In his book, ‘What is health?’ Peter Sterling recounts an Oliver Sacks story of ‘the lost Mariner’ – Jimmy, a former seaman, in his forties who has lost all his memories going back to 18. Jimmy could not form social bonds and was depressed and agitated. The only place Jimmy experienced peace was in chapel, where the sacred music and ritual seemed to soothe him. Gardening did the same.
Sterling argues that this points to the healing power of sacred experiences. Different culture have created sacred practices ranging from sex, music, art, dance, stories, jokes and the construction of monuments. They also include the ceremonies around life transitions of birth, puberty, marriage and death. These experiences evoke powerful emotions like awe, joy and grief – cathartic releases that ease pain. Sterling notes that the large investment in our neural circuits for these practices and the processing of music and art suggest that they are important to our functioning and well-being. The rhythm involved in these practices seems to have a regulating effect on mind and body.
Rhythm
What is about music that is healing? Sacred music mimics the tonal qualities and intervals of the human voice expressing joy and sadness. Rhythm is one of our most powerful tools for regulating our biology, says psychiatrist Bruce Perry. All life and the natural world is rhythmic – we experience this in the womb with the beating heart of the mother. It creates sound, pressure and vibration that provide input to the brain as it is starting to organise. These become implicit memories that associate 60-80 bpm rhythms with the sense of feeling warm and safe. After birth, rhythms at these frequencies can comfort and soothe. Loss of rhythm or unpredictable patterns can become associated with threat.
Perry argues that our ancestors developed rhythmic practices to heal trauma and loss. Amongst aboriginal cultures many common healing principles are present. The core elements in these rituals include creating a meaningful narrative within a broader belief system that can make sense of the trauma; the trauma gets re-enacted creatively through the arts in words, dance and song; different somatosensory experiences are employed including touch, and patterned repetitive movements; and all of this occurs in an intensely relational environment with the whole clan participating. This provides a total neurobiological experience that accesses all the different parts of the brain by retelling the story, holding each other, massaging and moving, singing.
Images of the trauma are created, literature, sculpture and drama are used. The victim is reconnected with loved ones, the community celebrates, eats and shares, processing these experiences together. These healing practices are ‘repetitive, rhythmic, relevant, relational, respectful and rewarding’. This alters the dysregulated stress response, bringing the community and the person back into balance. Cultures from around the world converge on these general principles as they were passed from generation to generation because they worked. Cultural practices evolved as mechanisms that buffered groups against distress, dysregulation and disconnection that can arise in response to adversity.
In addition to the arts, Mythology, claims historian Karen Armstrong, evolved to help us cope with the ‘problematic human predicament’. Similar to a novel, ballet or an opera, myth is make-believe. “It is a game that transfigures our fragmented, tragic world, and helps us glimpse new possibilities by asking ‘What if?’”, writes Armstrong. In mythology we entertain a hypothesis, bring it to life through ritual, act on it, contemplate its effect, and discover that we have achieved new insight into the ‘puzzle of our world’. It works if it transforms our minds and hearts, gives us new hope and compels us to live more fully.
Armstrong argues that in every culture we find the myth of a ‘lost paradise’, in which humans lived in close contact with the divine. People were immortal and lived in harmony with the world around them. At the centre of this world was a tree, a mountain or a pole which joined heaven and earth. People could climb up to the gods through this connection or link. But then catastrophe occurred. The link was broken. The mountain crumbled, the tree was cut down and it became difficult to reach heaven. Trauma, for the individual or the group, is this catastrophe or ‘broken link’ resulting in the ‘lost paradise’. Myth served as a guide back to harmony and regulation.
Nature was an integral part of myth and connecting with the natural world helped to regulate people in the wake of trauma. Contemplating the vastness of the sky gave people an experience of ecstasy by becoming aware of the nature of existence, seeing their smallness and place in the universe. Glimpsing this reality transcended their own lives and lifted them ‘emotionally and imaginatively’ beyond their circumstances. Trees, for the ancients, embodied a presence and qualities lacking in humans. It had the power to renew itself effortlessly and exemplified a miraculous vitality. The waning and waxing of the moon symbolised regeneration and the sacred powers held in the natural world.
Myth also revealed regions of the human mind that would otherwise have remained inaccessible. In this way it was an early form of psychology. The stories of the gods and heroes moving into the underworld, through labyrinths, fighting with monsters, brought to light the working of the psyche, showing people how to cope with their interior crises. The gods were inseparable from powerful emotions like love, rage and sexual passion. The tales told how the gods behave so that we mortals might imitate these powerful beings and experience divinity. These stories had a regulating on the culture.
Regulation
Bruce Perry describes regulation as about being in balance. Stress is what occurs when a challenge takes us out of balance. We become dysregulated when we experience distress and discomfort. Finding balance again – becoming regulated – is rewarding and we experience pleasure. In addition to rhythm, to most reliable source of regulation is relationships – safe, attuned, responsive interactions with trusted others.
Our body uses neural networks to manage and process stress. Stress is a demand on one or more of our body’s physiological systems. Hunger, thirst, cold, exercise and even getting excited are all stressors. Positive stress that is predictable, controllable and moderate (and is followed by recovery), is central to learning, developing new skills and building resilience. When stress is unpredictable, extreme or prolonged it is damaging as it sensitises our stress systems and makes us vulnerable.
Perry explains that we have core regulatory networks (CRNs) which are neural systems that originate in the lower part of the brain and spread throughout the rest of the brain. They work together to keep us regulated in the face of stress and challenge. These networks influence all functions, including thinking and the body – having an impact on the heart, lungs, the stomach. They try to keep everything in balance – the whole system regulated.
