Interpersonal Neurobiology: A Personal Reflection on Christian Community

Written by Matthew Sabatine

Image credits belong to: Anemone123 | Pixabay

“A cheerful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones.” Proverbs 17:22

“My son, pay attention to what I say; turn your ear to my words. Do not let them out of your sight, keep them within your heart; for they are life to those who find them and health to one’s whole body.” Proverbs 4:20-22

After a week of minimal prayer, I have observed and realized something within me: I have had increased negative thoughts/emotions, irritability, impatience, less resilience, and more anxiety. Though I am no longer an atheist, I can start to feel some old atheist mantras and records wanting to play again in the background of my mind. 

Some examples are: 

“Oh Matthew, God is just in your head.”

“You have not felt His presence in recent days/weeks because he has abandoned you.” 

“You see, His presence happens solely because of your internal chemistry and physiology.” 

“You must not be doing something right to reward your body and brain with the felt experience of God’s presence.” 

“Your heavenly Father is a defective father who is no better than any earthly father who has abandoned his earthly children.” 

As my own mind tries to swindle me, I want to lay it on the table and expose its insincere talk for what it is. I think these internal messages can happen in various ways.

There are so many on the surface as well as beneath the surface. They all cannot possibly be counted or uncovered, entirely. But I think this transparency of public writing really helps me to change my thought patterns and feel better. 

I think it is not unnatural for those old messages to want to have a resurgence so they can change and reshape the inner narrative back to what it once was. Those old tapes may be formidable, but I do not have to let them overtake me, since I do not want to ignore God nor disbelieve in Him nor live without Him, again.

I think this raw confession about my inner monologue does not unveil a falsely converted Christian nor someone who is running from some unrealized atheist secretly residing within. I think this actually unveils an ongoing journey out of atheism. It unveils a battle against an old mindset that wants to steal from me the new person I see myself to be. This is a spiritual battle that I see, not only because the Bible tells me so, but because of what I see when I consider the collective happenings of society (e.g., cultural values vying against each other in media and on the streets) that eventually infiltrate my mind as well as yours. 

I have missed several weeks of church, as I have been quarantining myself due to the concern of being an asymptomatic carrier of Covid-19. I have neglected prayerful thinking and stillness with God due to a preoccupation with demonstrating my intellectual prowess online. I see a difference in my moods and emotions now compared to how they seem in those periods when I keep prayer-time, Scripture-reading, church attendance, and relaxation in equilibrium with intellectual brawls over logic, reason, science, and evidence. 

When I consider the scientific data on the health benefits of prayer, intuitively it makes sense to me to say that prayer will help me to feel better even if my unwanted, old atheistic feelings are not dispelled immediately at my command.  

The Scientific Data on Religion’s Health Benefits

In 2019, the Pew Research Center took data from more than 24 countries, including the United States. In its opening statements, it tells us that religious people are likely “to be happier and more civically engaged” than their opposites.  Previous research has found greater longevity among religious people than non-religious people, even though the Pew Research Center realizes that religious people do not report greater health in terms of less obesity and better physical exercise. They admit to finding “mixed results” from making “five health measures.” However, they clearly state that consistent involvement in a religious community is linked to greater happiness and more collective actions done to address public issues (i.e., civic engagement), which could explain why we tend to find “mixed results” among those who are nominally religious or intermittently practicing.

That would shed further light on the prospect that society’s diminished religious activity puts us on track to diminished well-being, even if that same study also finds that religion alone cannot guarantee greater happiness and civic engagement.      

Interpersonal Neurobiology: A Dimension of Christian Spirituality 

Board-certified psychiatrist and Christian author, Curt Thompson, wrote a 2010 book titled Anatomy of the Soul: The Surprising Connections Between Neuroscience and Spiritual Practices that Can Transform Your Life and Relationships.

There, Thompson discusses a Christian woman by the name of Cara who saw him in his professional practice. She was in her early thirties and was hankering for the kind of committed romance, professional success, and happiness she saw in her friends. She experienced anxiety and some poor habits involving eating and alcohol consumption that were her strategy for dealing with her chagrin and sorrows about life. Her discovery of Christ in college gave her a hope and confidence she did not previously possess, but she still felt an emotional struggle that left her feeling, not exactly suicidal, but rather indifferent to the prospect of dying sometime soon. The fear of Hell was the main thing keeping her from suicide.

Unfortunately, this kind of story is unsurprising to me and is likely more commonplace in Christianity than we Christians want to admit or realize.

Cara grew up with a family who had conversations that were galvanizing to the intellect but not to the emotions. The deprivation of emotional conversations is perhaps to be expected from her situation, since her father passed away when she was 14, and her mother dealt with that by becoming overly preoccupied with work. 

Thompson states on page 2: 

“Cara had tried psychotherapy. She had tried medication. She had prayed. She had read Scripture and devotional literature. She was part of a worshiping community and a small group of women who met regularly to deepen their spiritual lives. These helped, but nothing sustained any sense of stability or confidence. Most troubling to her, she could not understand why her relationship with Jesus did not seem to make a difference. Why was her psychological distress so unresponsive to prayer? Why was God so unresponsive to her plight?”  

Let me dovetail that with the Pew Research Center’s statement:  

“In the U.S. and elsewhere, actively religious people are less likely than others to engage in certain behaviors that are sometimes viewed as sinful, such as smoking tobacco and drinking alcohol.” 

