So I was interested in integrating tools from those two paradigms – both relational psychology and mindfulness practice – and it was neuroscience that gave me the clues to do that.

It turns out that both mindfulness and empathy are two of the most powerful agents of brain change known to modern science.

I began to understand what happens in the brain when we are practicing mindfulness or reflection as well as when we are practicing empathy and compassion, and that helped me better teach clients how to change the patterns in their brains, so that they could be more resilient and even rewire patterns from the past.

The drive to attach is one of those survival responses that we don’t have to be taught – we know how to do that from the very first moments.

But habits are different. A habit of behavior is simply an encoded pattern in our neural circuitry, and we can develop habits lifelong.

The importance of neuroplasticity or self-directed neuroplasticity is that we are choosing which habits we want to develop. We are choosing the experiences that will develop the habits we want. I love this quote from Richie Davidson, who of course runs the big neuroimaging lab at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He says, “Once we know that experience changes the brain, we not only have the opportunity, but we have the responsibility to choose the experiences that will rewire the brain in a wise and wholesome direction.”

When we want to change neural circuits, we’re talking about new conditioning. We’re choosing new experiences that will cause the brain to fire in a different way. We are actually creating neural circuitry in the brain. New conditioning is simply creating a new pathway.

We can also talk about being able to rewire or recondition old patterns, old habits – reconditioning.

Now, neural scientists can see in their scanners that the neurons holding a network of a memory together can be caused to fall apart, and they will rewire again a fraction of a second later. What causes them to fall apart and rewire is the juxtaposition of an opposing, contradictory, disconfirming experience or memory.

If we are working with criticism and compassion – if I can actually evoke a sense of being critical, and I have the feeling in my body – I have my visual image, and I have my feelings and my thoughts on being critical, and if I can also evoke for real a sense of being compassionate and I can feel that in my body and I know the visual image of it and the emotions and thoughts of being compassionate, then if I can hold those in my awareness, in simultaneous dual awareness at the same time (that takes practice and sometimes people can travel back and forth), then that juxtaposition will cause the neurons to fall apart.

They will rewire, and when the experience of compassion is stronger, it will rewire the old experience of the old memory. Now, that is the basis of all trauma therapy, and we have been doing trauma therapy for a while – but now the neuroscientists are able to explain to us what is happening in the brain when we do that.

A big function of the higher brain or the prefrontal cortex is to regulate the survival responses of the lower brain. Survival responses are unconscious; we can change our conscious responses to our survival responses. That is why we want to stay calm and within equilibrium, so that the higher brain can stay online – functioning – and we can reflect on what we could do differently.

Dr. Buczynski: All of these processes and strategies can help us stay calm, cool, and even collected when we feel ourselves moving into a stress or reactive kind of state.

Linda Graham: Right.