Decoding the Science of Interpersonal Neurobiology

Host: Welcome to Therapist Uncensored, a podcast where therapist freely speak their minds about real life matters.

Ann: Welcome back. We are so glad that you could go to this day-to-day. Therapist Uncensored is recorded in Austin, Texas and our goal is to bring you the need to know about the science of relationships. And by relationships we mean relationship with yourself, your partner, your boss, anyone that brings deep meaning to your life. I'm Ann Kelley and I'm here with my co-host Sue Marriott and Patty Olwell. And Sue is going to lead us today in a discussion about the basics of a very complicated but extremely important area of science. It's called interpersonal neurobiology. Now, I know it's a mouthful but Sue has a way of breaking it down. A complicated topic down to manner that you just really easily understand and you can see how relevant the topic is to your everyday life. So, sit back and listen and I hope you enjoy.

Patty: Hi. I'm Patty Olwell and I'm here with my co-host.

Ann: I am Ann Kelly.

Sue: And I'm Sue Marriott.

Patty: Yeah, we are going to explore the concepts of interpersonal ... the concept of interpersonal neurobiology today. We have [crosstalk 00:01:25].

Ann: That's a mouthful.

Patty: We have just done an interview with Dan Siegel who really is the developer of interpersonal neurobiology. And today, we're going to really take a deep dive into that concept and some of the other ideas around it.

Sue: That's right. He actually coined the term in 1999 in his seminal, is that the word?

Patty: Yeah.

Sue: Textbook, the developing mind which has been life-changing for many therapists and clinicians and many of the disciplines actually. It's an interdisciplinary science that has taken many from anthropology, education, biology.

Patty: Biology. [crosstalk 00:02:13]

Sue: Many of the different disciplines and pulled them together to study the mind and it's a health and well-being. So, what we want to do. We're going to run through so by the end of this, you are going to be able to whip off some really cool concepts and sound really smart to your friends. So, hang with us and we are going to move to this pretty quickly. We're going to ... this one we'll have some really good thorough show notes and there'll be other ways to follow up in this more advanced training if this interest you. So, we'll get to that as well. But so first of all, what is interpersonal neurobiology mean besides being a mouthful and sounding really complicated, right?

Ann: Right, unless people wonder what that is even when you feel like you're familiar with the whole topic.

Sue: That's right. So, it's really just kind of means the brain is the neuroscience part and interpersonal means between so...

Patty: And between what Sue?

Sue: Between people.

Patty: Got it.

Sue: So, he was the first person to really look at that the brain is not just the organ inside, sitting inside your head and your skull but really to think about what the mind is itself. And for the purposes of keeping this really succinct, we're just going to go pretty quick here but that the mind is something different than the brain but that the mind changes the brain and that the brain changes the mind and that my brain and mind is changing enough influence and yours Patty.

Patty: Right.

Sue: As we look at each other and...

Patty: Talk to each other.

Sue: And talk to each other and behave different ways with each other, and that yours is mine. And actually, I'm going to jump right ahead to this idea, this triangle of well-being which is on one side of the triangle is the mind and on another side of the triangle is the brain, and on the third is relationships. And so, Dan's idea is and I think this is really cool to think about, that at any given moment, all three of these things are influencing us and you can kind of think of a little arrow moving around and everything is influencing each other. So, we can have like a state. I can be in a mood for example. And then my brain body, he talks about brain body that the brain doesn't just exist in our head but it is embodied in our entire neural system.

Ann: And our emotions don't exist just in our head and I think that is really an amazing concept that our emotions also can generate from the rest of our body and in our gut.

Sue: Gut, yes.

Ann: So our gut can respond even...

Sue: That's right. We have a brain in our gut.

Ann: Brain in our gut. [laugh]

Sue: The gut feeling is actually quite smart. So what basically ... the way I think of it to bring it down in just sort of real-life terms is neural Wi-Fi.

Patty: Right.

Ann: Um hmm.

Sue: That we are Bluetooth-enabled [laugh] from even before birth.

Patty: Right.

Sue: And that we are short of resetting each other. And so, that this triangle, if we think about the triangle is ... and this isn't woo-woo, feely-good, fluffy stuff. This is actually ... he is a neuroscientist, a Harvard psychiatrist and a very, very well-respected. The science of this, when you look at the developing mind, it is especially if you look at some of the later releases of it. It has been tested and tested and tested. This is hard science.

Ann: One of the things I remember about Dan talking about his book and I love this is that, the first book he took the developing mind, he handed to a bunch of graduate students and said, "Your job is to disprove every single part of this and then to bring it back and we want you to disprove everything I said." and so that's where his second book came out. He's really looking at it from a scientific perspective. I was always really impressed with that.

Sue: So that as we go forward, just know that this is the real deal. So, one of the other concepts and one of them is at its interdisciplinary. That it's about the mind and mental health that ... so there's three big concepts. The brain growth happens throughout the lifespan so that it's never too late and neural plasticity is the fancy word for it. And if we have... for sure we're going to talk more about it. If we have time, I want to do it today but we'll get back to that. And then the third part is that social relationships are critical. And you can already hear that as we begin to unfold this when we think about that triangle and that how are impacted both our moods, our states, the hardwiring, the soft.. I'm sorry, the hardware, the software and then the life interaction that is happening. And if you're a therapist so you listening to this, imagine as you're sitting there and then it remember one of the points as relationships. So, every person that comes and sits with you is impacting your body and your impacting their body, that's part of how healing happens and how therapy works I believe.

Patty: Yes Sue, I think that's really important. I think we heal in relationships and really that's the only way to heal. You can't heal in isolation.