Cara’s story apparently contrasts with the Pew Research Center’s data. However, the words “less likely” signify to me a conditional circumstance. Cara may be an outlier, but an outlier does not undermine what we can still infer from the specific people to which data speaks about. That inference tells us that a relationship with God can benefit people’s health. Once we consider Curt Thompson’s perspective, Cara does not have to remain an outlier, intrinsically. 

I want to attest to this based on my history with drunken revelries, bouts of cigarette-smoking, and noncommittal romps in the bed throughout my twenties and early thirties. Today, I admit to the occasional drink or cigarette that I intend to minimize into eventual abstinence. The noncommittal sex was fun while it lasted but now feels lackluster in such a way that makes me feel healthier in keeping it sacred.

I want to remind you of Proverbs 4:20-22 which promises health and vitality:

“My son, pay attention to what I say; turn your ear to my words. Do not let them out of your sight, keep them within your heart; for they are life to those who find them and health to one’s whole body.”

However, it is not surprising to me that any one of us would experience a faltering health status when moving away from God’s truth. The consequence of wavering health is why He tells us to keep our eyes on Him. We must remain steadfast, focused, enthusiastic, and not lukewarm, even in times of weakness and darkness.

The National Library of Medicine published a 2009 report on a systematic and formal inquiry into prayer’s impact on “depression, anxiety, positive emotions, and salivary cortisol levels.” This test took place in an office where the subjects were 95% women who received the same two or more treatments in a sequence determined by the group into which they were indiscriminately placed. This is called a “cross-over clinical trial.” One group had six weeks of “person-to-person” prayer with each session lasting for 1 hour while the other group had no prayer. Cortisol levels were measured in both groups after finishing the prayer sessions. 

The reported results showed that the prayerful participants had markedly decreased their depression and anxiety as well as boosting their hopefulness and confidence about the future, which were upswings they could keep for at least 1 month, compared to the control group of non-prayerful participants who did not show any noteworthy changes.   

The conclusion of the report stated: 

“Direct contact person-to-person prayer may be useful as an adjunct to standard medical care for patients with depression and anxiety. Further research in this area is indicated.” 

Yes, further research is usually needed in science, since science is progressive and ever-evolving. Contrast that with the Pew Research Center’s 2019 report on mixed results about the positive versus neutral versus negative effects of religiosity, and we should have a public conversation that may be ongoing until the day we all die.  

Curt Thompson’s proposal on spiritual health involves discoveries in neuroscience, interpersonal connections, and a relationship with God that all should be used cohesively to address the issue. 

Thompson reflects on the human need ‘to be known’ by others, which is a need that coexists with factually knowing things in general. Unfortunately, and to our detriment, the West is obsessed with gathering and reciting facts and proofs, to the extent that we prioritize it over feeling known by God and others.

Anecdotally and intuitively speaking, I feel that many of my social media debates about God with people plentifully reflect this. For many people, even those who claim to believe, God’s existence can be impugned if He does not have a demonstrability that is ready at anyone’s command. I think that this is due to the anatomy of the brain: the left hemisphere is more concerned with logically analyzing things in parts versus the right hemisphere which is more concerned with interpreting things from an emotional, holistic perspective. 

This is not meant to promote the pop psychology myth of a strict dichotomy between both brain hemispheres. Researchers are figuring out that our lateralized, hemispheric sides collaborate together on a variety of tasks to communicate through the middle bundle of fibers called the corpus callosum. However, in spite of that, and because of the above-mentioned brain anatomy, I suspect that conversations about the empirical evidence or non-evidence for God are dominated by left-hemispheric obsessions. 

Thompson states something similar in his book on page 8:

“This book is not primarily about presenting data. That form of engagement is overshadowed by a left-brain mode of mental operation that encounters the world in a logical, linear fashion. This manner of processing is absolutely necessary and good, but it has crescendoed over the last four hundred years to dominate our cultural way of thinking to the extent that the other equally important ways of perceiving the world, namely those related to the right brain, are relatively underappreciated. Research is important and helpful, but it is not to be worshiped.” 

Much of this is echoed in the work of Iain McGilchrist who decries a mode of arrogantly assuming that the right hemisphere, in its representation of emotionality and holism, is inferior to the left hemisphere, in its representation of logical and sequential rigor. 

Based on my experiences with social media debates and personal reflections on the nature of logic, the sequential and verbal steps that must be used to become ‘the knower’ disengage me from ‘becoming known’ in conversation. Being the knower may make me feel elevated in the social hierarchy, above who or what is being known. But if I am higher, I am not submitting. And if submission is the key to feeling loved, then it makes sense to say I am less likely to feel God’s love as I am using the sequential, reductionistic analytics of my left hemisphere to elevate myself as an intellectual human. Winning a social media debate can feel rewarding but not without a cost, which could be this: a fixation on one-upping my interlocutors can be interpersonally isolating. 

Hence, Thompson states: 

“it is only when we are known that we are positioned to become conduits of love. And it is love that transforms our minds, makes forgiveness possible, and weaves a community of disparate people into the tapestry of God’s family.” 

This pathway of understanding interpersonal neurobiology, synthesized with my relationship with Christ, now helps me to make sense of why our conversations with other humans about God and religion either go awry or remain pleasant. After many years of being offended by numerous improprieties during conversations on this topic, I feel like I am finally making sense of why and how this happens…personally for me…at least.

But what about you?

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