How Abuse Began
The Snake Brain seems awfully comfortable with abuse. This is odd, given it’s the Snake Brain’s job to keep us alive and abuse doesn’t particularly promote survival. So why does being stuck in your Snake Brain make you more susceptible to abuse? According to Erna, this origin story goes way back. (We’re going prehistoric here, so bear with us.)
The Strong-but-Simple Snake Brain
The human Snake Brain is in charge of basic survival; keeping us alive is a skill it has honed over millions of years. If your Snake Brain reacted fast enough to help you survive a saber tooth tiger attack, then you got to live; the better job the Snake Brain did at keeping a person alive, the more opportunities that person got to reproduce. This is the extremely effective — yet extremely limited — Snake Brain we inherited, complete with pattern recognition and quick, single-step automatic reactions that help to keep us alive.
If you’ve only got a Snake Brain, your only concern is to continue to exist. Let’s think about an actual snake: all snakes do is look for food, look for mates, seek shelter, and use the sun to regulate their metabolism. Those behaviors are focused solely on individual survival; they’re selfish and egotistical and are completely unconcerned with anyone outside of themselves. But that’s what snakes do, and we don’t expect any more from them.
The Wise-but-Still-Developing Sage Brain
Over the next few million years, Mother Nature tried a lot of different ways to promote and perpetuate life. One of the more successful ways was when humans learned that forming societies could create a survival — and therefore reproductive — advantage; this is a relatively recent phenomenon in the evolutionary scheme of things. Instead of each person fending for themself, living in societies became a way to keep people safe (particularly children), which allowed the human race to flourish.
Thus began the development of our Sage Brain, which is the part of the brain that allows people to relate to each other and promotes prosocial behavior such as cooperation, empathy, and care. Without the Sage Brain, hunter-gatherers would not have formed communities that pooled resources and began to specialize skills. Without the Sage Brain, we would have never gone on to form agricultural societies, industrial societies, capitalist societies, and so on. Humankind has only progressed as far as it has because of the Sage Brain.
Prosocial behavior promotes survival just as fight-or-flight does, but the mechanisms the Sage Brain uses are much more complex than the Snake Brain’s and cannot be deployed with immediacy. In an emergency, we still default to using the Snake Brain because it’s able to react extremely quickly. We can only access the wisdom of our Sage Brain when we’ve got time to process information and devise a rational plan of action. However, the Sage Brain is in its infancy when you look at the timeline of evolution, and it has a lot of maturing to do, so it’s not always ready to go.
Back to the Future
Today we find ourselves equipped with a Snake Brain and a Sage Brain, both of which help us to survive. Although the ancient Snake Brain lacks the ability to learn, it can adapt its pattern recognition to an individual’s specific circumstances. This means that if a modern-day child grows up in an environment that is fight-or-flight levels of dangerous, either for the child or for those they live with, the child’s Snake Brain is called up to bat all the time and its automatic reactions are executed often. The prosocial Sage Brain never even gets a chance to flex its muscle.
After time, that child grows into an adult who has accepted dangerous, threatening environments as normal. What is familiar — and therefore what feels safe — is an environment where they can leave their Snake Brain in charge, environments such as abusive ones. Their Sage Brain — the one that wants to cooperate with others and be a part of a larger community — has been completely sidelined because their Snake Brain has done an adequate job of keeping them alive.
The Snake Brain only makes the mistake of feeling safe in an abusive situation (when it should be warning us to run, baby, run!) if it has experienced or observed abusive behavior over an extended period of time, disconnecting it completely from the Sage Brain. Usually, the Snake Brain is just there to set off an Alarm Emotion, and our more measured Sage Brain takes over the actual problem solving. But after years of living in a dangerous situation, the Snake Brain has adapted and is comfortably settled into calling the shots. It knows how to keep us alive. This is how our well-developed warning system loses the plot and takes over controlling our behaviors.
Bringing the Sage Brain Back Online
How can we get our Snake Brain, which has developed for the express purpose of keeping us safe, back in its lane? And more importantly, how can we awaken our Sage Brain so that it can devise a plan to move us out of harm’s way for good?
Our journey away from abuse begins with creating awareness within ourselves and seeing how the system of abuse works.
The first lesson we must teach our Sage Brain is to recognize Alarm Emotions for what they are: a signal from our Snake Brain that there is an impending imbalance in our lives. Whether this imbalance reflects feeling unseen, not having the care we need, suffering a loss, not understanding our purpose, or not being able to exercise our power, we need to see that this is a temporary state that we can fix, not our permanent condition. This type of consciousness is only possible in the Sage Brain: hey, there’s an Alarm Emotion going off and I can do something about that.
The second lesson we must internalize is that we humans are social creatures, and it is this social aspect of our existence that differentiates us from our primitive, pre-Sage Brain ancestors. Do something social! and not just in a “party and have fun” sort of way, but in a meaningful prosocial way. The fastest path to bringing ourselves back into our Sage Brains is to access our empathy. Having empathy with yourself as you recognize an Alarm Emotion, or empathizing with somebody else’s Alarm Emotion, is the best way to engage our Sage Brain; all social connections begin with compassion, and compassion is the job of the Sage Brain.
As they say, “If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.” Very few of the problems we face require us to act so quickly that we should put our Snake Brains in charge of reacting. This is a reminder that if you want to make real progress, leaning into a social solution by empathizing with others and allowing them to empathize with you is the approach that will help you to arrive at the most effective, most durable solution.
Last but not least, to bring your Sage Brain back online, remember that you have time. The Snake Brain only thinks in terms of “now or never,” but “now or never” rarely reflects reality. When you internalize that you have time to devise a plan and execute a solution, you will be able to make much more considered decisions.
