How Men and Women Fit: Finally Understand Your Partner with the 3 Brains Theory

How Men and Women Fit — finally understand your partner with the Three Brains Theory.

Copyright © 2019 by Christoffel Sneijders.

All rights reserved under the International Copyright Act and by the Copyright Act 1968 in Australia.

By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen.

No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of Christoffel Sneijders.

Digital version (short) e-book June 2019 ISBN-13: 978-0-6485934-2-3

Digital version (full) e-book July 2019 ISBN-13: 978-0-6485934-1-6

Print version (short) June 2019 ISBN-13: 978-0-6485934-0-9

Print version (full) July 2019 ISBN-13: 978-0-6485934-4-7

Index

LOVE AND RELATIONSHIPS ARE BETTER WITH THREE BRAINS

Intro: this book can change your life for good and for the better

SECTION I

HOW THE THREE BRAINS THEORY CAN CREATE THAT DESERVED HAPPY RELATIONSHIP

1. Five reasons why our three Brains struggle to form a happy relationship

2. Meet your Brains

SECTION II

HOW WE FAIL IN RELATIONSHIPS

3. We are conditioned to have unhealthy relationships

4. Trauma distorts our relationship compass

SECTION III

FIRST STEPS: UNDERSTANDING YOURSELF

5. Harmony: Three happy Brains is our default programming

6. Who is your interior boss? Your Head, Heart or Gut?

SECTION IV

UNDERSTAND YOUR PARTNER (AND THE EMOTIONS THAT RULE THEM)

7. Gut people: the seagull, the adaptor and survivor

8. Heart Brain people: the Labrador attitude

9. Head Brain people: have you ever kissed a cyborg?

10. Three Brains and sex

SECTION V

HOW DO THE THREE BRAINS WORK FOR YOUNG PEOPLE?

11. Children also have three Brains (But only two are booted up)

12. The pre-teen years, from two to three Brains

13. Teenagers, three Brains struggling for control

14. Children and divorce, Consistency is the key

SECTION VI

THE SOLUTION: LET´S MAKE IT HAPPEN!

15. Partnership: What are the two magic bullets?

16. Fifteen rules of engagement

17. The eight signs of a dominating or emotional Gut Brain

18. The seven steps to really connecting with the other person

19. Bonus: trigger words for our three Brains

SECTION VII

THREE BRAIN SCIENCE

20. The science behind our three Brains

21. Makeup of our three Brains and how they communicate

22. Recap, last words and a request

Acknowledgements

Love and relationships are better with three Brains

INTRO: THIS BOOK CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE FOR GOOD AND FOR THE BETTER

How many times have you been in conversation with a partner or loved one, and felt that you just couldn’t get through to them? You both understood the words , but neither of you was hearing the other? Like your brain was turned off. It’s frustrating. Disappointing. And it happens all the time.

How many times, after a conflict or disagreement, have you felt that it would have been different if you knew then what you came to understand later?

Why is it so hard to have a happy relationship? You would think that cutting-edge science would not be needed to address this question. After millions of years of evolution and tens of thousands of human societies, you’d think we’d have worked out by now how to understand, and get along with, one another. Philosophers and poets might have some insights, and I don’t want to tread on their turf.

However, as a therapist, coach, and associate professor of the science of behavioral organizational leadership and communication, I wonder what we have unlearned across the years, or what have we learned that is not actually true?

Why do people say the things they do? How do some words excite our emotions and others turn them off?

What is the connection between that gut-wrenching or passionate feeling in our heart, and our communication and interactions? And how can science have proven we react to stimuli seconds before we are consciously aware of them? Who is in charge inside us?¹.

When you talk to someone —even your partner— do you really understand their intended meaning? Is it clear to you what you want to get out of the conversation? Is it clear what the other person wants? Moreover, is there a shared understanding of where this interaction fits in the context of your relationship?

When you look at the science, you realize that human beings, the greatest thinking machines that have ever existed on this planet, don’t have much insight into how their own thinking processes work.

