Much of our recovery can occur in collaboration with others.
Pain, in its various forms, is an inevitable aspect of the human experience. Often, we endure it alone. However, being part of our highly social species offers a valuable resource for coping: other people.
The impact of others on our biology is undeniable. Someone's presence can influence another's breathing, heart rate, and chemicals in their bloodstream. A mother's soothing voice can stabilize her premature baby, leading to fewer cardiorespiratory events. A spouse's hand-holding can reduce the brain's response to the threat of electric shocks. Strong relationships can help us live longer and happier lives.
Our brains and their connections
As we go about our days, our brains are quietly interacting with other brains, explains neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett in Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain (2020). We do this by regulating each other's "body budgets," which are the ways our brains manage various biological resources like water, glucose, salt, and oxygen, to keep us healthy. Through our interactions, we make deposits and withdrawals to and from each other's body budgets, gradually "tuning and pruning" our neurons. Your caring hug to your friend can contribute to her budget. A hurtful insult from a colleague could deduct from yours.
"Ultimately, those close to you, including family, friends, neighbors, and even unfamiliar faces, play a vital role in shaping and enhancing your brain's function, ensuring it supports your body's overall well-being," states Feldman Barrett.
Evolutionary origins of psycho-social healing
According to researchers, three key ideas help make sense of why humans, throughout centuries and continents, have supported each other's healing with their psycho-social assistance:
1. There are evolutionary origins to why humans experience profound distress. Emotions, including those associated with distress (e.g., sadness, shame, fear, anger), partly evolved as responses to social dynamics, either for approaching potential opportunities for survival or avoiding threats to life (Kohrt et al, 2020).
2. Emotions and emotion regulation evolved in a social context. Because emotions developed in connection with others, they can be managed by oneself (self-regulation) and between people (interpersonal regulation) according to Kohrt et al. (2020).
3. As we engage in interpersonal regulation of emotion, various mechanisms facilitate prosocial behaviors. These mechanisms include empathy, perspective-taking, mentalization, and personal distress (Kohrt et al, 2020).
Mental distress, write Kohrt et al., (2020), can often signal the need for repairing social ruptures or disrupted social bonds. As a "coping mechanism," we engage in a variety of social repair behaviors by comforting, reassuring, and supporting each other.
Most of these behaviors that help us get along with others are rooted in empathy, which has two important parts: feeling personal distress and understanding others' perspectives (mentalizing).
Words matter
Much of our intrapersonal and interpersonal regulation is done through words.
Think about the last time words that you heard, read, or spoke changed the landscape of your inner experience from soothing you with reassurance to engulfing you with anger.
According to Feldman Barrett, the reason why words affect us so profoundly is because the "language network" the brain regions that process language "also control the inner workings of your body, including vital organs and systems that support your body budget." These brain regions regulate heart rate, balance glucose consumption for cellular energy, and influence chemicals in the immune system.
This makes words the sentences we utter countless days, to ourselves and to others, consciously or unconsciously "tools for regulating human bodies," she writes:
Others' words directly impact your brain activity and your bodily systems, and your words impact others. Whether you intend that impact is irrelevant. It's how we're wired. (Feldman Barrett, 2020).
Collective healing
As an expert in collective trauma the psychological responses to a traumatic event that affect an entire community (Hirshberger, 2018) Thomas Hübl has worked with programs with over 100,000 participants worldwide and authored two books on what adversity means for us and how we recover from it.
According to Hübl, since most of us carry fragments of collective trauma, a significant part of our healing occurs in relation to others.
It's in relation where understanding our own psychological, spiritual, and behavioral patterns becomes easier. And it's in relation where we get close to collective insight and wisdom.
In fact, separation, othering, and fragmentation when we no longer share the social space with others are symptoms of trauma, according to Hübl.
A crucial driver of healing in relation is in the quality of our connection with others. Attunement, which Hübl describes as a "moment-to-moment exchange of feeling and deeply listening to one another, overall body intelligence" is a foundation of relating. By signaling safety, it nurtures the connecting individuals and their relationship. "Hübl emphasizes that by fostering fairer social environments, we actively support the global self-recovery process."
These "self-healing mechanisms" are also intrinsic to healthy social environments - our networks of family, friends, and colleagues. According to Hübl, these networks are an extension of our immune systems. For better personal and group health, Hübl advises thinking about the different social groups we're involved in, emphasizing that each person is like a mini ecosystem.
What's uplifting and joyful about them? What feels heavy and draining? "Pay attention to what you prefer not to pay attention to, and what draws you in," he writes. "Begin by raising awareness first, before rushing into finding solutions right away."
Just as pain can be an unintended companion we keep encountering on our journey, so can healing. The more we engage with the latter, individually and collectively, the more it bestows upon us its many blessings. It could even become a part of our purpose.
"Our responsibility is not only horizontal towards people who we coexist with now but also vertical towards the past (our ancestors), and the future (our children)," Hübl points out. "What we unconsciously carry, we transmit to the future. "What we make conscious and integrate, we do not pass on, and that means our children inherit a broader world to grow into. Thus, by doing the work we need to do, we increase the possibilities of representing the future for our children and grandchildren."