Editor's Picks for Healing: Norman Doidge's Books

I was sitting at lunch at the airport yesterday and ended up talking with a lovely woman who teaches yoga California—we were talking about healing modalities and I recommended both of Norman Doidge’s books. So I thought it was high time I did the actual review so that I didn’t have to champion the book one person at a time at the airport. I can review it, and now you guys can talk to the person next to you on the bus or the airplane…

I could make this review really short: buy both books. Stay home and read them. And then recommend them to all your friends and colleagues. Why? They will completely change the way you think about brains. They will change the way you think about healing problems. They challenge the very ideas we have about what treatment is and can be.

As I mentioned on Monday, all of his books highlight the idea of neuroplasticity: ‘the property of the brain that enables it to change its own structure and functioning in response to activity and mental experience.’ Neuroplasticity is the game changer. The old conventional wisdom believed that our brains were hard-wired with a definitive amount of brain cells. And if anything happened to the brain, if there was any injury or disease—that was it—the thinking was that brain couldn’t make new brain cells and you had to work without the damaged areas. But the new science of neuroplasticity has shown this to be untrue. The brain, it turns out, is mostly Real Estate. It gets created as we use it and we can recruit other parts of our brain to work around problems if we need them to.

In addition, the limited notion of the brain just being in your head is also the new science that the brain and the body have a two -way communication system. For example, there are neurons in your gut sending your brain information, and there are neurons in your brain sending your body information. We are a brain-body, not a brain with a body attached. It is an integrated system that we are just beginning to comprehend.

But not only will his books change the way you think: it will change the way you approach change. It will challenge you to be more creative in your approaches to problems you are trying to solve either as the therapist or the client.  And while his books are not ‘how-to’ books –they are ‘how will I think about and approach this now’ books.

In his first book, The Brain that Changes Itself, one of the many neuroscientists that Doidge describes is the work of Taub, who discovered how the brain and body can heal from stroke. Typically with a stroke—there can be loss of capacity on one side of the body—you lose the capacity to use your right arm and leg, for example. And the conventional treatment was physical therapy of the affected body parts or capacity, like speech, but mostly you would get by with the limbs that worked. Taub turned it upside down. In his work with primates he found that if he constrained the limb that worked—by wrapping it to the body with an ace bandage or a cast so it couldn’t move at all, the limb that was affected and wasn’t working, actually began working again. And when this approach was tried on humans it had the same effect. If you put an oven mitt on the good hand, and had people do tasks with their affected hand, they regained their ability to use their hands. Even years after the stroke had happened.

Doidge doesn’t directly discuss trauma, but I believe that if all of us read his books and tried to play with and apply his ideas, trauma treatment would move forward from where it is. I do psychotherapy, not physical therapy, so I played with what the psychological equivalents would be. How could you psychologically put an oven mitt on the part of the psyche that was working and get at the part that wasn’t?

One young man I was working with at the time I read his first boo had had a severe brain injury when he was five. His family was here in the States.  The family spoke a foreign language, which is really why they ended up with me because I could meet with the young man in his native language.  He was struggling with decisions and transitions. He couldn’t tolerate change—of any sort. And he couldn’t decide, or converge on an answer because every option had benefits and so they were all good and he could get stuck for long periods of time in a loop. He was truly the most non-judgmental person I have ever met—and therefore the kindest person I ever met. But this inability to use judgment, meant he wouldn’t be able to keep himself safe. If you looked at his struggle through the lens of the stroke model, he had the capacity to be consistent and to be open-minded. Two things I was actually trying to teach a lot of other people. But he had no capacity to do the other. It wasn’t weak. It wasn’t there. So I worked with his mother to begin with small changes. To move one thing in his room, or in the garden every day. And when we met I would force him to choose something to talk about, or choose something he liked better than another. Or play games where he constantly had to choose where he was going to move and make him do it faster so that he couldn’t fall back on his ‘good muscle.’ He needed to use the muscle of distinction or convergence. Doidge’s books are available in multiple languages and his mother was able to read the book and begin to understand more fully how the brain works and how it can heal.

And most of all—that there is incredible, I mean incredible, hope for healing when you see what can be done to heal brains. So many people had told her that her son wouldn’t heal further, and there was so much hope in the pages of his book to counter that view.

