Wired to Connect: The Surprising Link Between Brain Science and Strong, Healthy Relationships - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Amy Banks, M.D., was an instructor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and is now the director of advanced training at the Jean Baker Miller Training Institute at the Wellesley Centers for Women. She has a private practice in Lexington, Massachusetts, which specializes in relational psychopharmacology and therapy for people who suffer from chronic disconnection.
 
Leigh Ann Hirschman is a bestselling nonfiction writer who specializes in psychology, parenting, and health.

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FOREWORD

Want to have more joy and contentment in your life? All the scientific studies of happiness, longevity, and mental and medical health point to one factor: the strength of your relationships with others. In Four Ways to Click, psychiatrist Amy Banks, M.D., provides an innovative and user-friendly summary of the extensive research on the neuroscience of relationships and offers readers practical ways to use this knowledge to retrain their brains for healthier, more rewarding relationships. What’s in this for you? Simply put, you can intentionally transform your life by improving how you connect with others. Relationships are not simply the “icing on the cake” for a life well lived. Relationships are the cake.

After decades of studying how culture shapes our relationships as well as working as a psychiatrist in clinical practice, Amy Banks has brilliantly created what she calls the C.A.R.E. system, which can help improve the four ways we “click” with one another: how calm we feel around others, are accepted by others, resonate with the inner states of others, and are energized by these connections. Using the C.A.R.E. system as it is described in this book, readers can target the neural pathways that need fine-tuning so that the quality of their relationships increases. With an understanding of how our brains truly work we can intentionally change how we live our lives!

I love this book! It is beautifully written, engaging, and inspiring.

Want more happiness? Want to live longer? Want to be healthier in mind and body? Then learning these four ways to click into more meaningful and rewarding relationships is your passport to achieving these goals. Let Amy Banks be your guide to a better life of love and laughter. Enjoy!

—DANIEL J. SIEGEL, M.D.

Chapter 1

BOUNDARIES ARE OVERRATED

A New Way of Looking at Relationships

Boundaries are overrated.

If you want healthier, more mature relationships; if you want to stop repeating old patterns that cause you pain; if you are tired of feeling emotionally disconnected from the people you spend your time with; if you want to grow your inner life, you can begin by questioning the idea that there is a clear, crisp line between you and the people you interact with most frequently.

People who talk a lot about boundaries tend to make statements like these:

“It shouldn’t matter what other people do and say to you, not if you have a strong sense of self.”

“How do parents know they’ve been successful? When their children no longer need them.”

“Best friends and true romance are for the young. As you get older, you naturally grow apart from other people.”

“You shouldn’t need other people to complete you.”

“You wouldn’t have so many problems if you would just stand on your own two feet.”

The message is clear: it’s not “healthy” to need other people—and whatever you do, don’t let yourself be infected by other peoples’ feelings, thoughts, and emotions. The statements above are intended to have an emotional effect on you. You may notice that they sound just a teensy bit judgmental and shaming. I know they make me uncomfortable; when I read them, I feel like I’m standing in a harsh white spotlight with someone pointing a finger at me, intoning You’re pretty messed up, missy, and it’s all your fault.

The ideal of complete psychological independence is one that was very big with mental health professionals in much of the twentieth century, and it still has our culture by the throat. So even if those statements about boundaries carry a sting, they also probably sound familiar to you, or even self-evident. Obvious!

So I couldn’t possibly be suggesting that they’re untrue. I couldn’t possibly say that it can be good to be dependent, or that our mental health is unavoidably affected by the people we share our lives with, or that we achieve emotional growth when we are profoundly connected to others instead of when we are apart from them.

That’s exactly what I’m saying.

This book is going to show you a different way of thinking about your emotional needs and what it means to be a healthy, mature adult. A new field of scientific study, one I call relational neuroscience, has shown us that there is hardwiring throughout our brains and bodies designed to help us engage in satisfying emotional connection with others. This hardwiring includes four primary neural pathways that are featured in this book. Relational neuroscience has also shown that when we are cut off from others, these neural pathways suffer. The result is a neurological cascade that can result in chronic irritability and anger, depression, addiction, and chronic physical illness. We are just not as healthy when we try to stand on our own, and that’s because the human brain is built to operate within a network of caring human relationships. How do we reach our personal and professional potential? By being warmly, safely connected to partners, friends, coworkers, and family. Only then do our neural pathways get the stimulation they need to make our brains calmer, more tolerant, more resonant, and more productive.

The good news for those of us whose relationships don’t always feel so warm or safe: it is possible to heal and strengthen those four neural pathways that are weakened when you don’t have strong connections. Relationships and your brain form a virtuous circle, so by strengthening your neural pathways for connection, you will also make it easier to build the healthy relationships that are essential for your psychological and physical health.

For many people, the news about the importance of relationships began with a 1998 study at the University of Parma in Italy, a study that proved how deeply connected we are to one another, right down to our neurons.

Your Feelings, My Brain

It was one of those lucky scientific mistakes, an unexpected observation that could have easily gone unnoticed if it hadn’t been for an astute researcher. When Giacomo Rizzolatti, a neurophysicist at the University of Parma, and his research team began their now-famous experiment, they were not intending to explore how human beings interact. In fact, they were not even studying people. The Italian researchers were mapping a small area, known as F5, in the brains of the macaque monkey. At this point in neurological research, it was already well known that the F5 neurons fire when a monkey reaches his arm and hand away from his body to grasp an object.

One routine day in the lab, a researcher observed something unprecedented. The researcher was standing in the line of sight of a monkey whose F5 cells had been implanted with micro-sized electrodes. As the researcher reached out to grasp an object, the electrodes placed on the monkey’s F5 area activated.

Remember: it was known that the F5 neurons activate when a monkey moves his arm to grasp something.

Then think about this: the monkey was not moving his arm; he was simply watching as the researcher’s arm moved.

This seemed impossible. At the time of this observation, scientists believed that the nerve cells for action were separate and distinct from the nerve cells for sensory observations. Sensory neurons picked up information from the outside world; motor neurons were devoted to acting. So when the F5 area, known for its link to physical action, lit up in the brain of a monkey who was only watching action in someone else, it was a clear violation of this known divide. It was as if the brain of the monkey and the brain...