Sue: You can't read a self-help book and have some help-books.

Patty: Well, [laugh] don't want to knock personal group or anything but...

Sue: You can't run hard enough anyway. [laugh]

Patty: We heal in relationships.

Sue: Eat enough Oreos. Oreos don't work. [laugh]

Ann: We heal in relationships but we also create Neuro-WiFi.

Sue: Vodka. [laugh] I'm sorry, go ahead.

Ann: I could use that right now. [laugh]

Ann: We heal in relationships but everyone knows also that in relationships, you can feel the Neuro-WiFi go bad. We go get disconnected and that what creates disruption in our individual system and our relationships also really affects our brain and vice versa. And I think that's what's so important about why we're putting this on our podcast is because it really does. What happens to us in between us and in our interpersonal relationships actually does affect our brain. And it's so important to remember that and what goes on in her mind in her brain affects our relationships and so, sister?

Patty: It's a really good point Ann and when you start with a baby, you start with a lot of the hardware isn't there. So the brain is really developing in relationship with the caregiver, with the mother or the father or whatever the caregiver is. So, it's not even an effect on your brain. It helps build our brain.

Ann: Build and develop good point.

Sue: Now here, this is going to just blow... this blew me away. I’ll say that so hold your seats.

Ann: I'm holding on.

Sue: But with epigenetics and I don't know if you're familiar with that but basically what that means is that experience actually affects our DNA. So that for example, just experience can turn on and off and change our DNA. And this begins again truthfully if I'm being totally honest above my head more, that I begin to not understand it. But the gist of it is, is that when severe trauma happens, the child can inherit a changed DNA just from physical experience of the parent so that is really, really powerful about how interpersonal actions physically change the body.

Patty: Right. There is a ... we unplanned social experience experiment with the Holocaust.

Sue: Yes that's a most common example about epigenetics, yeah.

Patty: That, children of Holocaust survivors for several generations have changes in their DNA because their parents, grandparents suffered a horrible traumatic experience. [crosstalk 00:10:19]

Ann: Yes, that's exactly right.

Sue: So now practically speaking, going back to IN as they say interpersonal neurobiology. Here's some fun easy things to remember for folks. What we want to do, on an episode two, we talked about brain science and sp I'm so not going to go over that. But the upshot of it was, we talked about importance of what we called the PFC which is the prefrontal cortex and how that we want to much as possible... because of Neuro-WiFi and being affected by one another, we want to be engaged with the top of our brain as much as we can. That's the best part. That's where we are doing the best. And what Dan Siegel talks about is this thing called FACES flow and it stands for FACES stands for flexible, adaptive, coherent, energetic and stable that when we are in FACES flow and I used to when I would start meeting so I would say, "Okay." especially if it was going to be tensed meeting. So all get reminded that we're going to be in FACES flow and sort of inspire everyone to bring their best selves to this tensed meeting. So, I'm going to say it again. Flexible, adaptive, coherent, energetic and stable but that's what the PFC feels like. That's what integration that integration is one of those words you're going to hear a lot about in interpersonal neurobiology. And it means a lot of different things. We're going to fly through it though. And just think of it, the easier thing to think is FACES, FACES flow. And that is when you can play, that's when you feel safe because that's what we're striving towards. And one of the way at techniques to get, there is another idea called 'COAL'. The idea is not called coal but the acronym is COAL and it stands for... oh, this I'm going to have to. It's an attitudinal stand. Oh my gosh. Help me remember. It’s curiosity, openness, acceptance and love so the idea behind that is in order to achieve FACES that we begin to notice our own body reactions and what's happening with COAL which is [crosstalk 00:12:50] curiosity, openness, acceptance and love. And that so we're noticing things are happening and we've talked about that in this and other episodes using mindfulness. And by doing that instead of resisting what we're feeling or denying it or insisting that we bring it towards us, we notice it, curious about it, open, acceptance and love and that we're letting it move through that. That helps us reconnect or move back up the brainstem up in two FACES flow.

Ann: And of course it's always important if it may sounds very... they were always Zen and always peaceful and always curious and I for one acknowledge, that's not where I always live. I know that shocking but so I think it's so important...

Patty: Your voice is very soothing.

Ann: I think it's really important when we talk about like even curiosity. It doesn’t mean that you have fun always being curious or could be you're really pissed. So that's not the exception that that means we're always in his Zen state when we're having curiosity and openness. It's like when we talked about some of the different things in relationships or even around the election, it's like we can feel more shut down and we're righteous and were closed to the concept of that is to go, "Wait, remember I want to try to be open and curious even if I'm being curious about why I'm so pissed.

Patty: Right.

Ann: That's still really trying to engage in this way.

Sue: Right. The openness is not necessarily open to the other person. [laugh]. It's just open to yourself and your feelings. [laugh] It reminds me of Tara.

Ann: What the hell am I feeling?

Sue: Tara Brach talking about... she has an acronym RAIN which I can't. It's like recognize, accept, investigate and be non-judgmental or something but she was like, "I was so pissed. I was so pissed. I was raining all over myself." [laugh]. "I recognize that I'm pissed" and so just to your point that the openness might be openness to your fear or to your jealousy or to whatever the big ugly feelings or whatever that might be happening.

Ann: And we'll get to that point to in terms of the name-it-to-tame-it, is that you can be really... we can jump into that one because if you're really, really angry the idea... and we bring it back to the process of interpersonal neurobiology.

Sue: Yes.

Ann: And why we're talking about this is that if you're really, really pissed and angry and you're about to say that and recognize it, you've already moved the process in your brain to a place that becomes more centered.