States of Consciousness from a Therapy Perspective - Part 4 the Healthy Adult
“If you have a lot of judgement, you will not have much compassion. They cannot exist together. If you have compassion, you will not judge, because you understand from the point of compassion that the person who is before you in this moment can act no differently! You do not impose your beliefs on others.”
From “I come as a Brother”, Bartholomew
As Bartholomew said so well, compassion and judgement cannot exist together. This is because they originate from different parts of the brain. Judgement is the limbic brain knee jerk response to what is happening from our limbic part of the brain (As outlined in Part 2) and Compassion comes from the cortical parts of the brain (as outlined in Part 3)
Following on from Part 3, as we cultivate our grounded adult part, then we start to see what is happening. Grounding helps us to remain in the present moment. Seeing what is happening is cultivating clarity and wisdom and it is important to be non judgemental. If you find this difficult, I recommend to find another person that holds a non-judgemental space for you (such as a 12 step program or therapist). Often the most challenging part of people’s therapy journey is to face the reality of the thoughts, memories and emotional pain that have not yet been processed. We can start to see the suffering created in our life from this unprocessed material in our minds…. When we see this, it can activate the amygdala into danger and there can be a tendency to immediately enter into contemptuous, judgemental, blaming thoughts towards ourselves. This is where, in conjunction with being grounded, we need to cultivate The Healthy Adult Part of us that takes charge of our life in healthy ways.
We can also call the Healthy Adult by different names such as: The Loving parent, Wise Adult, True Self, etc. You can find a name that works for you. For this blog, I will call this part the Healthy Adult.
The Healthy Adult learns and takes action to take care of our body and mind to create balance in our lives. We need to learn to take charge of our lives in a way that creates health. This does not happen overnight…. I have been working on this for years and still continue to do so…. What I do know, is that if you do it, it works. As they say in the 12 steps “The work works if you work it!”. Learning to do this is the path of responsibility. We need to make the effort to develop a wise functional adult to heal our psychological pain. If we don’t take 100% responsibility for our immaturity issues then nothing will change. It’s as simple as that.
However, this is not about blaming ourselves for our pain. Our pain was a normal response to an abnormal situation and that was awful and valid. Our history was accountable for the memories and current state of our nervous system. But, no matter who did what to us, or what we did to others, it is up to us as an adult now to take 100% responsibility for managing our nervous system, emotions and actions.
Buddhist teachings teach us that Wisdom and Compassion are like 2 wings of a bird. The bird cannot fly unless they are both present. Wisdom, our mindfulness awareness is needed to have clarity about what we are doing. Unless we know what we are doing, we can’t change what we are doing! Compassion can be cultivated to understand that we all have common ground…we are all in this together, we all feel suffering and we all just want to be happy! Compassion can be simply put as putting yourself in the other persons shoes.
“Compassion is, by definition, relational. Compassion literally means 'to suffer with,' which implies a basic mutuality in the experience of suffering. The emotion of compassion springs from the recognition that the human experience is imperfect.”
~ Kristin Neff~
When we react to what is happening, the limbic brain (Inner Child) is activated. This is the wounded or protective child being triggered. Pia Mellody calls this the Adaptive Child as the child had to find a way to adapt to traumatic events and unmet needs. In Part 2 I broke this child consciousness down further to the Wounded Child and Protective Child. It is a survival response that has a fright, flight or freeze quality to it. We can learn to be present through bringing the cortex on line (the grounded Adult), and then from this place we can cultivate qualities to enhance our way relating to ourselves and others. Mindfulness is the tool we use to have a non-judgemental awareness towards what is happening. Compassion is an inherent quality that arises from this non-judgemental awareness.
Deep down, everyone wants love, everyone wants to be happy. By cultivating the Healthy Adult Qualities then we can further calm the limbic brain when it gets into the red and blue zone of Fright Flight and Fight (this was discussed here). We can cultivate a way to spend more time in the green zone, which is that place of feeling connected to ourselves and the significant others in our lives. This has the by-product of feeling more connected to all of life.
