Book 15 of 2020: Mindsight by Daniel Siegel

I've been terrible at blogging the books I've read this year, but here we go...   Book 15 was a phenomenal read and combined some of my favorite subjects:  personal growth, how trauma affects the brain, and therapy techniques.   Dr. Siegel walks the reader through basic brain anatomy and function in a manner that helps the reader understand how memories, emotions, and modes of thinking emerge.   He discusses in depth a technique called "mindsight" for integrating the brain.    I highly recommend it.   Some of the information is repeated from his other books, but let's just face it...I have to have new information pounded into my brain. 

I use the "name it to tame it" technique with my children, clients, and myself.  This strategy takes the overwhelming emotions and recruits the higher functions of the cortex to apply a name to the feeling.  This helps someone who has "flipped their lid" (ie, in fight, flight, or freeze mode) to turn the higher circuits of thinking back online.


Here are some of my favorite quotes from the book.
"Well-being emerges when we create connections in our lives - when we learn to use mindsight to help the brain achieve and maintain integration, a process by which separate elements are linked together into a working whole."

"Finding a way to soothe excessively reactive limbic firing is crucial to rebalancing emotions and diminishing the harmful effects of chronic stress.  As we'll see, mindsight can help us recruit the higher areas of the brain to create a 'cortical override' of these limbic reactivities."

"In sum, experience creates the repeated neural firing that can lead to gene expression, protein production, and changes in both the genetic regulation of neurons and the structural connections in the brain.  By harnessing the power of awareness to strategically stimulate the brain's firing, mindsight enables us to voluntarily change a firing pattern that was laid down involuntarily."  (Ie, if you have a trauma past, there is hope!)