Brain Development: Why It Matters Podcast Episode

Now what’s absolutely amazing about brain development is to have a healthy thinking brain actually requires that you have a healthy survival brain, an emotion brain attachment. Welcome everyone to Breaking Bread, the podcast brought to you by Apostolic Christian Counseling and Family Services. Excellent as always, to have you along. Delighted to have with me Kirby Reutter from our Bastrop congregation and a therapist among many other things. Just delighted Kirby to have you on and to spend just a few minutes with you and glean from your experience and expertise. But before we get into today’s topic, Kirby, I would love for you to introduce yourself even more broadly than what I’ve just done. 

Where you hail from where you’re at currently. And briefly again, is that not possible? What do you do? Yeah, it’s a loaded question, but I hail from Connecticut, so I grew up in the Rockville Church now called Ellington. I married my beautiful bride in Ixtlán, Mexico. So that’s where I spent two years of my life learning Spanish. 

Then we also spent five and a half years in Vermont supporting a church plant there. And then I was at Gateway Woods for seven and a half years. Now we’ve been in Bastrop, Texas for going on nine years. So, this is the longest stretch that we’ve been anywhere, and this is home to us. 

Thanks for that. And children? Yes. Three boys. Ages 20, 15 and 13. Excellent. You did great with the ages on the spur of the moment but nobody’s checking. I’m not checking. My wife will. Yeah, I know what that’s like. Kirby, you’re in the trenches of helping people in a therapeutic way. Give us a little bit of background on your emphasis, your expertise, your studies and what you’ve done professionally. I would say that one of the main things I’ve come to specialize in is trauma work.  

So, based on the seven and a half years that I served at Gateway Woods as a counselor, it was incumbent upon me to learn how to work with trauma because trauma was a part of that. It was a huge part of the package of what we are dealing with. And then the last seven years? Yeah. So, starting in 2019, I’ve worked full-time with immigrants, so in particular, mostly asylum seekers, but regardless, people who have been apprehended by immigration authorities for various reasons. And pretty much by definition, these are people who have been, I would say, horrifically traumatized, in their countries of origin and their journeys to the US. Some of their experiences in just being apprehended and detained. 

We’re going to talk about brain development today and some of the work that you’ve done in trauma. The seed bed of that learning and practice is with this population at Gateway Woods and now among immigrants who have had some deep trauma. I just want to pause and thank you for the work that you’re doing with the vulnerable subgroup. 

No doubt that has impacted you in many ways. What would be one or two things that you would want to share with the audience about the population you work with? Probably the first thing that comes to mind is the incredible resilience of humans to survive horrific conditions that strain the imagination. 

The second thing that comes to mind, and this is where I’m going to risk getting a little bit preachy and that is, as the body of Christ, we need to see people as Jesus did and does. Whatever our political leanings are, and it’s never going to be my role to tell anyone how to think, but regardless of how we think, we need to think like Jesus. 

Wow. And Kirby, your point really makes a secondary point. And that is there are things that keep us from acting like Christ perhaps, or maybe seeing things as Christ would see them. And I think your point makes the larger point that causes us to be pretty introspective on where we’ve failed to do that and the reason for it. Thank you for the work that you’re doing.  

And so, I invited Kirby to talk about brain development, and we can’t really sum up brain development in 20 minutes. But Kirby, I think the insights that you can offer us would do well with a 20-minute version and probably have a lot to chew on but talk a little bit about brain development. Sketch it out for us. What do you mean by brain development and its impact on people? Why it matters. 

Yeah, I think brain development matters for a few reasons. One reason it matters is because the brain experiences extremely rapid growth early on in life. And the reason that’s important is because whatever a baby, a toddler, a young child is exposed to really does impact brain development moving forward. 

The brain develops in a very specific order. And so, each stage of brain development, or each phase I should say, sets the stage for subsequent phases. And so there can absolutely be this ripple effect. And the reason that’s important is because even once we have a developed brain, our brain still processes all current incoming information in light of those phases that the brain developed in and in light of the development. So, if the development is halted or skewed in some manner it is going to have lasting effects for the adult brain.  

Spell out for us lay people. What would be a way to see how the brain develops? You mentioned it happens quickly. Is there a shape to it? Yeah. So early on in life the first part of the brain that’s developing is what I call the survival brain. So, this is the part of the brain that drives all of our survival functions, and it does it automatically. For example, digestion, circulation, respiration, right? Things that we can think about if we want to, but we don’t have to. Those functions will carry on whether we think about them or not.  

