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“What’s a Trinity House?” It’s a question we hear a lot. As we unpack it, we often point to communion as its defining characteristic. Want to know if your home is a Trinity House? Ask yourself, “Do the habits and practices and spaces of our life build up communion among persons?” It might sound “churchy,” but it can be a helpful benchmark.

The most common form of communion in our Trinity Houses is just our conversations with one another. Do they reflect the deep mutuality, the knowing and loving, of the persons of the Holy Trinity, or do we often find ourselves slipping into “fight, flight or freeze” dynamics in our interactions with our spouse, kids, and neighbors?

At these moments, something seems to be blocking communion, our God-given desire to be seen, heard, and understood.  Whatever’s going on under the surface, it sure doesn’t feel good. It feels like your Trinity House is suddenly trending away from communion toward alienation. Fragmentation. Division. You’ve just bumped up against a communion inhibitor.

It’s interesting to note that we don’t need spiritual language to describe what’s happening when we “fight, flight or freeze.” In fact, neuroscience shows how our experience of alienation in such moments plays out in the brain. The communion inhibitors, unhealed wounds and sinful patterns, are represented by broken neural pathways that must be healed and transformed, physically, in order to be integrated into a healthy whole. But how does this healing and integration take place?

We haven’t studied much neurobiology, so we’ll take Christian counselor Adam Young, LCSW, as our guide. In his podcast, Young explains that such healing, “requires another to bear witness to our unhealed pain.” When “there is no witness to offer connection and care and presence,” pain or trauma “embeds in our bodies.” In other words, until you share the pain of your past with another, it resides in fragmented neural networks.

Young further explains, “When your nervous system is sufficiently supported by another settled, wise nervous system—i.e., another human being offering witness and presence—then your nervous system will heal naturally.” He continues, “God made your physical body to heal naturally, and God made your emotional, spiritual self to heal naturally as well.”

This act of being present for one another is called “limbic resonance.” Young explains, “Limbic resonance is a fancy way of saying that your brain needs to experience someone attuning to you and empathizing with your big emotions.” The “interpersonal joining” that results “creates the environment for the brain and body to heal.” And the “resonant circuitry” thus created helps us to “regulate our internal state” (translation: resist the “fight, flight or freeze” default modes).

Young situates the backstory of our brain wiring in the Trinity: “It’s how God set it up. It [our need for relationship] is the natural byproduct of being created in the image of The Relationship, capital T, capital R. In the beginning was ‘The Relationship,’ the triune God.” Of course, God can work miracles when it comes to our unhealed pain and sinful patterns. And of course, our recourse to the sacraments is integral to our ongoing healing. But on the natural level, the standard mode of healing and integration—through our brains and nervous systems—is to have us support one another, according to His image as a communion of persons.

This is truly good news! Alongside our spiritual growth in Level 1, Faith Life, in Level 2, Person & Relationships, we can also pursue emotional growth and healing from the self-sabotaging “fight, flight or freeze” dynamics in our relationships. Okay. Let’s bring this back to daily life. Here are three practical ways to engage in the listening, healing and integration Young is speaking of: 

• Get curious about your own “fight, flight or freeze” tendencies. Next time you feel yourself slipping into one of these unhealthy responses, take a deep breath, say a prayer for wisdom, and try to identify what damaged neural pathway may be bringing it about.
• Offer connection, care, and presence. God may use your listening skills to allow another to heal naturally.
• Try not to “pack it down.” Instead, as you encounter life’s inevitable pain, look for ways to “metabolize” it by talking it through with a loved one who can simply bear witness to what you have experienced.

Yes, we live in a therapeutic culture that finds a psychological answer for everything, and that can reinforce our inborn selfishness. Yes, we need to be careful about a tendency to supplant God with scientific data. That said, these dimensions of our psyche and relationships are intrinsically linked to the “temple of the Holy Spirit” that God has given each of us. As St. John Paul II wrote,

“Human maturity, and in particular affective maturity, requires a clear and strong training in freedom, which expresses itself in convinced and heartfelt obedience to the truth of one’s own being, to the meaning of one’s own existence, that is to the ‘sincere gift of self’ as the way and fundamental content of the authentic realization of self” (Pastores Dabo Vobis, 44).

What a powerful exhortation to treat our need for healing and integration seriously. In this lifetime, the day will probably never come when we are completely free of “fight, flight or freeze.” But by God’s grace—and by embracing the stunning way he has inscribed our very brains with an intricate need for relationship—even now we can experience a foretaste of heaven through gradual healing and increasing communion!