Only through making effort can anything be cultivated
There are some wonderful teachers who have developed systems and trainings to support us to cultivate this part of ourselves. I draw inspiration for this blog through training via the works of: Pia Mellody (as taught by the Healing Our Core Issues Institute), Internal Family System (With Jay Early - self therapy), Terry Real (Relational Life Institute), Schema Therapy and Dr Margaret Paul (Inner Bonding).
Pia Mellody identified that emotional immaturity and the inability to care for ourselves as an adult stems from childhood where basic 5 core issues were not met adequately in our family of origin. When these areas are not met it is traumatic for a child and the child needs to adapt to survive (as spoken about in Part 2)
The 5 core that often need healing to cultivate being a Healthy Adult for yourself are as follows:
Healthy Self Esteem that I am worthy of being loved and belonging.
Healthy Boundaries - includes healthy protective boundaries (protecting ourselves from what might harm us) and healthy containment boundaries (protecting others from us harming them)
Healthy sense of awareness of knowing ourselves, our limitations and what we are capable of.
Healthy awareness and attention to our Needs and Wants.
Self compassion that knows we are doing the best we Can and that we are imperfect human beings like everyone else.
Richard Swartz in his Internal Family systems therapy, describes the Healthy Adult to be recognised as the “Self” by the 8 C’s and the 5 “Ps”
The 8 C’s are qualities of being Compassionate, Caring, Curious, Calm, Clear, Creative, Courageous, Confident & Connected.
The 5 P’s are Presence, Persistence, Perspective, Playfulness and Patience.
Terry Real, relationship therapist who founded the Relational Life Institute, calls this part the Wise Adult. Terry Real’s work is also based on Pia Mellody’s work. You know the Wise Adult is present by the following qualities…
We are Forgiving rather than relentless
Flexible and warm rather than rigid and harsh
Yielding and humble rather than hard and certain
relaxed in the body rather than tense
Thinking is more nuanced rather than black and white.
Ideas and expectations are realistic rather than perfectionistic.
Can commit to “full respect living” where one neither dishes out nor passively tolerates disrespectful words or behaviour to ourselves or others.
Dr Margaret Paul in her Inner Bonding Work calls this “The Loving Adult”. She describes the loving adult as
the part of us that receives love and truth from Spirit and puts it into action.
The loving adult is open to learn,
takes responsibility for our feelings, happiness and safety
Sets loving boundaries for self and others
Heals false beliefs of the wounded child by realising truth and taking loving action
Brings love to all parts
Takes loving action
Schema Therapy calls this “The Healthy Adult Mode” which is summarised in points below.
Behaves in a healthy and compassionate way towards yourself
Is kind and responsible and able to care beyond the self.
Balances emotion with reason when making decisions.
Capacity for stepping back to reflect on situations.
Cares for our vulnerability and takes action to meet core needs of the vulnerable parts of us (Inner child)
Helps to reparent ourselves when this was missing or dysfunctional as a child.
Provides reality orientation to here and now present time.
Makes all the “executive” functioning decisions for ourselves. Has agency and capacity to carry out those decisions.
Of course, it is not always realistic to think we are going to be able to hang out in The Healthy Adult state all the time. We are human! We live the full scope of human existence which means we are going to be triggered into the red and blue zone all the time. Mindfulness is one of the most helpful muscles to have to realise when we are triggered. Then we can navigate out of triggers in more skilful ways the more we practice cultivating The Healthy Adult qualities.
Healthy Adult qualities naturally calm the limbic brain. All of us has experienced being around a loving and compassionate person. Harsh judgement directed towards ourselves or others is a function of the fight part of the limbic brain. Judgement puts us in to defence and we feel disconnected between parts of ourselves (inner conflict) and from others (outer conflict).
The beauty of the design of our nervous system is that we can regulate into our Healthy Adult part by having connection with another who has that quality established in their nervous system. Once we get a group functioning on this level, it creates a lot of coherence not only in our brains but in the environment around us. We can have deepening experiences of love and something greater than ourselves that we can trust and surrender too…. I will talk about this more in Part 5!
Thank you for taking the time to read this blog. I hope it has been of benefit. Please feel free to send feedback via the contact page on my website. If you are triggered by any material, my resources blog is here.