But among those functions that we do automatically is fight, flight, or freeze. So that’s inborn, it’s innate, and we have those responses from birth and a way to view is as a reflex to the outside world. Even in babies you can see the instinct to turn away, the instinct to fight, the instinct to withdraw inward, right? So right away that’s fight, flight, or freeze in use. 

Yeah, and those are processes that are driven by the nervous system and in particular by the autonomic nervous system. In other words, a part of the nervous system that’s just completely automatic and a baby or a toddler can’t regulate their own survival brain in their own nervous system. 

That’s why babies need co-regulation. They need an attachment figure who does most of the regulation for them. Actually, they need a regulator, but over time the regulator becomes more and more internalized and, the regulator, the attachment figure becomes more co-regulation. 

Are the parents there at the beginning? Yes. And then ideally over time, very good co-regulation will work themselves out of a job, and then the individual can, for the most part, regulate on their own. A caregiver’s job is to protect a child from danger, from threat because a child can’t. But a baby will still be triggered, and they’ll still have those fight, flight, freeze responses. And that’s why they need that attachment figure to come in and regulate. But if the attachment figure is the one that’s causing harm, abuse, danger, and threat then that will skew brain development moving forward. Because what’s going to happen is that survival brain will overdevelop, right? Instead of the fight, flight, freeze response being mitigated and stabilized, it’ll become even more exaggerated.  

And the next part of the brain to develop is the emotion brain. So, if you’re interested in neuroanatomy, you can think of the limbic system. And so, assuming the survival brain is contained, stabilized, well-regulated by an attachment figure, then that’s the perfect setting for the emotion brain to develop and flourish. And in particular the full spectrum of emotions, ranging from positive emotions to negative emotions. And by calling them positive and negative, I hesitate to even use those terms, I’m certainly not implying good emotions versus bad emotions. Comfortable and uncomfortable maybe? Yes. That would be a much better way of describing them. And we need all of them. But what happens when you have a dysregulated survival brain that’s going to skew the subsequent development of the emotion brain.  

And in particular, what’s going to happen is the positive emotions will under develop because the brain learns early on you don’t really need them. And in fact, they might be a liability. Because if you feel this natural love towards a caregiver that’s abusing you, you are going to learn not to trust love, or that love’s a bad thing, not a good thing. So, while the positive emotions are under developing, the negative emotions are overdeveloping and in particular fear and anger. 

Why? Because those are the tools that this child needs to survive their environment. Those are the useful emotions. And so, if those are the motions that are developing at the expense of other motions, that’s also going to affect subsequent ongoing brain development. In particular the next phase of brain development is the attachment brain. And obviously, babies need attachment even before they’re born. But when there’s a well-developed, well-regulated survival brain and a fully developed emotion brain, that’s when children can actually start to notice and appreciate attachments. 

But once again, the extent to which they can do that hinges on the prior stages. So, if they have a well-regulated survival brain and if they have full spectrum of emotions, all of what you’re going to need for attachments, then you’ll be able to develop those secure attachments and find safety in them. 

Say a little bit more about the attachments. I think our listeners really understand that survival makes a ton of sense and the emotional makes a ton of sense. This attachment seems a bit more ethereal. What do you mean by the attachment brain? 

Yeah, so the attachment brain, you can also conceptualize this as part of the limbic system, but you can think of it as the part of the brain that knows it needs fellow humans to survive. And we literally have it in our brains. Attachment to people? Yes. Attachment to people. 

And there are different kinds of attachments that can result. So, we won’t go down that rabbit trail but basically, we have neurons, brain cells in our brain that literally communicate with brain cells in someone else’s brain, and they’re called mirror neurons. 

So, at a deeply subconscious, visceral level, our brains are communicating with other brains. And that’s why we have empathy, that’s why we can sense someone else’s emotions by picking up social cues. Yep. All of that. For all of that to develop requires attunement. It requires a caregiver to actually be paying attention to us, attuned to our needs, to our emotional states. 

You know, when all of that happens, when all of that clicks the attachment part of the brain develops well, which is absolutely foundational for a successful life. However, in contrast, if what we have going so far is survival brain, that’s out of whack because fight, flight and freeze is constantly being triggered, and the only emotions you have to work with are fear and anger. 

