This Is Your Mind. It’s Broken Into Pieces. Try This.

Source: Geoff Yates/iStockPhoto

In the mid-1980s, the Partnership for a Drug-Free America began the largest privately-run Public Service Announcement (PSA) campaign in history. The pinnacle of its campaign was the powerful 1987 television commercial, "This Is Your Brain On Drugs.”

This ad’s protagonist was a fresh, white-shelled egg. I’ll affectionately refer to her as Sunny. The narrator explains that Sunny is a representation of your brain. The camera then pans to Sunny’s nemesis, a hot, lightly greased skillet, and we’re told that it represents illegal drugs. Things do not go well for Sunny from here. We watch as Sunny smashes into the side of the skillet. Our hero breaks apart and, cracking wide open, her innards spill onto the hot grease. Sunny meets a terrible end, sizzling and burning as the narrator deadpans, “This is your brain on drugs.”

Everyone I spoke to who was old enough to remember this ad recalled it in striking detail. It’s little wonder, considering it is cited as one of the most influential commercials ever made and, since its launch, has been spoofed on television shows ranging from Saturday Night Live to Married With Children (2016).

Interestingly, this commercial teaches a bedrock truth, but not the one its writers and producers intended. This ad accurately explains that our minds, like Sunny the egg, are far more fragile than we imagine them to be. Our minds anticipate life experiences falling within a certain “range of tolerance,” and, if we have too many encounters outside this range, these minds of ours break into pieces.

Where this commercial goes astray is in its understanding of our mind’s nemesis, the skillet. At the time the ad was run—the mid-1980s—the two most popular street drugs among teens were marijuana and cocaine, and the ad’s skillet represents this illicit duo. But it turns out something completely different (and far more nefarious) puts our minds at risk, and shatters the vast majority of them…

The World Our Minds Anticipate

Writer Francis Weller (2015) tells the story of a young woman, about seventeen years of age, who he met when spending time in an African village many years ago. This teenage girl had an extensive burn scar on her face, but, to his surprise, her scar didn’t make her at all self-conscious. Instead, he found her happy, outgoing, and filled with vitality.

When Francis asked the village chief what had happened, the chief explained that, when she was very young, her mother had thrown boiling water on her in a fit of rage. But what happened next was transformative. The villagers responded immediately. They stopped everything they were doing and spent days with this little girl. They helped her recognize that what had happened had nothing to do with her: Her mother was wrong to do this. She would always be loved and cherished by her people.

This girl witnessed her worth reflected back to her in the words and in the eyes of her villagers. In this way, what happened remained a superficial scar. It never broke through her skin.

This is the world our minds anticipate when we arrive on this planet. Our minds evolved over our 200,000-year history, and for almost all that time, we called villages home, places where we routinely experienced a sense of connection and belonging to one another.

Our minds arrive prepared (and excited) for our villagers to welcome us, but they are a few thousand years too late for this warm reception. They land, instead, in a marketplace culture where, as we’ll now discover, these minds of ours experience ongoing events well outside their “range of tolerance.”

Our Minds in Jeopardy

We are recipients of a worldly welcome for which our minds are wholly unprepared. Instead of a village greeting us, two pairs of eyes welcome us, and two pairs of hands carry us home.

Unlike the villagers we anticipate, our two parents are exhausted (worn down by a modern culture demanding they make it on their own) and isolated (living in a culture insisting on individual lives). There is no way two tired, lonely parents can attend to and meet our ongoing childhood emotional and relational needs. This takes a village.

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At first, we experience small, subtle, and repeated failures in these early relationships: Our parents are emotionally absent when we run to them with our bumps and bruises and scraped knees, or they feel strangely distant when we longingly reach up for a much-needed hug or a tender kiss. We stand there expectantly waiting, but the touch we crave never comes, or what comes instead is distracted and misguided. Over time, it adds up, wearing away at our minds’ expectation that our village will be there for us.

In addition, we face difficult trials in childhood: A cherished grandparent unexpectedly dies of a heart attack and we tumble into grief and loss; or a car crash brings with it acute trauma that disrupts the carefree days of summer. Our compromised parents aren’t able to soothe our suffering, and we slowly sink into our sorrows.

Our young minds were never built to deal with so much of life by themselves, absent the emotional protection of the people surrounding us. This falls outside their “range of tolerance.” Things begin breaking apart…

Young Minds are Egocentric Creatures… and That Becomes a Problem.

When our Moms and our Dads let us down, our developing minds tell us it’s our fault. “There must be something wrong with us,” they declare.

We listen to our young minds and start rattling around inside of ourselves, looking for the parts and pieces that are making us hard to love. Maybe the trouble lies in our sadness or our anger or some other feeling we’re having; or perhaps our need for security or validation is the problem; maybe the issue lies in our physiology, with our appearance or our sexuality; or it’s in the thoughts we’re having and in the way we’re expressing them.

In each situation where we don’t feel loved, our minds decide which pieces of themselves are the unlovable ones. Then, our minds break apart: The feelings, needs, physiological experiences, and thoughts that are a part of our minds, but have been deemed love-resistant, are cast out whenever we’re afraid we won’t be loved.

To this very day, our minds continue splitting apart. When they’re scared we won’t get the love we crave, our minds still toss out the parts they deem unlovable.

It’s challenging to live with minds that are constantly breaking themselves into pieces…

When the Mind (and the Culture) Meet Stillness and Compassion

Ask your average psychologists-on-the-street-corner about our minds and they’ll tell you a version of this story: Our parents didn’t reliably respond to our childhood needs, and we experienced isolation and separation as a result. Our minds were entirely unprepared for this, and it caused them to break into pieces.

If all begins with our parents’ inability to consistently meet our needs, how and why do they fall short?

Consider the world our parents live in. Our parents weren’t taught to seek security through vulnerability and trust in their fellow human beings. They were told to build security by becoming accomplished and accumulating wealth. This caused our parents to become busy, overwhelmed, and isolated, keeping them from reliably meeting our needs.

Our parents didn’t choose this. It was our culture that took their attention away from us, creating a separation that pushed our minds outside their “range of tolerance,” causing our minds to break apart. Culture is the skillet our minds smacked into, cracking them into pieces like Sunny the egg, the protagonist of the 1980s PSA.

To keep the minds of future generations intact, we have our work cut out for us. We’ll have to strive for nothing short of cultural transformation, moving from an accomplishment-above-all-else culture into one that values relationships and belonging at least as much as accomplishment. Each of us can be a part of this transformation by “becoming the change we long to see in the world.”

You and I can bring our stillness and compassion into relationships with the people around us everyday. We can do this by making the repeated decision to consciously slow down to experience a rich relational presence with those who color our world. This allows us to live differently—more fully—than in a culture promoting accomplishment and separation as a way of life.

Over time, we might even create our own "little village," allowing us to enjoy the warm glow of mutuality instead of the isolation of individualism.

As we live this new way, we are able to do something that was out of reach for Sunny the egg: When we spend time being present and compassionate, the fragments of our minds come back together, returning home to wholeness.