Limbic v cortex thinking

[square]

I'm sure this has been discussed, but I was thinking about how PD thinking is apparently based in the limbic system and what that looks like.

The limbic system of the brain includes the amygdala, and it evolved in many species a long time ago. It deals with threats, survival, instinct, emotions.

The prefrontal cortex is the part of our brain that we consider most highly evolved and either mostly or entirely unique to humans (idk which). It includes logical processes, planning and other executive functions, metacognition, etc.

I've noticed how some PDs can be intelligent yet incredibly simplistic in how they see the world. I've mentioned my NPD ex boss had some incredibly childish theiries about what divided good potential hires or clients from bad ones, including zodiac signs, cultural membership, or value systems like following this or that diet. Brilliant guy, but in some ways he was a three year old saying "oh, that's a bad guy because he's wearing black."

The limbic system in fact deals with black and white, simplistic thinking. Decisions are narrowed down to A vs B, and there are no other options. It's a terrific system if you are suddenly faced with a lion - it acts quickly and doesn't waste time on optiins C, D, or E when you gotta decide right now.

I wonder if most PDs live in a state of almost PTSD level threat. But I'm not sure if ASPD does, they don't seem too bothered, idk.

With my H, I wonder ifit can also explain hiw he can seem to believe two very opposing things. I suspect PD is a somewhat secondary issue for him. When he is not as well (body inflammed, stressed, poir sleep) his limbic system seems to rule, he is an emotional, irrational, black and white thinker, and he sees threats everywhere.

But some days he seems better and his frontal cortex is online. In my H's case, I believe Iam describing a different phenomenon that the BPD process of being painted black vs white, or moving on the IDD triangle. When he is "well," he does not paint me white, does not love bomb, none of that. He's just a sane, empathetic, and insightful person. In this state, he could be triggered into the other state, but his threshold rises and he could tolerate a certain (low but not nil) amiunt of criticism.

It's mind boggling how he can apparently think I am the most evil person the world has ever produced, but also enjoy talking to me and sometimes appreciate my paeticular qualities. But it makes more sense if I realize that his limbic system believes I am evil (and it's always there but quiet sometimes) and his frontal cortex thinks normal balanced things about me (and sometimes it goes entirely offline).

I have those systems too, and my limbic aystem can and does take over at times. I know because when I am threatened, my thoughts get fuzzy and my language is poor. I may do a terrible job JADEing because the blood flow to my frontal cortex and lessened, and therefore my speech and logic fade as my amygdala prepares to protect my life from a threat.

My amygdala and frontal cortex have disagreements. My amygdala says "run!" and "fight!" while my cortex says "don't misbehave" and "don't overreact."

But my limbic system and cortex are WAY more in agreement than my H's are. Even when I feel the most threatened my him, I just think "I gotta get away!" and "I can't take this!" His limbic system says "Destroy! Eliminate threat!" His thinks I am what is wrong with the world. His frontal cortex thinks I'm a regular, flawed but reasonable human. I never think, no matter how threatened, that he is the WORST PERSON EVER or that he is responsible for everything wrong that ever happened to me.

But this two-minded system makes a bit more sense if I understand it as different parts of the brain.

[Cat of the Canals]

My amygdala and frontal cortex have disagreements. My amygdala says "run!" and "fight!" while my cortex says "don't misbehave" and "don't overreact."

Ahh, this is interesting. I'm reading the Pete Walker CPTSD book right now, and it never occurred to me that the "4F" trauma responses could be divided between two different systems of the brain. Fight/Flight being the amygdala and Freeze/Fawn being the cortex.

I wonder if most PDs live in a state of almost PTSD level threat. But I'm not sure if ASPD does, they don't seem too bothered, idk.

Is there a chance his not seeming bothered is actually a Freeze response, and he's actually in a somewhat dissociative state?

[square]

Fortunately, I've never been very close to an ASPD - just neighbors, coworkers, etc.

I don't think they feel fear, so don't think they react to tgreats. In fact, a coworker I classify as ASPD traits seemed to enjoy getting into threat situations. He both stirred up trouble and also was nit very reactive when (minorly) hurt physically on the job. Seemed more curious than threatened.

[square]

I like your idea about fight/flight being amygdala, and fawn being cortical. I think freeze could be either. There is a freeze that seems amygdala based, like a deer in headlights. But certainly the cortex can order a freeze too, I think - the self-conscious "don't make a scene" type of freeze.

