happening in the present, and expecting the same ordeal to happen again triggers . . . (the same old response) (my words).

Although that is how trauma is remembered in the body, it is also how healing is remembered in the body.  And – this is how the healing works – a vivid experience that disconfirms a long-held emotional memory can actually erase the emotions of that memory and replace it with a new emotional memory.  Hence, my clients who still remember how Ella made them feel.  The clinical name for this process is called memory reconsolidation and it is becoming a game-changer in the therapeutic world of dealing with trauma as well as with long-standing emotional conditions such as anxiety and depression. 

What is also interesting is that memory reconsolidation changes the way we feel about a past situation, but it does not change the autobiographical memory of what occurred.  This is because that part of the memory is stored in the neo-cortex part of the brain and is accessed by different neural pathways.  So – we don’t forget what happened, but we no longer have a ‘charge’ in our system that is associated with the memory.  As Ecker writes, “the most authentic and therapeutic narrative is formed through retrieving and verbalizing what the client’s emotional brain already coherently knows in implicit memory.  Nothing is invented in that process, only discovered.” Our body has figured out that whatever happened in that past episode is no longer a danger in the present and we no longer have an automatic reaction to similar stimuli.  Our mind can now create a coherent meaning of the experience.

I know this is true in my own healing.  After doing a lot of work around my relationship with my dad, I no longer carry the anger that I had towards him.  I now understand the circumstances that led him to be who he was (the thinking brain part) but, more importantly, I also no longer hold that anger when I remember him (the feeling brain part).  The anger has been replaced by compassion for how he was born and raised.

There are many ways to use memory reconsolidation in the therapeutic healing process but somehow horses figured it out long ago without needing to understand the neuroscience.  Because they always live in the present, they are always with us when we spend time with them.  (Unless, of course, something spooks them.  Then all bets are off!)  Being in their presence and feeling how present and attuned they are to us can present a very different experience than that of being ignored, berated, shunned or whatever was our defining experience.  It is true that the ‘outside of a horse is good for the inside of a man’, as Winston Churchill once said (that quote has been ascribed to quite a few people so it must reveal a deep truth!)

For the longest time, I said that it is ‘mystical’ what horses can do to people.  Now, I think I understand the neuroscience, but I still find it mystical and am left with the question – Why do horses choose to heal humans?  I am just grateful that they do.