However I read today, U.S. Rep. Tim Walberg became the latest Republican lawmaker to openly call for the genocide of Palestinian people in Gaza, saying that instead of sending humanitarian aid to starving civilians there, the U.S. should "get it over quick" by dropping a nuclear bomb on the besieged enclave. He was asked by a voter why taxpayer money was being spent to build a port off the coast of Gaza now posted in a video that was apparently recorded on March 25.
"We shouldn't be spending a dime on humanitarian aid. It should be like Nagasaki and Hiroshima,"
Apart from the immeasurable lack of humanity, it appears the senator does not know where Gaza is on a map.
There are others as well. Jared Kushner has repeated his father-in-law’s “get the job over quickly” words adding that an area in the Negev desert should be bulldozed for the remaining people and there will be good opportunities for land development along the foreshore.
People who advocate mass murder are psychopaths. I don’t worry about them so much, because they are predictable. We know what to expect from them. They have no functional prefrontal cortex, and their limbic brain is also impaired, which means it cannot generate normal feelings. So of course for them ‘finishing the job’, ‘nuking people’, etc. does not seem wrong at all. They are the apex predators in humanity.
It is those who aid and abet them, who enable them, who sit silently and do or say nothing when they harm others… It is all the ‘nice’ people who are too limbic and frightened to stand up for what is right, to confront the bullies and rescue their victims that I am concerned about. There is a small percentage of psychopaths among us. But we have far more ordinary people with fully functional brains who will just remain passive and silent, or would enable evils to be committed.
Love is there in everyone who has a functional prefrontal cortex (~80% in my guesstimation). But if the limbic brain keeps taking over every time people feel scared, you won’t see much of it… Unless we begin to grow (and growth means integration), the downward spiral will continue. We have a choice. We do not have to stay the way we are. I see the profound changes that integration brings in my practice every day, and of course I have been experiencing them myself first hand.
Thank you for your reply. Yes. A struggling teenager once sadly asked me if I thought there will ever be peace in the world? We talked for a while about what he was doing for peace in the immediate world he lived in. He was a good person.
Yes, I find it heartbreaking to think about young people and the world they are forced to grow into. Then again, when has it ever been any different in our species?…
The way you engaged with that young person and how you took them seriously, validated their experience. This was very helpful to them, not only on the specific topic, but to their development in general. All adults should approach young people seriously, and in a validating way, as you have done.
I read this a second time just now. As a Catholic, I strive to follow Jesus, and I do struggle because I’m often an angry and self-righteous person. But I’m learning! It strikes me that too many of the priests and teachers don’t understand what Jesus meant by humility. This came to me as a young adult, more than thirty years ago. What humility truly is, is self-forgetfulness. It’s BEING yourself, and thus being fully present in the moment. It’s not putting yourself down, which is a form of false pride. It’s not thinking of yourself at all.
And that, I think, is self-love as Jesus meant it. It’s humility.
Does it seem that way to you?
I’ll finish with a short prayer I say every night: may there be peace, and may we help to bring it.
‘You’ are not an ‘angry and self-righteous’ ‘person’, although, like the rest of us you see yourself sometimes behave in ways that you are not proud of.
Like the rest of us, you have a limbic brain that feels things as it should do. But sometimes it takes over and runs away with you. It is humanity’s story. Our limbic and executive brain systems are not naturally well integrated. If we followed the instruction to be loving properly we would all grow up with a brain that is much better integrated. It means that the limbic system would continue to function as our ‘safety officer’ as it was meant to, but would not try to run our lives as adult humans.
All children and young people need to be loved. Loving someone is not a warm and fuzzy feeling. As M Scott Peck says, love is ‘the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth.’ If we listened to the needs of children and young people, we would easily see that they desperately ask all the time for their inner reality to be validated by those around them. We ask for it all through life. When parents validate their children’s inner reality (their feelings, and inner states) they directly cause children’s brains to integrate, leading to a child who grows us with a completely different psychology to most humans alive now. In other words, the instruction to love is key to our neurological development, which could take all of humanity further along the path to our innate potential.
