THE FIRST UNITARIAN CHURCH OF HONOLULU
A Unitarian Universalist Congregation
ON LIZARDS' TAILS
Sermon by Rev. Mike Young
Preached April 18, 2004, at the First Unitarian Church of Honolulu
I know something about every one of you. By the very fact that you're reading this I know that you come from a long line of people successful at escaping from saber toothed tigers. Otherwise, your great, great, great, great, great, great grandmaw would have been eaten!I was raised on the desert. Among the interesting opportunities that being raised in the desert provides is a wonderful array of different sorts of lizards. The one that fascinated me most was a lizard with a long, beautiful blue tail. You had to be very careful trying to catch these kinds of lizards. If you weren't quick with your hands and catch the lizard in the middle of the body, all you got was the tail. The lizard could "pppt" pop it off and you had this tail wiggling at each end of your fist. I've actually seen cats go after this kind of lizard. The lizard would then do his tail drop-off number and the cat would be so fascinated with this wiggly tail that the cat was batting at it, pawing it and pouncing on it and chewing on it while the lizard --whhhhht --took off for safety.
Each of us has hidden inside this cranium of ours what many researchers refer to as a "lizard's brain". It's still there. Oh, you've modified it a little-bit. But most of the modifications that we human beings have made has been by adding stuff to that lizard brain. The lizard brain still functions not a whole lot differently from the way it once did. That lizard's brain takes care of such functions as your routine maintenance, the things that go on without your having to pay any attention to them. You breathe by yourself, most of the time, without a great deal of conscious effort. You respond to what's happening in your environment with out having to give a great deal of thought to it. One of the interesting things that's been happening in research over the last decade or so is to put people inside the brain-scanning machines. Then they do stuff to them and watch what parts of your brain light up when there is activity going on. It turns out that you have two routes for getting stuff done. One of them is incredibly fast and goes directly from sensory input to action without pausing or passing through gray matter. There is a whole sequence of wired-in stuff that goes on. They evolved that way because they were survival behaviors. They are the kinds of things that enabled your forefathers and foremothers to avoid being-eaten-by saber toothed tigers. Those that didn't have those survival characteristics wired in didn't make it to have children --they got "et".
Most of you are familiar with how this process works, I'm sure. There's some kind of external sensory input into that lizard's section of your brain. It has this large label on it that says, "Threat urgent. Prepare for flight or flight, now." Instantly, that signal goes directly to your action center, without passing through gray matter or any analysis. Your blood pressure goes up, your pulse rate goes up, your breathing rate goes up and your whole system is flooded with a wonderfully rich chemical stew that prepares you for fight and flight. Sometimes you can feel your own pulse pounding in your ears. The action center selects the most emotionally-loaded response available to it. For some of us, the response is to strike out with a fist. For some of us it is to turn and run like the dickens. No decision, no self, no hesitation. In nanoseconds you respond, and it feels right.
Belatedly, seconds later, your conscious mind notices that something is going on. It can interrupt, but those initial responses are already underway, and so even if your conscious mind hits the pause button the fight-or-flight has already hijacked your brain and is rapidly engaged in doing its thing. The emotion chemistry is flowing. The initial actions that your lizard brain has taken are very difficult to stop. Your conscious mind comes into action late, slow, and with its brain chemistry totally deranged. It again is hijacked as your conscious mind looks around for a good excuse for why you just did what you did and commences to rationalize to you exactly why it is that you did this deranged, stupid and clearly embarrassing activity.
For the lizard it's clear: detach tail, run for cover, and the tail wiggles by itself.
This is not the world's most optimal mental and physical state in which to make decisions, and yet it is the mental and physical state in which far too often we make some of the most crucial decisions in our lives.
If you've never had anything approaching that experience, consider yourself blessed. Most of us have had, to one degree or another, some variation of that experience in our lives. There are precious few occasions on the island of Oahu where that fight or flight response is, in fact, useful, necessary or justified. There are few saber toothed tigers left in the world. And yet, because we are evolved to respond that way, we often find our brains hijacked and our whole blood chemistry fouled. And it takes quite a while for it to calm down. When your doctor says you're under too much stress, one of the things he or she is talking about is that you are probably carrying around the tail end of that chemical soup in your bloodstream expecting to need to fight or flee at any moment.
There's an additional layer to this. It's not only external threats that can set off that wonderful cascade. Your brain is so wired that thoughts and ideas on the inside of your brain are also capable of setting off that same cascade. Your brain has associations with that external event or image incoming. When those associations click in your brain--a memory you don't like, a memory that is painful, a memory that is awkward, one you don't want to have--the physical and emotional condition you were in when that memory was created is reconstructed in your blood chemistry. Much memory is an internal rehearsal that recreates both the physical and the emotional condition at the time and place that you're remembering. That internal cue sets off the same fight or flight cascade. Because all of this feels right, most people don't realize that the lizard has hijacked their brain and their body. Only later, it might occur to them to ask, "Now, why did I do that?" or "Gee, I wish I had stopped first and thought before I did that." Even then, reconstructing the cues and associations and responses in that cascade can be very difficult.