[Cat of the Canals]

Fortunately, I've never been very close to an ASPD - just neighbors, coworkers, etc.

I don't think they feel fear, so don't think they react to tgreats. In fact, a coworker I classify as ASPD traits seemed to enjoy getting into threat situations. He both stirred up trouble and also was nit very reactive when (minorly) hurt physically on the job. Seemed more curious than threatened.

My bad... I misunderstood the ASPD comment as being about your H. I see now you were commenting about ASPD in general.

I think I remember reading a theory somewhere that sociopathy might be the result of a disconnect between the limbic system and the frontal lobe.

[square]

Very interesting!! Will have to look into that.

[NarcKiddo]

This is indeed interesting.

I am currently discussing my 4F reaction with my therapist.

I know my fight/flight instinct is on a hair trigger, no doubt due to growing up with uNPD mother. I have also learned that fight/flight does not actually work (with her). As a child, flight was not an option and if I ever tried fight it did not go at all well. So for most of my life, as soon as my fight/flight is triggered my freeze/fawn generally comes into play instead. To the point where I can't fully enjoy really good emotional moments because my default is "freeze until you have established what precise reaction is going to be acceptable and then exhibit that". It's a shame, actually, because I have recently had some really good results in the gym that I have been working on for, literally, years. And when they came they felt like an anti-climax because I suppressed my reaction to them.

uNPD mother, on the other hand, seems to react very much on what her amygdala is saying. My husband and I were discussing only the other day how truly childish and stupid she can be (and usually is), for a woman who is actually very intelligent. That said, whenever she was in the company of her own mother, who was a truly world-class narc, she did seem to be opting for the freeze/fawn options. So maybe her cortex was kicking in much as mine does when faced with her mother against whom she felt powerless, but did not bother when dealing with her kids over whom she had all the power.

[square]

Interesting idea.

I think there is communication between the two parts of the brain, but, yeah, it must be somewhat limited.

The limbic system doesn't formulate thoughts into words or logic, it just feels or intuits. An insightful cortex can notice the feelings and perhaps teanslate them but it's not even close to perfect. And people with low insight might not have any idea whatsoever what is going on.

I think a lot of what we do here isto help our cortexes notice what is going on in our own limbic systems.

I think my H's Dr Jekyll is kind of fuzzy about his memory or awareness of Mr Hyde. I do not believe he has any amnesia, he remembers, but not well or clearly. I think it can confuse him. Your idea does seem to fit.

When the limbic system is running the show, it takes few or no messagesfrom the cortex. When survival is at stake, your Shakesperean thoughts or John Locke notions of fairness are dead weight. The limbic system can be somewhat indirectly affected; you can concentrate on your breathing and mindfulness. But yeah, I would guess the communication is halting, they speak different languages. Your cortex has to send messages by breathing and noticing hiw you feel. Your limbic system gives you a fluttery stomach or a flash of rage but not necessarily a treatise in English on WHY.

Have more thoughts and sorry aboveis so disorganized, but will have to post now and come back later.

[treesgrowslowly]

Hi Square and everyone,

Really interesting insights Square. Thanks for bringing this up.

Brain wiring is fascinating to me. I think in terms of NPD stuff, learning about the brain and brain development sure helped me to better understand why the NPD's I've known don't seem to learn or change over time. Except I saw deterioration - with age, more memory loss, more confusion, more defensiveness, etc...

From what I have read, there is so much brain development that happens in the context of the environment especially the first few years of life. A lot of events can interrupt 'healthy' or typical brain development. Just the fact that the pre-frontal cortex can / should keep developing into our 20s, tells us that a lot can happen there - but what if some (or a lot) of that development doesn't happen?

Many therapists now are fond of saying that in therapy, people with trauma can learn how to get the brain parts to talk to one another (left side, right side etc...). And that therapy can help us to develop new neural pathways after trauma. I read a lot that seems to fall under that main idea these days. So then this explains why the general population can learn a lot by going to therapy, and improve how they think / react / behave....but sadly the NPD personality is so resistant to treatment. They don't think that their brain has a problem that needs 'fixing'.

I remember years ago learning from John Gottman about emotional flooding. Once that fight / flight system is set off, I remember him saying something about how that person won't be able to have a rational conversation for at least 20 minutes, because the fight or flight has flooded them with adrenaline or other things. He was talking about the average person, not a PD. So with someone whose brain is divided and not communicating with itself very well, it could be hard for them to even realize they are in fight or flight.

