Almost twenty years ago, the night before a handful of his songs were being inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame, Leonard Cohen sat down for an interview with Shelagh Rogers. Cohen, the brilliant poet and musical artist most well known for the iconic song “Hallelujah,” died in 2016.
Cohen rarely did interviews, so this one was special. If you read through the transcript, you can tell that Rogers wants to grasp every last drop of insight from Cohen. She asks him about his history, his process, his perspectives on life. And she walks through several of his most famous songs, seemingly trying to construct a backstory and meaning for each one.
Cohen is open and reflective, and he offers as much as he can about how his songs got written. But ultimately, he tells Shelagh this: “If I knew where the good songs came from, I’d go there more often.”
There’s a way in which his response can be seen as almost mystical, acknowledging the limits of his conscious control on his creative process. It’s a sentiment echoed across artists, thinkers, and scientists, often with a hint of reverence or bewilderment, that their best work did not emerge from deliberate planning. Instead, it arrived unbidden, as if from elsewhere.
Cohen didn’t pretend to know where that place was, and I certainly don’t either. Some would certainly propose that it exists on some divine plane. But I’ll personally start a little closer to home – with a place that we have for too long dismissed and forgotten.
That place is in fact in fact of us – an entire hemisphere of our brain. The “right brain,” as it’s usually referred to due its orientation on the right side of our bodies, is considered the seat of creativity, intuition, and emotional processing. It’s where we perceive space, generate ideas, and interpret emotions, among countless other things. It’s contrasted with the left brain, the hemisphere responsible for reasoning, sequencing, assessing, and, perhaps most importantly, serving as the seat of language.
Despite it occupying half of our cerebral space and arguably guiding much more than half of our behavior, the right brain has been downplayed and forgotten in our culture. In what seems to me to be a grave irony, the field of psychology and the practice of therapy may be among the very worst forgetters.
What has it meant for therapy and for the practice of healing that we’ve dismissed an entire brain hemisphere? Well, it’s been nothing short of a tragedy.
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There’s the briefest of moments in therapy that happens just after someone finishes talking about something difficult. It exists in the space of just a second or two, maybe less, but it’s where you see the emotion connected to the memory or ideas that they were discussing come to the surface.
Stan Tatkin, a well-known couples therapist, clued me in to this. He advises to pay special attention to this moment after the talking is done. This is where the good stuff is.
It’s not that the story itself or the beliefs or concepts about the story aren’t important, but the process of telling a story is a regulatory process. Using our brains to put language to a memory is taking out some of the emotional charge. It’s down-shifting the experience from a felt, embodied one into a more linear, languaged one.
To be clear, this isn’t a bad thing. In fact, it’s an incredible mechanism. We can think of the ability to narrate to be a true gift to us as humans, as it lets us regulate and cope with otherwise overwhelming experiences. When hard or painful or frustrating things happen, being able to describe them lets us shift out of feeling mode and into thinking mode – at least during the telling.
But a lot of us have had the experience of talking about the same situations over and over again and yet not ultimately feeling any different. And that’s because when we are languaging, our brain resources are directed to the left brain. At the moment we stop – and before we do something else to not feel it, the emotion that the languaging was trying to explain or regulate can often be witnessed. The right brain is saying hello.
Good therapy, in my view, involves a complex interplay between left and right brain work. It has us practice both being in the feeling and making sense of it.
But why do we have to be in the feeling? It’s a valid question, especially when the feelings in question are ones that feel like they might overwhelm or even destroy us. To answer that, let’s talk a bit more about the role of the left and the right brains.
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When we were navigating the world as a small child, before we had our fancy language skills, our experiences were processed primarily through our right brains. We say that this hemisphere was dominant at that time, because it was taking in all kinds of information about the world, relationships between events and people, our sense of our bodies, our emotional states, and creating imprints. These imprints would then last a lifetime.
Starting to develop language was a process of categorizing the world. That is a chair. A chair has four legs. A chair can look all of these different ways. We can call a chair by all of these other names. Assigning words wasn’t just about verbalizing something – it was an internal process of sense-making. But by the time we were able to language our experience, so many of our imprints had already been created. We often then went back and applied our newfound language to our felt experiences.
This is important because most of us have long believed that the ways that we feel – our self-esteem, our anxieties, our expectations of others – are a function of what we think (I’m not smart enough; I can’t trust that they will come through for me.). But they are often a function of what we felt even long before we could put complex words to it.
This is also important because it gives us some wisdom into why purely cognitive or rational approaches often fail to result in lasting change. If we’ve struggled with our self-concept and we sit and write out a list of forty reasons we should like ourselves, we may get a little boost. But if it stops there, when we are laying in bed later tonight, we are almost always met with the same sinking feeling of self-reproach.