We are told, "Be yourself!" We used to say, "Let it all hang out." Remember? Sometimes I really didn't want to know that much about you. Is that hijacking lizard really you? In one sense, perhaps it is and it's appropriate for us to own that internal response as our own, not something somebody else is doing to us. It's very easy to turn around and say, "YOU made me angry." I make me angry. I respond to stuff out there by getting angry. YOU don't do it. In fact, if you want to really try it sometime, try making somebody angry intentionally. It isn't easy because you have to guess what their buttons are. And no fair doing it to your spouse or your partner. But, it was your own conscious mind that was circumvented, gone around, in that hijacking. I own my lizard, but it's not the "me" I want in control of my life.
This phenomenon pops up in a lot of interesting places in our lives that we may not often realize.
I have sat with couples planning a wedding ceremony and had one or the other of the couples say, "Well, you know, we've been living together for four-or five year and a piece of paper isn't going to make any difference." I smile wryly. "Fair warning," I tell them, "if you believe that, six weeks to three months into your new 'papered' relationship, something bizarre is going to happen. You're going to be screaming and yelling at each other in the midst of conflict. When that happens, remember that Mike Young warned you it was going to happen. Stop for two minutes and calm down. All wedding ceremonies today are mixed marriages with very rare exceptions. The cultural mores that you absorbed from the atmosphere were from different sections of the country, different denominations, different ethnic backgrounds. The odds are exceedingly good that the conceptual models, those little notions in your head about how partners are 'supposed' to behave in a relationship, are different from the ones your partner actually holds. We have no conceptual models for how people should behave when shacking up. But we have a whole pile of conflicting conceptual garbage about how married people are expected to behave. When all of a sudden those mutual expectations don't match, the cascade occurs and the emotional chemistry comes flowing into the bloodstream. This totally predictable, relatively minor situation is suddenly quite threatening."
Remember those words you heard your parent say, and you said to yourself, "I'll never say that to my kids?" Then you hear out of your own mouth those very words, complete with the very same tone of voice that your parent used.
When I was 8 years old, the next door neighbor and I were arguing about a water faucet that was right on the boundary line between our two homes. The original three houses had been built as a unit for rentals. Years later they were broken up into three separate lots and sold. The water had served all three houses jointly, but we 8-year-olds didn't know that. For reasons that I cannot remember because of what happened afterward it was terribly important that Arthur Lewis be convinced that the water faucet was on my property, not on his. And Arthur felt that it was of great importance to convince Mike Young that the water faucet was his water faucet. Hearing us screaming and yelling at each other, Arthur Lewis's mom came out of her house. She said, "What are you guys yelling about?" We told her and each of us attempted to get her on our side in the argument. She took his side, and I objected loudly. Out of my house, hearing all of this, came my mother. She wanted to know what all the yelling was about and I told her. She, of course, took my side, and so Mrs. Lewis and Mrs. Young commenced yelling at each other.
Now, Arthur Lewis' mom could cuss real good, and I heard a few words for the first time. I could tell by the tone of voice that I wasn't supposed to say those words. And my mom doesn't cuss good. In fact she doesn't argue well at all and collapsed in hysteria. I picked her up and took her back inside and comforted her through the cascade of tears and sobbing. At 8 years old I was responsible for my mother's mental health.
Ever since then, when people are in conflict and squabbling, I am 8 years old again. That is not an age, physical or emotional state, in which to be highly effective when people are screaming and yelling and swearing at each other. Well, I have grown past it and learned some techniques for responding to it more usefully and I can now be relatively useful when people are in conflict, but it is still--more than 50 years later--a conscious act.
My lizard brain is still functioning very well, thank you.
Throughout my teenage years I did all kinds of wonderful things. I was a very verbal kid, and I desperately wanted my father to say,"Gee, l approve of what you're doing." While he backed me and supported me in everything I did, saw to it that I had the tools and resources to do all of those things and clearly trusted me greatly in permitting me to do them; he never once said anything even close to "I approve of what you're doing." Every male adult authority that I have had to deal with since has had a 14-year-old kid trying to get his approval. That one got kicked out of me when I took my clinical pastoral education. However, like my hysterical mother, it's still there in my "lizard brain" and has to be consciously and intentionally compensated for.
How do you know when you brain's been hijacked? There are a couple of very clear tip-offs.
The physiology gives it away. When you notice that throb of your pulse in your ears, when you notice that your breathing is getting fast and shallow, you know that your lizard brain is in the process of trying to hijack the rest of your brain.
In the old days, they used to tell you to count to 10 if you got angry. It's more than just anger. Each of us has a particular, peculiar array of cues that we have come to consciousness with, and it's very difficult to guess what each other's cues might be. We can learn that pause that gives the conscious mind the opportunity at least to decide whether this crazy situation is an appropriate one to continue to be crazy in.
It isn't easy. It takes time to learn it. One of the ironies of learning to do it is that you have to have places to practice it that are real. This is the difficult part of the anger management classes that have become all the rage. Unless you practice it in the midst of the real physiological biochemical situation, you're not practicing the real thing. You're practicing "what ifs" and most of us don't become terribly dangerous about "what ifs". It's only in the real situations of conflict, when the "lizard brain" is actually trying to hijack your brain, that effective practice at responding differently can happen. We desperately need to give each other permission to do that.
This is why forgiveness is so important a part of what it feels like to be a human being. For us to stay alive and growing, we need to practice in the real world where the real emotions and the real threats and the real misunderstandings are happening. If we do not give each other permission to learn in the midst of reality we deny each other the opportunity to learn at all.
BUT there really are very, very few saber toothed tigers left.