You certainly don’t have the tools you need for a solid, secure attachment. In fact, if you’re dealing with an unstable survival brain and only fear and anger, what you’ve already learned is that attachments aren’t safe. Those are the things you need to avoid because who’s hurting you are probably people, right? 

And that’s another tangent we could go on. We can be traumatized by many things, but it’s trauma that’s inflicted by fellow humans that hurts us the most by far. And so, it’s adaptive. If at a young age you’re being hurt by a caregiver or someone else, it’s adaptive that you learn to just stay away from relationships. 

That’s a powerful statement that the deepest trauma is people inflicted trauma. Is that another way to say it? Yeah, absolutely. As an example, you could be traumatized by falling off a ladder. You could be traumatized by a shark bite. You could be traumatized by a tornado, right? All of those are impersonal non-human, and that’s precisely why you are not going to react to those traumas the same way you would to a human because you don’t have a personal relationship with that ladder or that tornado or that shark. You have no expectations. But with humans, we do. With humans, we have deep connection whether we want it or not, right through those mirror neurons. 

Fellow humans are supposed to be image bearers of the Creator. And so, of course we have expectations for fellow humans that we don’t have for animals or inanimate objects. And therefore, when those expectations are not met, it registers as a very deep betrayal.  

So, what’s the fourth? Survival? Emotional attachment. Thank you for that clarification, because I think we all understand what you mean by the attachment brain, though. Yeah. So, with the final phase of brain development is the cognitive brain. This is the part of the brain and if you’re thinking in terms of neuroanatomy, you can think of the front part of the brain that we call the prefrontal cortex. 

This is the part of the brain that thinks rationally and makes decisions. This is the part of the brain that thinks about things like cause and effect. Short term versus long term pros and cons, right? This is the part of the brain that is logical but also abstract and theoretical. 

Now, what’s absolutely amazing about brain development is to have a healthy thinking brain actually requires that you have a healthy survival brain, emotional brain, and attachment brain. We wouldn’t necessarily think of it that way, right? We could think someone is just brilliant. They’re just innately very smart. And that could be the case. But if you have a survival brain that’s constantly firing off, fight, flight, freeze or you have an emotional brain that can only work with fear and anger, and you have an attachment brain that fears other humans, you’re not going to make the same decisions that other people make. 

Your thought process will be completely different and in a couple ways. One way is, if you’ve had healthy brain development up to this point, that means by definition that your experiences with the world, life, and people have been relatively positive. And so, you’ll see things through a much more positive lens. 

Whereas, if life has forced your survival, brain emotion and brain attachment to follow a different trajectory, which is adaptive for those circumstances. But by definition what that means is your experiences with life have not been that positive. And therefore, you’re going to see things through a much more negative lens because that has been your reality. This adds a lot of complexity and it’s maybe gentle pushback to the phrase, I can’t quote it exactly, but two rational people will agree because that’s the beauty of logic, right? 

You’ll come to the same conclusion, and I live in a math world where that type of thinking certainly works. But this really pushes back a little bit and says, no, two rational people are going to come to perhaps some different conclusions because of what is rational to them. Is that fair to say? Yeah, absolutely. Because the survival brain, the emotion brain, and the attachment brain all affect our thinking so much more than we realize. And you can’t just say we’ll put that all aside. You can’t. It’s part of your brain. And so, if we’re only going to be quote unquote, rational, that’s a fallacy.  

And too, we’re discounting so much more information that we also need that can’t be processed verbally, logically, rationally. But the tricky part is those other parts of the brain are so well hidden a lot of times to us and to others. And so, we see someone’s reactions and we think that’s so irrational. That’s not logical. They’re just using a different operating system than you are. Yeah, I really like that. In fact, it sounds like we could further geek out on this narrow point. I love how you said, language. So that language is very cognitive. Language is cognitive, but what’s the language of attachment? 

I’m not real sure. Or emotion. Not real sure about that. Or survival. Those are not language based, are they? Yeah. So, the thinking mind is very logical, linear and linguistic, which is amazing because so much of what we do as humans is verbal through language, and that’s one of the ways we’re different than animals, right? 

God created the universe with words, and the first thing he told Adam to do was use his words to name the animals. In other words, God gave Adam the superpower of words, and it truly is a superpower. However, most of what we do, including how we communicate, is nonverbal. As much of a gift language is, I would say our emotions are just as much of a gift, if not more because the beauty of emotions is that they can communicate outwards and there’s so much in life that can’t be expressed or understood verbally because words aren’t good enough.  