Validating someone else’s inner states and reality is the most loving thing we can do for anyone. Adults, however, cannot change the brains of adults directly. So in therapy we teach clients how to access their prefrontal cortex/our executive brain, and validate everything they feel. It is called ‘vertical integration’. People who do not consume alcohol and drugs (at all), and who have healthy brain can integrate their own brain quite quickly which leads to dramatic changes in the person. It is a condition of seeing me that my clients do not consume any alcohol (or drugs). Even in small quantities, alcohol disables the prefrontal cortex (PFC), the most important brain system we need in order to grow to our potential and be psychologically robust.
Our prefrontal cortex gives us the most godly qualities we have, such as empathy, unconditional love, presence, attunement, morality, and a connection to the divine. All of these and more are simply a given when we use our PFC. When we are better integrated we never lose this connection and we live with ease, integrity, and without fear and worry.
The Bible was written a long time ago, and from stories passed on orally. So maybe the detail of ‘loving one another’ and loving oneself got lost over the millennia, and in translation. But in essence the message is 100% accurate, it’s just that no one understands what it means to be loving to self and to others. Now we know it means letting ourselves and others know that it is OK to feel the way we/they do. It does not mean we accept people’s actions and choices, only their feelings. As I explained this leads to neurological changes in children directly and in ourselves internally. Among people in relationships validation makes us feel safe with others. When we know others do not try to change how we feel and they do not judge it, but are happy to just be with us when we feel something, we feel safe with them.
I have always thought that what was special about Jesus was that he was much better integrated than the average human. If Jesus is the role model to follow, it is because he shows us what is possible for human beings. We are not well put together, but all through human history we have been given the key to integrating so we can become what we have to potential to become. When we are better integrated, humility is natural as are all the wonderful qualities that we strive to have. That is because our PFC gives us the ability to have them naturally. Perhaps because it connects us to the divine. Some people think that it is an ‘antenna’ to God or to universal consciousness. In ancient Eastern religion the eyebrow centre has always been seen as a the seat of enlightenment.
The instruction to love has always been the key, but we need to understand what loving means. And it means validation, the most coveted thing on the planet. And it is completely free of charge! Anyone can offer it to anyone, any time. We don’t need university degrees or special conditions. All it takes is breathing more deeply (to access the prefrontal cortex) and tell ourselves and someone else ‘what you are feeling is OK’, or ‘it’s OK to feel like this’. Try it with children and anyone and see for yourself what happens. If you do it with yourself regularly you will begin to change as you brain integrates. I write about this in detail in my book on anxiety and in Therapy Without A Therapist and will discuss it in my talk for the SMN on 20th Nov. Most people respond to other people’s feelings completely the wrong way even with the best of intentions. Saying to someone ‘you shouldn’t feel this way’ is not loving. It is the opposite, because it does not help them grow.
Every time you pray, you access your PFC. Be sure to notice what you are feeling and validate it all the time. The guidance has always been there. We just did not understand it properly. But we do now. Thank you so much for this lovely and honest comment.
This really touched me. "Integration automatically stops us from hurting one another. It also prevents us from just standing by and saying nothing when we witness harm being done."
In my practice, I have absolutely witnessed this phenomenon, without ever fully articulating it. True self acceptance and love can't help but enable us to better care for and consider one another in all our acts and words.
You are very welcome and thank you Carl for your comment and for taking the time to read. I am glad that what I am saying validates your experience and observations. 🙏🏼
Good, isn’t it? But Israel has chosen destructive entitlement, and (misplaced) vengeance. That is what I mean by ‘primitive psychology’. Hillel’s and Jesus’ advice require some level of psychological maturity to put into practice. That is not the prevailing psychological state in Israeli society (and maybe in most human societies)…
I’m a Rotarian in FortErie, Ontario, Canada, across the Niagara River from Buffalo NY.
