This is by far the most frequent comment I hear in therapy: “I should be able be to handle this on my own.”
Huh?
This statement is uttered often and with much authority. Where, I’m always left wondering, is it written that we should have to sort things out by ourselves? Is there some Big Book Of Living Rules that I’ve somehow missed in all my reading? Because everything I’ve read so far, as well as my clinical and personal experience, suggests the exact opposite – namely that the human brain is a social organ, which requires sustained connection with other brains to function optimally.
Basically, we’re social animals.
Through thousands of years of evolution the human brain has developed within a social context – a clan, tribe, village, extended family, polis or some other group of humans that gathered together in order to help each other survive. Expulsion from the group often threatened one’s continued existence so a lot was at stake. And the human brain adapted accordingly: a large amount of brain capacity became devoted to things like communicating, recognising human faces, reading other’s emotions – basically functions that keeps us involved with other human beings. As the American clinical psychologist Louis Cozolino says: “Our brains are inescapably social, their structure and function deeply embedded in a group of other brains – the family, the tribe, the society”
So, like it or not, we are – like other primates – social beings, and we suffer when our relationships don’t work out. And most often problems are much easier and more effectively worked through when we do it with someone else. There are many reasons for this (I may write about that in more detail later) but an obvious one is that explaining to another human being what is troubling us, forces us to articulate what’s wrong. And once that’s done we can start figuring out what to do about it.
So the next time you feel that you should be working through something emotionally difficult on your own remember this: your brain is built to resonate with other brains and some brain circuits only come online in the interaction with other brains.
That’s just the kind of animal we are.
Are you really going to argue against your own biology?