The Five Chemical Brainwashes
This article is a partial transcription and summary from my podcast Eavesdropping taken from episode 30, Five Chemical Washes of Life.
I met Aaron Hayes, my friend and fellow life-consultant in a mentoring program called Catalyst Mentoring where I worked for him as an administrator. Catalyst Mentoring trains men and women to mentor at-risk youth. Aaron has worked with hundreds of leaders and organizations, including, non-profits, businesses and churches. When Aaron worked as a pastor, he noticed his congregation going through changes emotionally and making life altering decisions during similar ages and stages of life. During this time, he remembered a concept he had learned in school. “The Five Chemical Brainwashes” is a concept which explains 5 stages in life where our bodies and brains go through the most chemical change.
What is it?
The first brainwash happens at birth. From the moment you come out of your mothers womb, the chemical makeup of your body completely changes. Your brain sends signals to your body, causing a chemical wash from your head to your toes. Those chemicals basically say, “wow, we're not in that warm little hot tub anymore. In order for us to survive, we need to change, develop and grow.” During this time, our brain is very plastic and new connections are forming.
There’s a saying that goes, “neurons that fire together wire together.” Say you’re born into a healthy home. When you cry, your mother comes and meets your needs. Maybe she changes your diaper, nurses you and you receive a healthy connection. Your brain makes the connection, “I have a need, when I cry, my need gets met.” Cry equals need met. Your brain fuses these neurons together and forms a new neural connection and eventually a preferred neural pathway.
The same is true if there's trauma. If you cry, but your needs don't get met, the brain forms a neural pathway which says “I cry and I don’t get my needs met.” Eventually, the neurons in your brain wire together for survival instead of safety. If a child sees how his dad solves conflict by getting violent, the mirror neurons in that child’s brain will mirror the situation and, we’re more likely to repeat it. For example, if I see when dad has conflict he solves it with violence, my brain makes the connection, “when I have conflict, I solve it with violence.”
As a child grows, these connections become preferred neural pathways. They’re not fixed, but when a child is abused, it can be really hard to work with them to form new neural pathways. Aaron explains his experience with one child who had come from a traumatic environment, “I worked with an elementary school aged child who was abused by his father and would run into the street at church every Sunday.” When his mother remarried a man who treated him really well, he eventually stopped running into the street. Then, at puberty, or the next chemical wash, he began to level out because he was safe from harm and his brain formed new neural pathways.
“I have power, what COULD I do with it?”
The next chemical wash happens at puberty. A lot of people think, “puberty, it’s all about sex.” But it’s not just sex. It’s a growing awareness of “whoa, I have power to influence and impact my world.” Sex just happens to be one of the coolest things we can do with power. Multiply ourselves! But we also develop an awareness of our influence in the world of our siblings, friends, and caretakers.
In addition to this awareness of power, our prefrontal cortex is developing. Our brain develops starting from the back to the front. The back of our brain, the reptilian brain, is the part of our brain that’s all reactive and develops first. Our prefrontal cortex, the forward, thinking, planning part of our brain is the last part of the brain to develop. When the 13 year old boy throws a rock, breaks a window and his mom asks, “what were you thinking?” and he says, “I don’t know,” he’s being honest!
When children experience trauma, the neurons that fired together and are now wired together, have put them in survival mode. Aaron remembers being told by his students to “F-off” every day for the first year of school. He had to ask the question, “why?” in order to gain an understanding of why his students might have been using their power to protect hurt others and protect themselves.
This chemical wash also provides an opportunity for the adolescent brain to form new neural pathways and can be an opportune time for students who are stuck in survival mode to break free from old patterns.
“I have power, what WILL I do with it?
The third brainwash is post adolescence. For women, it happens around age 23 to 27. For men it takes place around age 25 to 28. At this point, the prefrontal cortex is beginning to fully develop, so we are aiming our power and making plans with our life. You know a person is at this stage when you hear their angst about what they are going to do with their life. Will I get married? Raise a family? Biologically the post adolescent body is undergoing just as much chemical change as an adolescent in puberty, so the amount of chemical change in the body can leave someone feeling just as unstable as a pubescent teen.
Sometimes, these stages of development show up in all different ages due to trauma halting the natural progression of development. Trauma disrupts our natural growth and development as a human. Arrested Development is more than just a TV show. But it’s not funny when it’s your life. There are a lot of people who feel like a 15 year old in a 30 year old person's body. They’re going through a stage of development that was halted due to trauma at the age it normally occurs.