~1996, a member connected with
Gush Shalom, Wahat al Salaam, Oasis of Peace to whom we donated then-$US10,000 matching grant from TheRotaryFoundation for one of their 2-week School For Peace courses.
I’ve often wonderred whether the graduates are today staring down gun barrels at their new friends.
I still follow GushShalom [Peace Bloc] whom we met at that time.
Methinks Israel’s real problem is
Proportional Representation.
It gives unwarranted power to tiny WagsTheDog ultra-Zionist parties in coalition governments. They aren’t moderated as they would be in FirstPastThePost Westminster Parliamentary and USA Congressional parties.
I liked your description in your book of the central figures in the root of the Sistine Chapel of Adam and God reaching out to touch each other as analogous to the relationship between the two brains.
Please forgive me if I have already shared this. I may have already done so and forgotten. He re-shared it today on Facebook. I think it makes an important argument. Gabor Mate has also basically made these points, but Robert spells it out even more clearly in this article.
You have a phenomenal conventional+ intelligence. But my phenomenal unconventional intelligence could not,was not, recognisable in any school or further education probably due to teachers not recognising any intelligence at all in my autistic, yet high achieving brain. (EXCEPT FOR MY MUSIC Skill which mayNOT actually be authentic,it maybe linked to my semi incestuous mother!) With somatic experiencing something more authentic has been unmasked-feels very odd.
We are all ,99%of us, at war psychologically-which to me seems worse than the3-5 wars presently on the globe at present AND W. War2++..
Itseems to me that a group of us should create a collective (including a shaman acqaintance=an outcast from Findhorn which was always doomed!)
I've just lost my most recent therapist who has lead me further 3+ dimensionally further into more mysterious aspects of my dysfunctional parents and boarding school( now asubject of victim abuse complaint)
I have evidence now that N H S mental health Elgin is burnt out and can hardly function. The very tired head of psychiatry saw me a few times to do brain scans on my prefrontal cortex=no problem; he has only recently admitted that the associated rigidity of thinking is typical in autism. BUT with recent anasthetics(small hernia op.) I just notice odd changes re synapses.....or something!
I normally say to people don't go without feeding or sleep but this wartime-a new kind-has extraordinary urgency, so let's meet,maybe with others. In W W 2 the clergy+singers stayed up all night to prevent fire bomb damage. Very Best, John
Thank you so much John for reading and commenting, and for sharing your experience. I’m sorry you have been let down so much from early life. My long term experience of working with high functioning people on the autism spectrum is that there is usually no obstacle to vertical integration (the integration between our limbic and executive brains). Sensory sensitivities, or other challenges that autism offers, do not change. But my clients lose their anxiety and live with a lot less effort. This means they become more robust, and can share with the world the gifts they have to offer. As long as people have a fully functional prefrontal cortex and good neuroplasticity, they can grow towards their innate potential.
Read my _Therapy Without A Therapist_, if you haven’t already. It is all there. All the very best to you personally, and with your initiatives. 🙏 Avigail
Amazing article and definitely food for thought as a person who has anxiety and a problem with loving myself as it always seems to be vain to me this has really helped me to understand myself a lot , thank you 🙏
I get it and it makes sense for this individual.
However I read today, U.S. Rep. Tim Walberg became the latest Republican lawmaker to openly call for the genocide of Palestinian people in Gaza, saying that instead of sending humanitarian aid to starving civilians there, the U.S. should "get it over quick" by dropping a nuclear bomb on the besieged enclave. He was asked by a voter why taxpayer money was being spent to build a port off the coast of Gaza now posted in a video that was apparently recorded on March 25.
"We shouldn't be spending a dime on humanitarian aid. It should be like Nagasaki and Hiroshima,"
Apart from the immeasurable lack of humanity, it appears the senator does not know where Gaza is on a map.