Like bookwork7 mentioned, some people don't seem to remember the rage they just went into. I myself have seen PD parents deny all sorts of things I know they did, like raging. Whether or not they actually remember or not is a mystery to me. There's so much denial and manipulation and lying during the normal course of relationship with them, hard to know when they were actually being truthful.

But yeah, if they really do forget their fight or flight limbic driven episodes, no wonder relationships with them are so stressful.

trees

[Starboard Song]

I love all this analysis, and love it better without the biological terms. That is, I think we all know there are distinct behavior types that we are concerned about and have to address. But I personally tend to avoid talk of brain parts and glands and what not. I have a concern that they can be over-prescriptive and can fool us with an air of scientific precision.

I start with the basics. A personality disorder is defined as simply have TOO MANY of the traits in a related list, TOO OFTEN, to a degree that is TOO SEVERE. One person diagnosed with a PD may indeed have a specific difference in biology going on, using this or that part of the brain, but many more may not.

And of course we are rarely even talking about diagnosed people. We are using the term PD because their behavior is so severe and chronic as to be not just confusing but confounding. And we specify this-or-that PD to communicate "you know, THAT KIND of problem."

But as I say, my concern is that we just take the science with a grain of salt. What we can definitely say is that overwhelmingly all the books and all of our shared experiences on this site tell us that there are common behaviors we can rely upon and need to address for our own peace of mind:

• Deep feelings of insecurity, injury, and isolation.
• Fight-or-flight reflexive sorts behavior.
• Black and white thinking, with little tolerance for gray scale (love-bombing and smear campaigns).
• Strong capacity to re-write history as needed for peace of mind (projection and gaslighting).

I just tend to stay at this known and well-understood level: they commonly act about like this. I know what tactics work. I know what I have to do. If I one day learned that my MIL is using her hypothalamus to insult me, it wouldn't change a thing.

No real critique here, just a little different approach.

[Starboard Song]

I think my H's Dr Jekyll is kind of fuzzy about his memory or awareness of Mr Hyde.

That is so accurate it hurts.

[falsebalance2]

I love all this analysis, and love it better without the biological terms. That is, I think we all know there are distinct behavior types that we are concerned about and have to address. But I personally tend to avoid talk of brain parts and glands and what not. I have a concern that they can be over-prescriptive and can fool us with an air of scientific precision.

I start with the basics. A personality disorder is defined as simply have TOO MANY of the traits in a related list, TOO OFTEN, to a degree that is TOO SEVERE. One person diagnosed with a PD may indeed have a specific difference in biology going on, using this or that part of the brain, but many more may not.

And of course we are rarely even talking about diagnosed people. We are using the term PD because their behavior is so severe and chronic as to be not just confusing but confounding. And we specify this-or-that PD to communicate "you know, THAT KIND of problem."

But as I say, my concern is that we just take the science with a grain of salt. What we can definitely say is that overwhelmingly all the books and all of our shared experiences on this site tell us that there are common behaviors we can rely upon and need to address for our own peace of mind:

• Deep feelings of insecurity, injury, and isolation.
• Fight-or-flight reflexive sorts behavior.
• Black and white thinking, with little tolerance for gray scale (love-bombing and smear campaigns).
• Strong capacity to re-write history as needed for peace of mind (projection and gaslighting).

I just tend to stay at this known and well-understood level: they commonly act about like this. I know what tactics work. I know what I have to do. If I one day learned that my MIL is using her hypothalamus to insult me, it wouldn't change a thing.

No real critique here, just a little different approach.

Starboard I liked your input.
if I get too far into biologic terms I feel I should accept the abuse because as even he would say he 'can't help it.' He has told me he knows his behaviors are 'wrong,' and wouldn't want 'someone treating his daughter this way,' but 'it sucks, but it is just what I do.'

He has used biology to make excuses for so long that I can get trapped by those thoughts of not being able to help it.

[Rose1]

I'm finding this quite fascinating.

I'm sure there is a physical issue there but if it is generic, acquired, or some predisposition made worse by family pd behaviour I'm not sure (I lean that way though).

It could explain why some kids in a family are more resilient than others.