In the absence of a real grasp of what makes ourselves and others tick, we have been treated to one theory of the mind after another. Some theories claim to be scientific —based on observations and case studies. Others are metaphysical or philosophical —based on thinking deeply about people and humanity. Still more have been made up by well-meaning people or by charlatans out to make a buck. The shelves of bookstore self-help sections groan under the weight of tomes peddling one vapid insight after another.

This book is built around crucial new insights into the science of human thinking. Current research has upended the notion that we have in our heads a single powerful mind that is home to our thoughts, emotions, and reactions. In fact, science now tells us that we have not one, but three centers of thought and memory! Each one perceives, interprets, and reacts to the world in a distinctly different way.

In addition to our well-known thinking brain (which we will call the Head Brain), we have a feeling brain (which we will call our Heart Brain) and a third brain —at our core— whose job it is to keep us safe. We will call this self-preservation brain the Gut Brain.

When we get angry or upset, what triggers those feelings and emotions? If the Head Brain (or the mammal limbic, or reptilian cerebellum brain) was truly the only home to our thoughts and feelings, why is it so hard to talk ourselves out of feeling and emotion? When we feel bad, where do we feel bad? In our Head, in our Heart or in our Gut? When our hearts are broken or our guts are churning with anxiety, why is it that the dispassionately rational thoughts in our heads don’t make a dent in our emotions? When we’re inclined to blurt out things we know we shouldn’t say, what compels us to do it anyway?

When I ask these questions of my clients, my coachees, or the people I meet, they often try to explain that any shared understanding is next to impossible; especially when that interaction is with someone of the opposite sex. You know Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus, they tell me. So, it is obvious we speak different emotional languages.

We have come, in part thanks to that popular book and its ubiquitous metaphor, to take as a revealed truth that such misunderstandings are a natural result of ingrained gender differences. Nonsense. Or let me put it more clearly: NONSENSE!

Men and women do not come from different planets. We are all human. But being human is a complicated thing. It’s hard enough to understand what drives our own thinking and ways of communicating, much less interpret what someone who was raised and socialized differently is really meaning or thinking, when they may not even know themselves. The fact that men and women have a tough time fitting in with one another is no surprise when you broaden the picture to understand that people have trouble fitting in with other people! Gender is one factor. There are many, many others. In this book, the gender of you or your partner doesn’t matter. The insights and skills we develop will enhance every one of our relationships.

Now is the time to use that knowledge to solve the problems of our own relationships, and find happiness.

The evolution of an idea… from divorce to inspiration

The longer I worked as a therapist and coach, the more I felt that something was missing — I didn’t know what — in my understanding of how people were applying the insights I was helping them towards. Were the solutions we found to people’s problems in my office leading to better lives in the real world? Sometimes, it seemed not. Making an intellectual breakthrough was one thing. But true emotional healing and personal change were altogether different. Understanding did not always lead to healing.

The less I followed my logical thoughts in working with someone, and the more I followed my instinct, the more success I had. It did not make logical sense, even though the results showed it was the right path.

Sometimes, I observed that the behavioral changes I expected to flow from intellectual and emotional understandings were not happening. Other times, people who seemed immune to insight suddenly improved anyway.

It is a crisis of purpose and practice faced by many people in my field. You do the demanding work of verbalizing an issue or emotional malfunction and then… Nothing much changes. Unhealthy or destructive patterns persist. As the French would put it, Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. For many of my patients, it was painfully true that the more things changed, the more they stayed the same.

My life is no exception. Many people have an incident in their life that inspires them to do things that they had never thought possible. In my case, writing this book was not something I would ever have envisioned. Finding that I had something to say came to me gradually over time, after hitting a brick wall after my third divorce.

I forced myself to REthink and REfeel regarding relationships and personal heartbreak. The shock, depression, grief, and self-blame did not grow easier to bear with the experience of having failed again and again. I was repeatedly doing the same thing, hoping for a different result.

So, I took a deep dive to understand why I messed up in my own relationships and did my best to distinguish between the reasons we make the decisions we do, and why we communicate (or not) the way we do.