There are others as well. Jared Kushner has repeated his father-in-law’s “get the job over quickly” words adding that an area in the Negev desert should be bulldozed for the remaining people and there will be good opportunities for land development along the foreshore.
Where did the love go?
People who advocate mass murder are psychopaths. I don’t worry about them so much, because they are predictable. We know what to expect from them. They have no functional prefrontal cortex, and their limbic brain is also impaired, which means it cannot generate normal feelings. So of course for them ‘finishing the job’, ‘nuking people’, etc. does not seem wrong at all. They are the apex predators in humanity.
It is those who aid and abet them, who enable them, who sit silently and do or say nothing when they harm others… It is all the ‘nice’ people who are too limbic and frightened to stand up for what is right, to confront the bullies and rescue their victims that I am concerned about. There is a small percentage of psychopaths among us. But we have far more ordinary people with fully functional brains who will just remain passive and silent, or would enable evils to be committed.
Love is there in everyone who has a functional prefrontal cortex (~80% in my guesstimation). But if the limbic brain keeps taking over every time people feel scared, you won’t see much of it… Unless we begin to grow (and growth means integration), the downward spiral will continue. We have a choice. We do not have to stay the way we are. I see the profound changes that integration brings in my practice every day, and of course I have been experiencing them myself first hand.
Thank you so much for reading!
Thank you for your reply. Yes. A struggling teenager once sadly asked me if I thought there will ever be peace in the world? We talked for a while about what he was doing for peace in the immediate world he lived in. He was a good person.
Yes, I find it heartbreaking to think about young people and the world they are forced to grow into. Then again, when has it ever been any different in our species?…
The way you engaged with that young person and how you took them seriously, validated their experience. This was very helpful to them, not only on the specific topic, but to their development in general. All adults should approach young people seriously, and in a validating way, as you have done.
I read this a second time just now. As a Catholic, I strive to follow Jesus, and I do struggle because I’m often an angry and self-righteous person. But I’m learning! It strikes me that too many of the priests and teachers don’t understand what Jesus meant by humility. This came to me as a young adult, more than thirty years ago. What humility truly is, is self-forgetfulness. It’s BEING yourself, and thus being fully present in the moment. It’s not putting yourself down, which is a form of false pride. It’s not thinking of yourself at all.
And that, I think, is self-love as Jesus meant it. It’s humility.
Does it seem that way to you?
I’ll finish with a short prayer I say every night: may there be peace, and may we help to bring it.
‘You’ are not an ‘angry and self-righteous’ ‘person’, although, like the rest of us you see yourself sometimes behave in ways that you are not proud of.
Like the rest of us, you have a limbic brain that feels things as it should do. But sometimes it takes over and runs away with you. It is humanity’s story. Our limbic and executive brain systems are not naturally well integrated. If we followed the instruction to be loving properly we would all grow up with a brain that is much better integrated. It means that the limbic system would continue to function as our ‘safety officer’ as it was meant to, but would not try to run our lives as adult humans.
All children and young people need to be loved. Loving someone is not a warm and fuzzy feeling. As M Scott Peck says, love is ‘the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth.’ If we listened to the needs of children and young people, we would easily see that they desperately ask all the time for their inner reality to be validated by those around them. We ask for it all through life. When parents validate their children’s inner reality (their feelings, and inner states) they directly cause children’s brains to integrate, leading to a child who grows us with a completely different psychology to most humans alive now. In other words, the instruction to love is key to our neurological development, which could take all of humanity further along the path to our innate potential.
Validating someone else’s inner states and reality is the most loving thing we can do for anyone. Adults, however, cannot change the brains of adults directly. So in therapy we teach clients how to access their prefrontal cortex/our executive brain, and validate everything they feel. It is called ‘vertical integration’. People who do not consume alcohol and drugs (at all), and who have healthy brain can integrate their own brain quite quickly which leads to dramatic changes in the person. It is a condition of seeing me that my clients do not consume any alcohol (or drugs). Even in small quantities, alcohol disables the prefrontal cortex (PFC), the most important brain system we need in order to grow to our potential and be psychologically robust.