When we are pushed out of balance, the stress response system becomes activated to help us. The fight or flight response is not the only way we respond to threat. If we perceive ourselves as being too small to fight and unable to flee, the brain and the rest of the body prepare for injury. Heart-rate decreases. Opioids, the body’s painkiller, are released. We disengage from the external world and retreat to the inner world. Time might feel like it is slowing and we might feel like we are floating or watching a situation from outside ourselves. This is called ‘dissociation’. This is a common adaptive strategy for babies and children in the face of overwhelming threat. In this state we tend to seek to please and comply with what others want. Even when there are no major traumatic events, unpredictable stress and the lack of control that goes with this are enough to sensitise our stress response systems, making them over-active and over-reactive, says Perry.
We learn how to regulate in infancy through relationships. Our caregivers act as external regulators that help keep us, and bring us back, into balance. Rocking the baby when it is distressed soothes it. Feeding, holding and giving affection to the baby increases this association between rhythm and feeling safe. Loving interactions with caregivers increase this sense of safety by mixing in the comfort of human contact. Smells, touch, tone of voice of the caregiver become linked with that sense of safety. These experiences shape the baby’s brain.
Culture and early care
Throughout history many cultures have recognised the importance of providing humans with regulating experiences both in the womb and in the early years of life. Psychotherapist Sue Gerhardt tells a story of a Patagonian culture in South America where women are treated like royalty when they are pregnant. They are awoken to the sound of beautiful music and entertained in a way that suits their tastes. In the same way that a sound tree produces good fruit, the Patagonians realised that the future well-being of society depended on the mother being well cared for in pregnancy.
Affective neuroscientist, Jaak Panksepp notes that much of what would be considered foetal development occurs outside the womb. This is the ‘fourth trimester’ during which parents take care of infants not yet ready to bond with them. For mothers to mother, a community of support is required which in our ancestral landscape led to aunts, uncles and extended family participating the childcare and protection. The major lesson from modern neuroscience is that children who experience emotional distress and social loss in early life are less likely to live happy, healthy lives. When parents offer care liberally, they bolster their growing child’s emotional resilience. Michael Meaney and his colleagues have repeatedly shown that early maternal care benefits rat pups across the lifetime, in terms of better regulation of their stress response.
Psychologist Darcia Narvaez describes what she calls ‘the developmental nest’ which provides for the basic needs of each species. This nest is made up of reliable and repeatable features of stimulation and experience that occur in the organism’s environment. It is the set of social and ecological circumstances inherited by the members of a species. This nest or niche is reconstructed in every generation and serves as the basis for the development of species-typical behaviour. Postnatal development coincides with an expected environment of parenting practices that comes from social mammalian heritage from 30 million years ago. These conditions include: Soothing perinatal experiences; parental responsiveness and prevention of distress; physical closeness and extensive touch with no physical or emotional isolation; long-term breast-feeding on demand; a community of caregivers; a positive social support system; and free-play within multi-age groups as children mature.
Colin Turnbull, a social anthropologist, spent a lot of time with the Mbuti hunter-gatherers of the Congo and wrote about his experiences in The forest people and The human cycle. The Mbuti believed that they were conceived when they were wanted before the sacred sexual act took place. The mother, during pregnancy, sings a song that was uniquely created for the child, to her foetus, giving reassurance of the child’s place in the natural world. This is common in Indigenous societies.
The Mbuti mother is focused on the sacredness of the life growing inside her. The child in the womb is the partner for whom she is guardian. She decides how to act based on how she senses the child may be affected by them. At the right time, the child is passed from one member of the tribe to the other, returning to the mother if the infant becomes distressed. When the child is named, they are treated as an equal member of the camp. For the first three years the infant remains in a symbiotic relationship with the mother, who receives on-going support from the tribe.
Dislocation
What happens when these traditional healthy cultural practices break down or are lost? Psychosocial integration refers to the deep interconnectedness between the individual and their social and cultural world which grows and develops throughout the lifespan. Bruce Alexander writes that a lack of this type of integration leads to ‘dislocation’, an experience that is painful for the person and destructive for society. Psychosocial integration is experience as a person’s place within society and their identity; it is also experienced as connection with nature and the divine. Another way of talking about psychosocial integration is using terms like ‘community’, ‘belonging’, ‘wholeness’ and ‘culture’.
‘Dislocation’ is not primarily about geographical dislocation, but is more accurately understood as psychological and social separation from one’s society and culture. It can also go by the terms, ‘alienation’ and ‘disconnection’. Dislocation can be endured for short periods, but prolonged dislocation leads to despair, shame and anguish. This leads to self-destructive actions like suicide and addiction.
Poverty can be endured more lightly if psychosocial integration exists while material wealth, in the absence of integration, leaves people degraded, according to Alexander. Hence, dislocation is a kind of ‘poverty of the spirit’. Dislocation can occur in many ways: A natural disaster, a culture the loses its traditions, when a child is abused, or perhaps even when children are under-cared for. The globalising free-market economy, writes Alexander, creates dislocation because it curtails psychosocial integration for its members.
Perry points out that as society has become more mobile, people move away from their extended families. The nuclear family is becoming smaller and families eat fewer meals together. In small-band hunter-gatherer groups the ratio of developmentally more mature individuals who could educate and enrich younger brains was 4:1. The ratio is roughly the reverse in high-quality early childcare today, while in modern primary schools there is one adult for every 25 or 30 children. Screen time has reduced ‘face-time’ leading to what Perry calls the ‘dilution of the relational milieu’ creating a relational poverty for children. Relationships are the food that brains grow on, so such a deficit can be expected to have serious social and emotional consequences. This relational poverty, Perry claims, is far more destructive than economic poverty. The compartmentalisation of home and work, choices around childrearing, and consumer habits like preferences for owning homes where everyone has their own room and TV all contribute to what is a high-risk social and cultural experiment.