That makes sense. And another way, just really quickly that the cognitive brain can be affected by prior stages of brain development is if there’s an unstable survival brain. You only have fear and anger to work with, and attachments are rocky at best, your decision-making style is going to tend to be perceived as much more impulsive. And the reason for that is because in your mind, either in reality or in your mind, or both, you’re constantly dealing with a present threat. And so, you don’t have the time, the luxury to sit around contemplate pros and cons, cause and effect, short term and long term. 

That’s meaningless when you’re in present danger. When everything else is stable, you know that’s when the cognitive brain now has the luxury to think about things like time and how this will affect me in the future and how this will affect others. I really appreciate that, Kirby. Now talk to us about why this matters and how this impacts how you interact with people. Oh yeah, absolutely.  

Couples can be gridlocked on certain topics that keep coming up over and over and over again that never get resolved. Because they’re trying to duke it out with logic, with some kind of argument. You’re trying to make some kind of case for this or that without realizing there’s an entire history of emotionally charged experiences behind the topic that they’re gridlocked on. What does it look like? Both spouses bring those histories to the table, but they’re invisible. They’re not aware of them. And they’re non-linguistic, so they’re hard to talk about. Yeah. And they’ve been coded in feelings and emotions and attachments and reactions. 

Yeah. How do we live in an understanding way with this knowledge? Like in the example that you gave of a couple or working with a neighbor. How do we get beneath the surface in a way that’s reparative. Even in our own life. But from a trauma perspective, what you do is you float back to earlier and earlier experiences. 

So, whatever the current situation is triggering fight, flight, freeze and activating the limbic system. Chances are that present situation is reminiscent of an earlier situation which might be reminiscent of yet an earlier situation. All of these experiences are cumulative, and so all of that is feeding into a current situation. 

And so, it can be really helpful, especially when you’re trying to understand your own emotional intensity or someone else’s, to peel back the layers and identify earlier situations in which you felt that the same way. And a lot of times, you’ll get to a situation in which there really was some kind of threat or danger. 

And so, it’s no wonder that fight, flight, freeze was triggered. Are fear and anger keys? You mentioned that those are primary emotions. Are those helpful indicators that we should be paying attention to? Oh yeah, absolutely. And so, the tricky part with fear and anger is they trigger fear and anger in other people. 

And now everyone’s triggered and what can be really difficult for me to this day is when I am triggered by someone else’s anger, to be able to step back and validate that person’s anger and embrace it even when it’s hurting me. Because that fear and anger, all of the emotions were created by God, and God was very clear at every step in his creation that it was good. Except when he came to humans and he said it was very good and emotions were part of the package.  

And so, we can be quick to judge and criticize someone else’s anger. So, you have given us a key here, Kirby, in interacting with people to be able to absorb fear and anger. That would be a meaningful step forward in an interpersonal relationship to begin to understand what’s beneath the surface and indeed rewrite some things if needed. 

Yeah, to an extent a child, certainly they don’t have the brain functioning yet to absorb lots especially from a caregiver. And, as a spouse, if you’re on the receiving end of destructive anger, by no means is that healthy. But having said that, anger is still a normal, healthy human emotion, right? God was angry. Jesus was angry. And so, if we’re just going to shame and suppress and criticize anger, then that resolves nothing. I really appreciate that. And you qualified what is meant to absorb anger, and I really appreciate that. It would not be to take on abuse, but I think you nicely clarified that, but to absorb anger in the sense of allowing understanding that it’s human and absorbing it in whatever healthy way could be done.  

I think that’s really insightful. Because it actually gives me tools. Can you go on record saying that if a brain has been underdeveloped and poorly developed and we have an adult brain that is not healthy, that things can be righted, things can be corrected, a healthy brain can still indeed be in one’s future or are we stuck with it? Yeah, that’s a great question. On one hand, everything that I’ve been explaining so far probably does seem fatalistic, deterministic, especially in light of the fact that so much brain development happens early on in life.  

And if we have lots of adverse experiences in those early years, they really do have a disproportionate effect on brain development moving forward, that’s all true. Now, having said that, the brain also has this amazing ability, and we call it plasticity or malleability. So, the brain doesn’t keep generating new neurons throughout life in abundance. There’s some debate on whether that happens on a smaller scale, but regardless, what the brain does do throughout the lifetime is it keeps making new connections. 