Our prefrontal cortex gives us the most godly qualities we have, such as empathy, unconditional love, presence, attunement, morality, and a connection to the divine. All of these and more are simply a given when we use our PFC. When we are better integrated we never lose this connection and we live with ease, integrity, and without fear and worry.
The Bible was written a long time ago, and from stories passed on orally. So maybe the detail of ‘loving one another’ and loving oneself got lost over the millennia, and in translation. But in essence the message is 100% accurate, it’s just that no one understands what it means to be loving to self and to others. Now we know it means letting ourselves and others know that it is OK to feel the way we/they do. It does not mean we accept people’s actions and choices, only their feelings. As I explained this leads to neurological changes in children directly and in ourselves internally. Among people in relationships validation makes us feel safe with others. When we know others do not try to change how we feel and they do not judge it, but are happy to just be with us when we feel something, we feel safe with them.
I have always thought that what was special about Jesus was that he was much better integrated than the average human. If Jesus is the role model to follow, it is because he shows us what is possible for human beings. We are not well put together, but all through human history we have been given the key to integrating so we can become what we have to potential to become. When we are better integrated, humility is natural as are all the wonderful qualities that we strive to have. That is because our PFC gives us the ability to have them naturally. Perhaps because it connects us to the divine. Some people think that it is an ‘antenna’ to God or to universal consciousness. In ancient Eastern religion the eyebrow centre has always been seen as a the seat of enlightenment.
The instruction to love has always been the key, but we need to understand what loving means. And it means validation, the most coveted thing on the planet. And it is completely free of charge! Anyone can offer it to anyone, any time. We don’t need university degrees or special conditions. All it takes is breathing more deeply (to access the prefrontal cortex) and tell ourselves and someone else ‘what you are feeling is OK’, or ‘it’s OK to feel like this’. Try it with children and anyone and see for yourself what happens. If you do it with yourself regularly you will begin to change as you brain integrates. I write about this in detail in my book on anxiety and in Therapy Without A Therapist and will discuss it in my talk for the SMN on 20th Nov. Most people respond to other people’s feelings completely the wrong way even with the best of intentions. Saying to someone ‘you shouldn’t feel this way’ is not loving. It is the opposite, because it does not help them grow.
Every time you pray, you access your PFC. Be sure to notice what you are feeling and validate it all the time. The guidance has always been there. We just did not understand it properly. But we do now. Thank you so much for this lovely and honest comment.
This really touched me. "Integration automatically stops us from hurting one another. It also prevents us from just standing by and saying nothing when we witness harm being done."
In my practice, I have absolutely witnessed this phenomenon, without ever fully articulating it. True self acceptance and love can't help but enable us to better care for and consider one another in all our acts and words.
Thank you for writing this.
You are very welcome and thank you Carl for your comment and for taking the time to read. I am glad that what I am saying validates your experience and observations. 🙏🏼
“What is hateful to you,
do not do to your neighbour.
This is the whole Torah;
all the rest is commentary.”
~Hillel, Talmud, Shabbat 31.a
Good, isn’t it? But Israel has chosen destructive entitlement, and (misplaced) vengeance. That is what I mean by ‘primitive psychology’. Hillel’s and Jesus’ advice require some level of psychological maturity to put into practice. That is not the prevailing psychological state in Israeli society (and maybe in most human societies)…
I’m a Rotarian in FortErie, Ontario, Canada, across the Niagara River from Buffalo NY.
~1996, a member connected with
Gush Shalom, Wahat al Salaam, Oasis of Peace to whom we donated then-$US10,000 matching grant from TheRotaryFoundation for one of their 2-week School For Peace courses.