This hope that is woven through both of his books is not just for the injured. In the corporate work I do, leaders and managers are often frustrated with their ability to make change in themselves or with the people they lead. They can feel hopeless that anyone can change at all. And yet when they learn about neuroplasticity---that we are building new neurons and capable of new learning right up until our last breath-they get energized.

In his second book, The Brain’s Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity, he continues to report on different ways that brains can heal and the remarkable physicians and clinicians who pioneered new ways of approaching the problem and finding a solution. He covers treatments for blindness using movement, treatments for pain using visualization, treatments for dyslexia using music.

Read his books for the specific stories and science because they are great. But even more, read them to expand your worldview of how our brain and body work and what we can do to support the healing process. Read them so we can all create a healthier future.

© Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD 2015


Mindful Monday: Mindful Journeys of Listening

“If music be the food of love, play on”
— Duke Orsino, Twelfth Night, Shakespeare

Reading Norman Doidge’s new book, The Brain’s Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity, gave me a huge appreciation for the ear and listening—and it made me think about how mindfulness applied to listening and hearing might be healing. I believe that all of the senses get affected with trauma. They are either dulled from overstimulation, or heightened to the point of hypervigilance. While his book doesn't directly address PTSD or repeated trauma I believe the information in his books is invaluable for healing trauma.

The book itself is on neuroplasticity, or “the property of the brain that enables it to change its own structure and functioning in response to activity and mental experience" and all the ways that brains can heal from all sorts of disease and injury. I will be writing more in depth about his books tomorrow, but there was one chapter in particular that made me want to explore it for Mindful Monday—Bridge of Sound –The special connection between music and sound.

In this chapter he introduces us to Dr. Tomatis and Dr. Paul Madaule who treated disorders from dyslexia to autism to TBI with music. But not just any music. Music that has been filtered to highlight the distinctions between frequencies. Helping the brain make the distinctions between the frequencies and be able to amplify or tune in to different frequencies allows us to hear accurately. It allows us to be in a crowded room and tune in to conversations.

What they discovered in their work was that the ear was ‘not a passive organ, but the equivalent of a zoom lens that allows it to focus on particular noises and filter others out.’ This ‘active listening’ is created with the muscles in our ears—the stapedus and the tensor tympani. These muscles, when they are working properly allow us to hear both high and low frequencies. But when they aren’t working well, for example, babies who have had chronic ear infections often have weaker middle ear muscles, they let in only low frequencies, and miss higher frequencies, which includes most of human speech.

Our brain controls the muscles in our ears and without the muscles in our ears being able to work properly, we don’t differentiate sounds, and our brains don’t have clear maps of information. Instead of clear information, we get too much noise. Sound overwhelms our system.

But the job of the ears is not just for hearing—the ears have two different jobs. As Doidge states,

“The cochlea, or ‘the ear of hearing’…processes audible sound at higher frequencies…and the vestibular apparatus or ‘ear of the body’ processes sound at lower frequencies. People experience these lower frequencies as rhythmic because they are slow enough for the listener to perceive the intervals between the individual waves. These frequencies often induce body movement.”

This ‘ear of the body’ is what helps us know where we are in space, helps us balance and have ‘timing.’ When we become more attuned listeners we are not only strengthening our hearing, we are strengthening our capacity to move, to act, to be still. Both Tomatis and Madaule found that the people they treated with music for learning problems improved not only their hearing and speaking but also their ability to move, to walk—and also their ability to regulate themselves—sleep, relax, know when to pause. Rhythm and timing. Not just hearing. The music that was used the most was Mozart. Doidge noted that Maudele liked Mozart because it a pure language of music—Mozart composed so young that his own language didn’t interfere with the semantics of his music—making Mozart more of a universal musical language.

Some Practices for Mindful Monday:

Last  week for Mindful Monday we looked at playing with sight, and today, I want you to do the opposite today, close your eyes. Take a deep breath and tune in to the sounds around you—for a minute, two minutes, ten minutes—whatever you can manage. The sounds you are hearing could be voices, or the sound of the wind or cars or birds outside. Breathe and just tune in. See if you can shift your attention from sound to sound. Not judging the sound but just playing with listening to it. Notice what the effect listening has on your mind, your breathing, your posture, your muscles. Notice what its like to open your eyes again.