I came to feel and understand that there was much more going on than could be explained by my traditional training. It took me a long time to piece together what was really happening inside my own mind and that of my patients and coachees. I spent a lot of time thinking, observing, and pouring through the scientific literature in my field and many others. I came to understand that the part of the brain that we are educated to work with, was only part of a much larger picture. That picture has been forming for millions of years, as human beings have evolved the cognitive structures required to survive in the world, to understand it, and to make decisions.

I went back to my 30 years of work experience and searched for new learnings from a different angle. I analyzed my therapy/coaching clients even more than usual.

I started to experiment with connecting concepts and creating new ones in my neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) and clinical hypnotherapy training, and especially in the workshops, Awaken and Live your Potential and Connect, Coach and Lead from the Head, Heart and Gut. This gave me the insights to connect the dots. I built on them and discovered a whole new approach to understanding how people communicate —and fail to communicate and connect— in relationships.

The human brain (the one in our head) is an amazing thing. It’s the one reading this page and understanding the words and language, it is an amazing success story in evolutionary history. But it is only the servant of our Heart Brain and Gut Brain. Whatever insecurities you might have, know this: You are evolution’s triumph.

How could mere words flitting across the surfaces of our minds ever change anything, when what was really going on was far below the surface?

Before we begin, a couple of notes…

Do we really have three Brains?

Let’s be clear at this point: we are not talking in metaphors. This book is not built around some intellectual concept to help us think about how that one brain inside our skull works.

Our three Brains are real. There is a great deal of scientific research on the distinct roles, locations, and functions of the three very distinct cognitive structures we carry around in our head and body.

Before now, if Heart and Gut Brains were thought to exist at all, they were considered separate entities that existed and reacted independently and were not capable of communicating or collaborating with one another. We have come to know differently.

We will go into some detail about the science in the closing chapter of this book. Until then, the important thing is to understand what the three Brains are, and how they work. We can then apply the insights resulting from the research in practical ways to help us manage (and sometimes control) our own Brains and how we interact with others. Throughout this book, we move forward from scientific fact —that the Head, Heart and Gut Brains exist— to explore the ways we can use that knowledge to improve our Brains’ health and our lives.

In the past, the Heart and Gut Brains have been neglected (or dismissed) by Western scientific researchers. In therapy and coaching they are often referred to as the unconscious mind; you may have seen those pictures of icebergs, one tiny part above the water (our conscious mind) and 90% beneath the water (the sub- or unconscious). From this moment on, the subconscious is tangible and has a name: Heart and Gut Brain.

They don’t speak the same language as the Head Brain. Their decisions can seem illogical. They can be stubborn and, especially to people whose own Head Brains are dominant, like scientific researchers, what the other Brains contribute can be irritating and seem downright stupid.

But know this before you go one step further: Your Heart and Gut Brains are not stupid. Not one bit. Often, they are much more insightful and attuned to our needs than the Head Brain, which can be distracted and beguiled by shiny objects, bad information, and bogus comparisons. The Heart and Gut Brains experience and interpret our internal and external environments in their own ways. They analyze, remember, and make decisions about what we should do, even when it’s hard to put those reasons into words. Words are the Head Brain’s domain, and if it doesn’t understand something, it can’t articulate it. But, if we can screw on our Head Brain correctly, and educate it a bit, we can learn to listen to all three Brains and become wiser and happier in the process.

Stereotyping provides an excuse to blame the other in a failing relationship

Our Brains love to place things into categories. It saves time and energy, as well as intellectual effort. Categories are useful when thinking about some things. Look at a restaurant menu, divided into meat, fish, and vegetarian dishes. This makes it easy to see what is on offer. Categories are worse than useless. Lumping people into categories —be they men and women or some other way of dividing people into subsets of humanity— is just laziness. It’s a way of avoiding the effort of thinking.

So, it boggles the mind to see how many relationship guides, including ones that sell millions of copies, fall into using stereotypes —especially ones that ascribe certain ways of thinking or acting to men and women. It is easy to do— not because male brains and female brains are fundamentally different —but because, in most parts of the world, boys and girls are socialized differently and taught to value different aspects of themselves. When they grow up to become men and women, they often continue to think of themselves as being defined (or constrained) by culturally defined traits supposed to be characteristic of their gender. This is not a good thing, but it is true. When even the people who are the target of a stereotype start to believe it, you have a real problem. This is one reason stereotypes are so hard to eradicate.