I’ve often wonderred whether the graduates are today staring down gun barrels at their new friends.
I still follow GushShalom [Peace Bloc] whom we met at that time.
Methinks Israel’s real problem is
Proportional Representation.
It gives unwarranted power to tiny WagsTheDog ultra-Zionist parties in coalition governments. They aren’t moderated as they would be in FirstPastThePost Westminster Parliamentary and USA Congressional parties.
I liked your description in your book of the central figures in the root of the Sistine Chapel of Adam and God reaching out to touch each other as analogous to the relationship between the two brains.
Not directly related to this article, but I just wanted to share Robert Rosenthal's article on "Israel's Huge Mental Health Experiment in Gaza." I recommend subscribing to him on Substack. I have also gotten him to subscribe to you! https://theprogressivejew.substack.com/p/israels-huge-mental-health-experiment?r=nrs1&utm_medium=ios&fbclid=IwAR2rMfs3wuGQsIhkhtZtJT8_q3uFGBrGmS4pY6a3PLw-sd9PHuWc9STMfh0_aem_AUuu2DTwshmSUbRq_fotRJPcIy7yJos3sldCGz_clWh_g7BFLu7nMsR_FYRQkYh7wFPFvtWOl_H2n5-vcAps7uAc&triedRedirect=true
Please forgive me if I have already shared this. I may have already done so and forgotten. He re-shared it today on Facebook. I think it makes an important argument. Gabor Mate has also basically made these points, but Robert spells it out even more clearly in this article.
Another excellent article. Well done Avigail👍💚
🙏💚
Oh my goodness, we really MUST meet and share.
You have a phenomenal conventional+ intelligence. But my phenomenal unconventional intelligence could not,was not, recognisable in any school or further education probably due to teachers not recognising any intelligence at all in my autistic, yet high achieving brain. (EXCEPT FOR MY MUSIC Skill which mayNOT actually be authentic,it maybe linked to my semi incestuous mother!) With somatic experiencing something more authentic has been unmasked-feels very odd.
We are all ,99%of us, at war psychologically-which to me seems worse than the3-5 wars presently on the globe at present AND W. War2++..
Itseems to me that a group of us should create a collective (including a shaman acqaintance=an outcast from Findhorn which was always doomed!)
I've just lost my most recent therapist who has lead me further 3+ dimensionally further into more mysterious aspects of my dysfunctional parents and boarding school( now asubject of victim abuse complaint)
I have evidence now that N H S mental health Elgin is burnt out and can hardly function. The very tired head of psychiatry saw me a few times to do brain scans on my prefrontal cortex=no problem; he has only recently admitted that the associated rigidity of thinking is typical in autism. BUT with recent anasthetics(small hernia op.) I just notice odd changes re synapses.....or something!
I normally say to people don't go without feeding or sleep but this wartime-a new kind-has extraordinary urgency, so let's meet,maybe with others. In W W 2 the clergy+singers stayed up all night to prevent fire bomb damage. Very Best, John
Thank you so much John for reading and commenting, and for sharing your experience. I’m sorry you have been let down so much from early life. My long term experience of working with high functioning people on the autism spectrum is that there is usually no obstacle to vertical integration (the integration between our limbic and executive brains). Sensory sensitivities, or other challenges that autism offers, do not change. But my clients lose their anxiety and live with a lot less effort. This means they become more robust, and can share with the world the gifts they have to offer. As long as people have a fully functional prefrontal cortex and good neuroplasticity, they can grow towards their innate potential.
Read my _Therapy Without A Therapist_, if you haven’t already. It is all there. All the very best to you personally, and with your initiatives. 🙏 Avigail
My reply didn't get through,did you receive it somewhere?! John
Amazing article and definitely food for thought as a person who has anxiety and a problem with loving myself as it always seems to be vain to me this has really helped me to understand myself a lot , thank you 🙏