For the fun of it, after reading the chapter I listened to two pieces of Music: Pachelbel’s Canon and then a Violin Concerto from Mozart. While I was listening I closed my eyes and tried to listen to all the notes that were playing—and I found it not only challenging but really fun. Music is often background and not foreground, and listening that carefully, with my eyes closed I could hear parts of the music I hadn’t noticed. And if you could believe it, I could feel the challenge in paying attention, to focusing.  It really did feel like I was using muscles to pay attention and really hear all of the sounds.

So if you have the time, an ipod, computer, Youtube, or the old fashioned vinyl… listen to a piece of classical music—with your eyes closed –and notice what it feels like to listen, notice all the notes you can hear—notice what your thoughts are, what your breathing is like. Notice what you feel like in your body. What images form in your mind. What you feel when the song is over. It’s a chance to explore sound and listening in a new way. And to help out—I’ve included two links below. Enjoy.

© Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD 2015

Pachelbel's Canon

Mozart Violin Concerto 1

Incremental is transformational

A Portrait of the Artist as a Duck

A Portrait of the Artist as a Duck

“Because no one ever learned to walk by walking”
— Moshe Feldenkrais

No one ever learned to walk by walking. It’s hundreds and hundreds of attempts and so many different motions and muscles and movements that come together that allows us to learn to walk. And healing is a lot like that too. It’s hundreds and hundreds of attempts and different motions and muscles and movement that come together to allow us to heal—to do something new, do something again. To reach forward. To move again in our lives, in our hearts, in our relationships.

I am talking about healing from trauma, but I could just as easily be talking about grieving the loss of a spouse or child, or the loss of a job, or the loss of a marriage. I could be talking about the physical healing from hip surgery or knee surgery or stroke or heart surgery. All of these things have their own trajectory. All of these things heal in pieces, in increments over time.

I think one of the most helpful things you can learn while you are healing from trauma is that you heal in steps. You loosen things up, you untangle them, you increase your range of motion, you expand your capacity to hold things. It’s the coming together of all of the pieces that allow you to move freely again. It’s not one set of moves and it’s not the same set of moves for each person.

But here’s the thing. You can’t just learn to tolerate the small steps of healing. You have to find a way to get excited about them, love them, be curious about them, celebrate them.

A few days ago I wrote about how healing was developmental, but it is also incremental. It is made up of these small steps which are building blocks. But incremental leads to something bigger.  In the world of writing about change there has been this weird false dichotomy created about ‘incremental’ change versus ‘transformational’ change—as if they weren’t interrelated. As if you could actually get transformational change without incremental change. We don’t pay attention to the incremental. We don’t pay attention to each muscle capacity a baby learns: the arched back, the lift of the head, stretch of the shoulders. We don’t celebrate each small move, we celebrate sitting, standing, walking. But these huge transformations are built on increments. Incremental leads to development, to transformation—to the big shifts that we want. You can’t always see how the small steps are coming together until they do.

I had a child client many years ago who created a game we played together. He would draw a picture using as few lines as possible, and I had to guess what the picture would be. If I couldn’t guess, he would add a line. And then another, and then another until it became a picture. And even then there would be surprises. On one particular occasion, he finished the picture and said, “Do you know what it is now?” And I said, “No.” And he said, “It’s a portrait of you, if you were a duck.” So as you are putting pieces together, you have to be ready for surprises. You have to be willing to see yourself in a whole new light.

When I say that healing is incremental, what do I even mean? What I mean is that you have to work on the pieces in increments that can feel solid and doable. When I had kids who couldn’t make eye contact we worked on talking from behind a chair, and then from under a blanket, and then just wearing sunglasses, and then moments of eye contact. We built it up in increments until it was solid enough that we weren’t even paying attention to it anymore. With each of those increments we got to stretch and grow some new muscles. The problem with any trauma, physical, mental, emotional, relational—is that you can’t always know what got damaged—you don’t always know what the trauma shattered. It is often in the healing process that you come to understand what was hurt, and what needs to be healed.

And incremental is also what allows healing to be healing and not re-traumatizing. If you work in increments, you are responsibly paying attention to dosage—how much someone can manage and take in without it overwhelming their system. If it is incremental then it isn’t ‘happening’ to the person—they aren’t being put in a position where they feel out of control again.