Staying in the left brain misses those deeper emotional imprints. It only goes so far. Rewiring these emotional pathways – what I’ll just call healing for now – requires that we actually work with the pathways directly. It’s a process of experience, not just explaining.
What is mind-blowing about good therapy is that it has the capacity to do this rewiring, this healing – even many, many decades after these imprints were laid. Allan Schore is a neuropsychologist and researcher who explains that healing happens at the edge of tolerance – when someone can safely access their dysregulated states – fear, shame, rage, grief – and can be helped to not dissociate from them. The therapist then provides co-regulation that makes those states bearable.
When emotional states are bearable, they can be integrated. To integrate means that we can experience them without having to check out to tolerate them. So much of what people enter therapy for is related to the ways they’ve been checking out from unintegrated emotions. They’ve been working too much, fighting with their partner, numbing with food, berating themselves all the time. These seem like problems to be solved, but they actually started as solutions – a way of adapting to tolerate what felt like too much.
Schore further explains that when a therapist and patient can co-regulate through difficult emotions in what he calls right-brain communication – through resonance and attunement – it repairs a sense of aloneness and lets the patient integrate even the oldest and most stuck emotional states.
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Given all this, why do so many therapists stay in the realm of the left brain? We keep people talking and talking and… talking. Again, left brain work is important to incorporate as well, but when it completely dominates the therapy process, people stay looping.
My own theory as to why we have so many left brain therapists in our culture is that many therapists went into the field because they were themselves tender-hearted and hurting people who found containment in… words. Psychology in our culture is all about categorizing, theorizing, and explaining. It makes sense to me that it would attract people for whom those systems felt regulating and reassuring.
What’s resulted is a field of practitioners who may over-rely on left brain approaches. Sometimes it’s because they haven’t yet done enough of their own work to be ready to sit in vulnerable emotional states all day. True co-regulation takes a lot out of you, to be fair. Sometimes it’s because staying in explaining or rationalizing makes us feel smart. Sometimes it’s because they haven’t been exposed to an alternative. We’ve privileged the left brain for so long that it can be hard to see beyond it.
But staying there in the left brain leaves so much on the table. It misses a crucial dimension of healing.
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Bringing the right brain into therapy can look all sorts of ways – ways that can sometimes be hard to even recognize.
At the most fundamental level, it might be a therapist inviting us to slow down or to bring awareness to the experience of our body as we talk. It could be the therapist asking us to tune into what’s happening between us, in the relational space in the room. It could be through invitations to express ourselves outside of language, such as through art, movement, or music. It could be through sustained eye contact or just being fully emotionally present and not seeming uncomfortable with the rawness of our emotions.
More explicitly bringing the right brain into therapy can involve techniques that directly draw on our right brain experience. EMDR is one modality that does this by inviting us to stop trying to actively describe or verbalize while still doing specific emotional processing. It’s also working to integrate the right and left brain experiences of hard memories or feared future states in a way that brings down the emotional charge and lets us look at them in new ways. Internal Family Systems (IFS) involves a similar process of helping us move beyond the immediate, languaged story and into a deeper emotional state of witnesses and processing.
This is also a way to think about what’s happening through Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy, which involves using a medicine to quiet the urge toward languaging and explaining and lets us be with our experience more directly. For people who have significantly struggled to quiet the Default Mode Network – our internal chatterbox – interventions like KAP can feel like a welcome access point to deeper processing and relief.
The right hemisphere learns through lived, embodied, emotionally-charged encounters. When we can access feelings that were once too overwhelming, but now within the container of a regulated relationship, the nervous system rewrites its implicit assumptions about danger, abandonment, or unworthiness.
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I was listening to a hospice nurse talk recently, and she was saying that at the end of people’s lives, they often just want their feet rubbed.
I was thinking about this, about the fact that in our final days, we’ve stopped looking for explanations. We’ve let go of the need to understand. We don’t even need a lot of words. What we crave is embodied – touch, relationship, presence.
But while we’re deep in the experience of living, we crave sense-making. We believe it will give us what we need to keep going. And that’s reasonable to want. It feels good to understand. As humans, we have lots of words at our disposal.
Mark Epstein, a psychiatrist and Buddhist teacher, says that we spend much of our lives trying as best as we can to understand ourselves. And once we feel enough coherence, then we can start to loosen our attachment to the ways we’ve come to understand ourselves – to the stories about ourselves that actually bind us.
This is the work of the best therapy, in my view. It lets us both explain and practice dropping the need to explain. It lets us cohere and fall apart and cohere again. And maybe fall apart again. It lets us be on the left and the right, and ultimately to be whole.
There’s a blaze of light in every word
It doesn’t matter which you heard
The holy or the broken Hallelujah.