Getting to the "they can't help it" thing. I think they can to some extent. Maybe not completely. Like people with PTSD can't really get rid of all of it. But we can do a lot. And so could a pd. Admittedly it would take hard work and I have yet to meet one who isn't in denial and relying heavily on "that's just the way I am". Learned behaviour takes some work to get over. Also I know there is awareness that the behaviour is hurtful. But no motivation to stop doing it.

I think it's an excuse to get what they want. The ones I know use bad behaviour or love bombing or both to get their way. Once they have what they want it's back to business as usual.

So do we need to put up with it because they can't help it? Even if that was true we should still do what we can to protect ourselves and our vulnerable people from it.

It's been said, I think by sot, if you see a car out of control coming towards you it matters little the motivation of the driver.

We don't stand there while they explain it is our fault we are about to be run over.

It's sad that people with pd have often had a very bad childhood. We can have compassion for what they have gone through but we don't have to hurt ourselves by getting in the way.

Sadly it can often take 50 years to figure all this out.

[bee well]

I appreciate both square's and Starboard Song's ways of looking at it. I've asked myself that potentially enabl-y question "Can they help it?" Then I think about how they only display toxic behaviour with certain people. That tells me they have a filter, and so on some level they know what they are doing. In any case, it ain't ok.

What Rose1 wrote is right on: "It's been said, I think by sot, if you see a car out of control coming towards you it matters little the motivation of the driver..."

[escapingman]

I am with Starboard on this one, as interesting this is, when I have gone into the science of what is wrong with my uNPDx before it always end up in me thinking she can't help it and I start thinking if it is curable and I just need to find the cure and get her to realise. I am not going there again.

But......

I find it much more interesting in the context of myself and how my brain has been damaged by the abuse and how I can try to fix myself. I notice it more now when I get into fight, flight or freeze. I can often stop myself when it happens now and then I can analyse it.

[losingmyself]

Right... from everyone.
EM brought up a good point. Nons can come to an 'ah ha' moment that changes something in our brains... we can, or at least I can feel a shift in how I feel because of certain realizations that I've come to. Such as, it's not me, it's him. Something so simple, yet mind-altering. The change in perspective can change how we see things and change our reactions.
I don't think my H has that ability to 'change his mind'.  I'm not sure PD's do. It is what it is, always has been, always will be. So, situations are good or bad, people are good or evil. There's no gray area, no 'letting things go'

[Boat Babe]

Very interesting thread.  When in conversation with my mother, which is occasionally possible if she's calm and in a good mood, I notice there's places she *will not go*.  We nearly get to a point where, if she were to just see the problem, it would make a huge and positive improvement to her life and our relationship. At this last point, inevitably, she'll swerve and avoid it. So bloody frustrating. Wether she is doing this consciously or not, I don't know. Therein lies the gulf between us.

[rockandhardplace]

I'm listening to the body keeps the score and find the idea that trauma affects our brains and our reactions so interesting. When I was trying to understand what was happening in my relationship- thick in the fog - one thing that I became aware of was me not agreeing with his perspective was being seen as an attack. I used to get so confused when he'd accuse me of being aggressive when he'd been yelling but now I have a video where he accuses me of being aggressive, trying to bully him as he's getting closer to me and knocks my phone out of my hand. That rage had started because he butted into a conversation I was having with my son about colonisation and intergenerational trauma - him saying how I was wrong. I'm happy to talk about our different perspectives but when he says I'm wrong I'm supposed to back down. I didn't and he started shouting over me. When I kept asking him to stop shouting over me he went into a real rage calling me childish and heaps of other names so I started recording him. In the video he calls me a number of horrible names and I barely get to speak as he'll talk over me again calling me this and that. Then again he does his favourite projection "you always blame other people for everything". It didn't  even have any relevance to our conversation so I asked what was he talking about which is when he told me I always do this and got closer and closer telling me I'm being aggressive and bullying him. I find it scary to watch but I also don't think that it's something that would happen to someone in control of their own thoughts. Me disagreeing with him feels like an attack. I suspect he does actually feel that I am the aggressor. There's a book called see what you made me do and the author interviewed lots of dv perpetrators and found that before an incident they often feel shame and powerless. Even tho the trigger is not in any rational sense an attack they feel attacked. Recently I misread a message from him as I try and skim what he says for anything relevant to our family but without having to read the abusive words. I keep thinking about it. Part was the skimming but also part was my trauma brain.  I was reading what i expected to see. The idea that the primitive/ survival brain is activated more often in PD's could explain a lot. But it doesn't explain how they can act like rational people when they are around others?