Healing from anything big takes an incredible patience. A mighty patience. And more compassion and self-compassion than you imagined possible. For all the people involved—for the trauma survivor, for the people who are working with the survivor and the people who love the survivor. It takes a lot of patience to create your new picture one line at a time, not sure what will come of it. You may not want to see yourself as a duck. You didn’t want to end up with a beak. But, hey, those are also wings you are growing.

© Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD 2015

The thoughts from Moshe Feldenkrais in this article were inspired by Norman Doidge's new book. I will be reviewing it later in the week, but if you want to beat me to it, you can purchase it below. It's fabulous.


Mindful Monday: Mindful ways of seeing

Photo: H.N.W.

Photo: H.N.W.

“We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice. As a result of this act, what we see is brought within our reach—to touch something is to situate one self in relation to it. We never look at one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.”
— John Berger, Ways of Seeing

Mindful Mondays are a chance to hone your practice, to give yourself another way to renew, recharge and rejuvenate. As Jon Kabat Zinn states, ‘mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally.' Mindfulness can increase your capacity for self-awareness and self-control. It can help you feel more grounded. And while everyone can benefit from mindfulness, for people who have lived through trauma, mindfulness is a crucial skill for healing. It allows you to take on the work of healing in a healthy and sustainable way. It helps you stay connected to yourself and the physical world when the work of healing gets difficult. It rebuild self-awareness muscles.

Today we are going to look at the mindfulness of seeing, of looking, of taking in your world visually.

The funny thing about seeing is that you can be looking at something, the screen you are currently looking at, the road ahead of you, or the pile of papers you are sorting—and you can also be thinking of another event in your mind and be ‘seeing’ that event at the same time in your mind’s eye. Your capacity for visually engaging with information can come from outside stimulation or inside stimulation. In fact your mind is always moving so fast you are lucky if there are only two competing visuals.

So today, or for this week, let’s bring the practice of mindfulness to looking at your world. Take a moment even now to just look around wherever you are, just 10 seconds. Really look. Notice what you see, notice what the light hits, notice what you often ignore. Notice, as Jon Kabat Zinn stated:  on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally.

See if you can play with seeing and breathing. Breathing comfortably, notice what your eyes pay attention to as you breathe. Think about how you take in breath, how you absorb it. How the oxygen from the air gets absorbed into your cells. Now turn your attention to seeing. See if you can visually take in your world. See if you can feel yourself seeing so intently that you absorb it. Take in the colors, the light, the textures you are seeing, and let them get absorbed.

Over the course of the day today, take a moment and stop. And look. Really look at something. Breathe and really take in what you are seeing. Use moments of mindful seeing to bring you into the present. Just notice what effect is has. Notice if it is different for you depending upon your attention, what you are looking at, or the context you are in. There’s no right answer. There is only the discovery.

Mindful seeing can be your experience in quiet moments, or it can also be something that feels more playful. I got my first car ever, a 1978 Buick, during the Fall in 1988, and my commute to work was on the back roads in the towns near Boston. I created a game I called “Best Fall Tree of the Day.” I would drive to work each day and look at the fall trees with the plan to give out the prize for that day to the tree that was at its height of its autumn color.  And if you are really observing each tree you know exactly the tree that wins each day, there is never any question. It seems to shine and shout out, “I’m wonderful.” And I would just smile at the tree and congratulate it on its win. And the game would pick up the next morning.  

When autumn turned to winter I shifted the game to my evening commute and the ‘best Christmas lights display’ and in the spring and summer the prize was offered for the best garden flowers of the day.  You can create your own awards depending on your landscape or the crowds of people you see as you commute.

Mindful seeing is a wonderful way to practice the art of perspective taking. You can look at something at close range like a blade of grass or the snow on your car and look at it so closely it can lose its particulars. And you can look at something, like the skyline or the landscape, so that it can seem to take on a shape all of its own, like the picture above of the mountains making George Washington in repose.

And the practice is being able to see and shift your perspective. To see it as you see it and see it as an ant might see it and see it as a tree might see it. So this week, really look and see. Look at your world the way a tourist might, with fresh eyes. We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice. And what you look at and how you choose to look can be a source of mindfulness.

© Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD 2015

For more on Seeing:

For more on Mindfulness: