pACC

One of my goals as a parent is to give my children the tools to navigate life's ups and downs. That's the benefit of progress: each generation has more access to mental health treatment and awareness of the neurological functions of our brains.

I'm still parsing out nature and nurture. What can be taught or re-wired and what is fixed.

One skill we're practicing is tolerance of uncomfortable emotions. My children have made great strides in identifying hard feelings and problem solving their way through them. Naming the emotion is a huge first step. Facilitating their own de-escalation is the second. During the past month I realized that I can and must begin to trust C in social situations. Yesterday it took a deliberate effort on my part not to hover while he played with his peers after school on the playground, but I did it. It was scary. It helped that he was with a group of good friends and I was with their parents, whom I trust. After an hour of play, he got tired and frustrated, but it was age-appropriate and did not spiral out of control. I was elated: our experiment worked and now we can replicate it! I trust him and he trusts himself.

After I dropped C off at home with my husband, B and I drove to equine therapy. A targeted area of therapy for both B and C is shame. It manifests as a staunch unwillingness to discuss anything they perceive as a mistake. The therapist and I agreed to schedule a parent appointment to debrief. I worried about whether this was something I had subconsciously imparted to my children ('cause guess who else suffers from shame? Yours truly). The therapist and I joked about the Brené Brown texts on our respective nightstands.

I briefly researched shame and related topics today, and what I learned blew my mind. I'll try to summarize.

• "Shame is ... an emotion that involves self-reflection and evaluation." It is different from guilt. Shame = I'm a bad person. Guilt = recognition that I did something bad

• Shame = I'm "inherently flawed." Some researchers think this is connected to an evolutionary desire to be socially attractive and gain a secure place in society; fear of losing one's status is linked to shame. It can be maladaptive; for example, it can encourage avoidance and anger rather than feelings of empathy and reparation through apology.

On the Origin of Shame: Does Shame Emerge from an Evolved Disease-Avoidance Architecture?, by John A. Terrizzi Jr. & Natalie J. Shook, Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 18 February 2020, https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnbeh.2020.00019/full (apologies for the lack of internal citations)

Wooooow. That rings true for C.

And: guess what area of the brain is involved in shame? Something called the anterior cingulate cortex, or ACC. I have absolutely zero idea what the ACC does, but I'd like to learn. I remember reading about the different brain structures of people with ADHD, autism or sensory processing disorder. Is there a connection? I'd bet yes.

I looked a little further, googling shame and ACC. A PhD named Virginia Sturm has done groundbreaking work on neurodegenerative disease. I would LOVE to meet this chick. I cannot comprehend most of the titles of her articles, but from what I gather she has studied "self-conscious emotional reactivity." "[R]ight pregenual anterior cingulate cortex (pACC) gray matter volume was the only brain region that was a significant predictor of self-conscious emotion." Role of right pregenual anterior cingulate cortex in self-conscious emotional reactivity, Sturm, Virginia E. et al, National Library of Medicine, NIH, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3624960/ It looks like the purpose of the study was to help dementia patients, but what if the information translates to kids like C or adults like me? If a decline in the pACC means less awareness for dementia patients, would an overactive or larger pACC mean higher sensitivity?

Yup. "[Virgnia Sturm] concluded that size dictated the emotional response: people with larger pregenual anterior cingulates experienced higher amounts of shame (and vice versa)." The Brain on Shame, Synergetic Play Therapy, https://synergeticplaytherapy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/handout10.pdf

Other articles:

A Complex Emotion, American Psychological Association, November 2012, https://www.apa.org/monitor/2012/11/emotion)

How Embarrassing: Researchers Pinpoint Self-Consciousness in the Brain, Dahlberg, Carrier Peyton, 1 September 2011, Scientific American, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-embarrassing/

So what does this mean? If shame is biological, how does one manage it? Have Brené Brown and Virginia Sturm met? The research is higher than my paygrade, but I'd like to continue to learn about this topic. There's support for acknowledging the feeling of shame as the genesis of managing it. In Brené Brown's The Gifts of Imperfection, she talks about recognizing "[w]hen the shame winds are whipping all around me":

The greatest gift of having done this work (the research and the personal work) is that I can recognize shame when it's happening. First, I know my physical symptoms .... I also know that the very best thing to do when this is happening feels totally counterintuitive: Practice courage and reach out! ... We need courage, compassion and connection. ASAP.

She also discusses the importance of sharing with the right people, the safe people. I need to read further, but this all makes sense to me. Recognize it, talk about it, and weather the storm. "I'm not afraid of storms, for I'm learning how to sail my ship." Louisa May Alcott