When Aaron was 27, he remembers feeling 15. As he went through post adolescence and into adulthood he felt a shift. He remembers a day when he followed through with everything he needed to do. “This is what it feels like!” He thought. His prefrontal cortex and forward thinking planning part of his brain had developed. He finally felt his age for the first time in his adult life. Prior to this, he had failed 36 units of college classes. After this key window of time, he was able to overcome the belief that he was stupid, graduate at the top of his class, and was awarded student teacher of the year. But he had to overcome his arrested development and allow for changes that were not only happening in post adolescence, but also never took place in childhood.
Is what I created WITH my power actually what I want out of life?
Can you guess when the next brainwash happens? You guessed it, 40. It’s the midlife crisis. Ever wonder why people get divorced at 40? Or why men run off with the secretary and buy a car? It’s because both men and women are facing the same amount of chemical change at 40 as a teenager at 13, but it can be hard to recognize because nobody talks about it.
Aaron watched one of his friends go through this change at 40. He had to grab him by the shoulders and tell him to, “take a deep breath. Don’t leave your wife. Take a cold shower.” The only difference between this wash and the one at puberty is, you have your prefrontal cortex completely developed, so you’re able to calculate the consequences of your choices.
The point at which a person hits this crisis happens in a window. For Aaron, it happened early. He hit this stage when he was about 37 because of the amount of stress he had undergone. He had built a 12,000 sq. ft. youth center, a non-profit and was hitting ceilings, but the stress brought him into his midlife crisis sooner. “Thankfully,” he says, “I watched a number of my friends do it poorly. Now, I’m thankful that I was able to observe how they did it and say, ‘that’s not what I will do.’”
For most people, this is the first time they recognize, “I’m closer to dying than I am to being born.” Aaron recognized, “I need to give myself some grace. What do you do when your son or daughter is 13 years old? You take it easy. You don’t match their emotion, or you’ll end up burning the entire house down. What you want to do is help a 13 year old regulate, the same is true as a college kid, or at midlife. The talk looks something like this, ‘Hey, don’t worry. You’re going to find your way. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in life, it’s that you have more than one shot at building your future. You’re going to try a bunch of different things.’”
Same goes for 40. Go back to the basics. Learn to self-regulate and support all the changes your body is experiencing. Have people you can call to encourage you, who won’t shame you for your messiness.
What IS my legacy?
The next stage happens from 65 to 70. It’s the point where you realize you have the last window of your life to start wrestling with legacy. Many people think that legacy is what you leave behind on the earth, but legacy is not the stuff you leave. The legacy question we’re talking about is from the Jewish tradition. What they believe, is that everybody has two deaths. The first death is when your physical body dies. The second death is when the last person on earth speaks your name with intention.
There are people who died penniless, but we still talk about them today. For example, Jesus. The bible said, “he didn’t have a pillow to sleep on.” Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Mother Teresa. All of these people didn’t have much in terms of worldly possessions, but their legacy was enormous. As a young person, you can start thinking about legacy, but it’s hard to see it as more than a concept. At 40, if you’ve done some healing work, you can see it and actually grasp the weight of it. But when you get to 65, and 70 you realize your time on earth is limited. Have you ever been around older people and experienced a sense of peace, belonging, connection and deep intention? Like you’re the only person there? You matter. This moment matters. There can be such a deep intention in the way they spend their time. As they say, as you get older, time speeds up. When you ask older wise people what their greatest asset is, they say, “time.”
The last chemical wash is about legacy. What will you do with your time that will impact people’s lives in such a way that they’ll remember you after you’re dead? “For me,” says Melanie, “It’s not the world, it’s that I want my children’s children to know about me. I want them to know what I fought for, for this family.”
Recap
As we experience these chemical washes, will we stay in a place of survival? Or choose into the healing opportunity these stages present to us?
How do you treat yourself? This is how you will treat others.
Where are you in relationship to your ‘power’?
Are you just beginning to recognize you have power?
Are you looking for how to aim your power and what to aim it towards? (You are aware you have power, now what?)
Are you at a place where you look around, and your concern is that you’ve wasted your power?
Are you aware of your power and want to see it have lasting impact? (Who do you want to remember your name?)
Have you gained a greater understanding or compassion for yourself through reading about the amount of chemical changes your body experiences throughout your life?
Whatever stage you may find yourself in, I hope you can be kind to yourself.
This blog was created by Breanna Lee
You can listen to Aaron Hayes speak on this subject on episode 30 of Eavesdropping: A Conversation with Two Life Consultants. You can find it here or anywhere you listen to podcasts.