One of my hopes for this book is that we can start to break out of stereotypical thinking. I hope the insights we discuss here will help people re-socialize themselves, so that those who have been encouraged to let their Head and Gut Brains dominate, learn to listen to their Heart Brain, while people who have been trained to prioritize what their Heart Brain advises, open up their hearts to some of the wisdom that they have been ignoring in their Head Brain and even more so in their Gut Brain.

However, your own Brains are configured, I hope to help you understand more about them, and to provide you with techniques, and a new mindset. If I (we) succeed, you will become a more centered, happier person, and a better partner in both your personal and professional life.

To achieve this, we must acknowledge that sometimes only one Brain is in charge, while at other times, a combination of two or all three Brains are involved in decision-making. With this knowledge, you will be capable of learning your own mindset and that of your partner, friends, and colleagues. With such a powerful tool at your disposal, you will be able to break free of stereotypes and say goodbye to many misunderstandings in your life.

Client examples

To illustrate the theory, and to show how our three Brains work and influence our relationships, I use many client cases throughout the book. In order to protect the identity of my clients, and to provide a richer example of what is happening with our three Brains, all the examples are a construction of two or more similar client cases.

1. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261605461_Predicting_theunpredictable_Critical_analysis_and_practical_implications_of_predictive_anticipatory_activity

SECTION I

HOW THE THREE BRAINS THEORY CAN CREATE THAT DESERVED HAPPY RELATIONSHIP

1

Five reasons why our three Brains struggle to form a happy relationship

There are two fundamental things that form the bedrock of all approaches to improving our lives and our relationships. One is understanding how we think and feel. The second is observing and empathizing with others, so that we can understand how they think and feel. Unless we can grasp the processes within ourselves that are blocking us from thinking/feeling clearly and making good decisions, we cannot change them. With luck and patience, we can sometimes also use our insights to help others or provide a model for them to follow.

Understanding how our three Brains work is the most important part of any quest for emotional connection and happiness. Until recently, the way we thought about thinking was misguided. We focused almost entirely on the talkative, intelligent, and reasoning parts of our thinking process: our Talking Head. We have ignored, or misunderstood, what goes on beneath the surface. We have overlooked the true power of the parts of our three Brains that (mostly wordlessly) feel, remember, think, react and, yes, control our decisions and our actions. We have not understood how our three Brains work. We know, often to our sorrow, that without this understanding, finding happiness, and creating satisfying relationships is much more difficult.

Reading this book and understanding the cutting-edge science behind the insights and techniques introduced cannot, of course, magically solve anyone’s relationship issues. But I will equip you with a new understanding that will make you much more likely to succeed.

In short, I aim to make you a happier person and help you create more stable and satisfying emotional relationships.

So why have therapies and self-help gurus gone wrong up to now? There are five main reasons.

REASON ONE: WE MISUNDERSTAND HOW OUR MIND (ONE VS THREE BRAINS) REALLY WORKS

In modern times, we have come to view the human mind as a singular thing. We tend to believe that all our thoughts, feelings and reactions to the world are controlled by a powerful computer in our heads. It is easy to understand how this has happened. It looks like a combined brain, the big blob of gray matter, the limbic mammal emotional brain and the reptilian cerebellum lodged inside our skulls. But, just as your lungs, heart, kidneys, liver, pancreas, and a constellation of other organs, are all crammed into the same abdominal cavity, so, too, your cranium houses three distinct thinking machines, two of which are operated by the Brains downstairs. As a matter of scientific fact, the one brain theory is fundamentally wrong.

In one way, it is another example of how we have ignored or forgotten insights from the past. A few thousand years ago, the Egyptians believed that the heart, rather than the head, was the source of human wisdom. The heart was, in their view, the center of our emotions, memory, soul, and personality.

In Hinduism the heart has a great significance both as a place where the soul rests and as a representative location of the abode of Brahman. It is the hub and the center of life.

In Buddhism, it is explicit that the