Have you ever had a friend or family member who simply didn’t seem to be curious about you, your feelings, or have empathy when you were hurting? Isn’t it frustrating? Here’s why that might be a right brain vs left brain problem.
So many of us go through trauma in our childhood. In so many of our homes when we are little, it’s not safe to show what you’re really feeling.
In North American culture we fetishize productivity, to the point of madness. That can lead to a lot of people being stuck in their left brains, the logical, doing part of their brains. The right brain, the feeling side, doesn’t seem to have much utility, you can’t optimize it, and a lot of people, after a lot of trauma, just shut that side down. They feel like they get value from work, so, they just keep working. And they can be tremendously accomplished people, professors, physicists, successful business owners, but emotionally, they might be four years old.
I wrote down a few things that Dr Lindsay Gibson said here. She wrote the book Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents and a few other ones, what she says about the left brain and right brain is important for understanding how to deal with people who don’t seem to be able to go deep with you.
She says,
“We process our deeper darker feelings on the right side of the brain. On the left side it’s much more superficial, I don’t think about it, I move on. There is no reflective depth. There’s no shadowing. No perspective. Things are very much on the surface. If you see the world that way it’s very easy to make snap decisions, black and white, right and wrong, good and bad.
In order to be a whole person, we are equipped and made to use the right and left hemispheres of our brain. We need to be analytical, but we need our depth, man! We need intuition, imagination, to feel our way into situations, to have an instinct about something, have a sense of self that is deeper than what my social role is. If you’re not using a part of your brain enough, you’re missing out on the full experience of being a human being who can be in relationship with other people.
It’s not just that these people are kind of difficult or frustrating. It’s a whole thing about how their brain works or doesn’t work. This is related to attachment or security trauma. Babies and mothers relate to each other through right hemisphere resonance. But if you have problems with that early in life, if that mother isn’t sensitive and attuned to the child, the child learns the right side of her brain isn’t safe for her to hang out, she gets feelings and intuitions, but people don’t like it, so she retreats to her logical brain. When you shut that feeling side down, you are not using the full complement of what your brain is designed to do.
The meaning comes from all of these values and abilities of the right hemisphere. It feels meaningful to us. If you don’t have that, then you begin to lose your sense of basic meaning in life, and leads to a particular kind of depression if you get too far away from those internal gifts that we all have.”
If you find yourself asking why people in your life cannot imagine what it’s like to be in your shoes, why they don’t seem to have empathy for you, it may be because they are stuck in their left brain.
You can’t get them out of it. They have to choose for themselves to have some kind of self reflection. And sometimes only a crisis, like their partner leaving them, will do that.
You can’t change unless you have some kind of self reflection. You need that right brain. All the richness and depth, the wonder and awe, the joy and the beauty, really having a life that feels like a tapestry that’s woven together in a beautiful way, even if there’s pain there, it feels so much more alive to be that way.
Disclaimer, I am not a doctor, I am not a psychologist or a therapist. I’m just an individual who is pondering why some people can’t seem to emotionally mature.