You have an anti-relational brain. 

“Hey!,” I’m hearing you say, “you just said the brain is relational.” And there ARE more systems devoted to drawing us to others. But there are two very powerful systems that push others away and cause us to withdraw and even attack.

These two systems are powerful because they are very emotional. All of the Executive Operating Systems (EOSs) have, over time and with life experience, developed a combination of thought, emotion, and pre-set patterns of responding. But these two self-protective systems are driven by strong emotion.

Think of your brain ashaving two main areas that are active during the operation of an EOS. The thinking part of the brain is more toward the outside and front. The emotional part of the brain is more to the inside and back, near the spinal column. This is stated more simply than it really is, but it will serve our talking about it here.

The Amygdala

One very small part of your brain, the amygdala (pronounced ah-MIG-dolla) is at the back of your brain. It is mostly responsible for your anti-relational brain. It works like an early warning system. It is very quick to set up your defenses and dump loads of adrenalin into your body. That way you can jump tall buildings in a single bound if necessary.

The front part of your brain helps the amygdala identify danger and, when the danger has passed, turn off the adrenalin. But the alert and the defense has a hair trigger. You may be familiar with these two systems as fight and flight.

RAGE

When your RAGE EOS is active you generate feelings ranging from frustration to intense fright, thoughts that overflow with blame and scorn, memories of pastwrongs against you , and the urge tostrike out. When you are using this system well, you protect yourself from harm.

FEAR

FEAR produces feelings ranging from anxiety to intense fright, thoughts ranging from mild worried to catastrophic certainty, and motivation to escape.

Not much difference between RAGE and FEAR. With RAGE the front part of your brain decides you can overcome the threat, so you strike out. With FEAR the front of your brain tells you, “You had better run.

I wish I could tell you that these systems always work perfectly. They don’t. Sometimes you think there is a threat when there isn’t one. Sometimes you over-rate the threat and over-respond. Right?

But I’m glad we have these two systems. 

You need more than the relationship-fostering systems of the relational brain. You need the RAGE and FEAR systems. And these two systems work for human threats as well as for non-human ones. In some cases we need an anti-relational brain.

In some cases the anti-relational brain dominates because it is over-active and the relational brain is impaired. Let’s take a look at how that happens. If you have time now,  check out…