The brain has hundreds of millions of neurons, and so if you just do the math of all of the connections that they can potentially make with each other. When learning happens, it’s new connections that the existing neurons are making. From a practical perspective the brain’s ability is almost infinite. The problem is we only live so long. So yes, the brain can keep learning new ways of thinking new skills, but this is the analogy I like to use.  

So, we all know that part of the rapid brain growth early on in life is language acquisition, right? That’s something kids just do automatically and fairly flawlessly. They just absorb a language and it’s miraculous from an adult perspective. Like, how do they do that? We don’t fully know. But it’s just one example of how quickly the brain develops early on at astonishing levels. If the brain of this person is also exposed to trauma, that’s also what they’re learning at astonishing levels. 

So later on in life, can the brain learn new ways of doing things? Yes, but it’s like learning a language later on in life compared to early on in life. You can do it. For example, I learned Spanish as an adult, but I’ll be the first to tell you, it was hard. It was brutally hard. It took years, and it will always be imperfect because I learned Spanish with my adult English-speaking brain, right? That was my operating system with which I learned Spanish. So, I can do it, but I speak with an accent. I don’t always get the words right. Sometimes I forget basic vocabulary. So that’s the same analogy that I think can apply to someone who’s been traumatized throughout childhood. 

Yes. They can learn a new way of thinking, a new way of doing life. But it’s the difference between learning your own native language as a toddler versus learning a new language as an adult. They can do it, but the grammar, so to speak, won’t always be spot on. They’ll do life with a heavy accent, so to speak. Yeah, no that’s good. And I mean that even more to the metaphor, you learn how to live with people with accents. You learn how to hear them. You learn how to listen. And that is just more to the point of living well together. 

And I think that’s really where this podcast finds itself, how do I live well with people? How do I understand how people think and how I think myself and what has impacted that? And I think you’re giving us the background or the science behind what we really do experience. 

I know Kirby, as you study this in your profession, as you research, as you work with people and you being a Christian, a believer. I’m interested in your insights into what you’ve learned about God, what you’ve learned about Christ, what you’ve learned about his design. I’ll let you answer this question however you want to, but why should we as believers know this? 

Yeah, that’s a great question. It’s very relevant to our Christianity and I would say having studied the brain has given me a much deeper appreciation for the Bible. In particular, all of the teachings on love and mercy and compassion, because we have no idea what’s going on in someone else’s brain that’s hidden from us. God sees it, but we don’t. Jesus had the advantage of being able to see into people’s brains. The Bible even says, they didn’t have to talk. He already knew their thoughts. We don’t have that advantage, but we do have the advantage of Jesus’ teachings, and he taught us clearly on how to treat other people because the whole idea of grace and redemption and salvation is because we’re all broken. All of our brains are broken. 

I’m not even getting into the soul or the spirit, but just at an organic level, none of us have had perfect brain functioning. But it’s so much easier to see how someone else’s brain is firing off in a way that we don’t appreciate and do not realize. Yeah. But we have the same brokenness. I really appreciate that and appreciate the work you do. What one thing would you encourage us with? As we now look across the dinner table at our spouse or our children, or across the backyard fence to our neighbor or our coworker, or even look into the news and see a person there, what should we take from this as we engage our world? 

Yeah, so Good Friday and Easter are just right in our rear-view mirror. What comes to mind is that Jesus on the cross did not have fight, flight, freeze. So even though that’s inborn, that’s innate, those are our reactions to threat. What that means to me is even when Jesus was hanging on the cross, he didn’t see humans as the threat, even though they were killing him. 

He realized the threat was spiritual. It was deeper than humans and their reactions. And so, that’s literally the only way to physiologically explain why Jesus didn’t have a fight, flight, freeze reaction. Eventually his body medically shut down, but we don’t read that he was fighting back. We don’t read that. He wasn’t trying to escape, and we don’t even read that he was mentally dissociating. The only explanation for that is he perceived nothing around him as a threat. And that’s what trips us up as humans and even as Christians when we see someone as a threat, we see our brother as a threat, or our spouse as a threat. Instead, Jesus only had compassion. I really appreciate it. I appreciate your time and I appreciate the work that you’re doing. Thanks for coming on the show. Thanks for allowing me to, it’s been a privilege.