Turning the Tide: Neuroscience, Spirituality and My Path Toward Emotional Health

Copyright © 2017 Sylvia Bartley PhD.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

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ISBN: 978-1-5043-7798-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5043-7800-0 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5043-7799-7 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017904908

Balboa Press rev. date: 03/29/2017

CONTENTS

Foreword

Gratitudes

Introduction

Depression

Part I: The Personal

Part II: The Spiritual

Part III: The Scientific

Part IV: The Convergence

Epilogue

References

Bibliography

DEDICATION

To my baby brother Anthony

June 14th 1970 – October 10th 1971

FOREWORD

It is often said that our character is defined by what we do when we think no one is looking. Sylvia Bartley is one of those rare individuals who is the true embodiment of this axiom. As individuals, it is often our tendency to characterize others based on our observations of their destination rather than our understanding the journey to that destination. It is easy to assume that someone as accomplished as Dr. Bartley has a picture perfect life–beautiful children, a successful corporate career, and the respect and admiration of her community. What someone on the outside looking in may not appreciate, however, is that she was on the receiving end of an early childhood characterized by unimaginable personal heartbreak compounded by social messaging that threatened to crush any hopes of accomplishing her dreams. Turning the Tide is Dr. Bartley’s personal account of her journey from enduring emotional and near-devastating depression to thriving to a place of wholeness.

As a psychiatrist with a deep interest in the interplay between environmental influences and one’s experience of health, Turning the Tide speaks to my heart. Depression is often tiptoed around or spoken about only in hushed tones for fear of being considered weak or defective if one were to acknowledge being affected by signs or symptoms of emotional distress. By sharing her experience and understanding of neuroscience Dr. Bartley encourages us to do the opposite; to break the stigma, pay attention to our emotional health and manage it to the best of our abilities with mindful practices. As a neuroscientist, researcher, and spiritual practitioner, Dr. Bartley is in a unique position to understand the intersection between neuroscience and spirituality. This book brilliantly illustrates how these seemingly disparate fields converge in a powerful way. It is this convergence that has allowed Dr. Bartley to transcend adversity and discover the courage to live her truth as not just a physical body but as embodied consciousness. Turning the Tide also supports my belief that our genes do not determine our destiny. Lifestyle and environmental influences can dramatically alter the expression of our genes. As a result, our dis-ease does not define us but merely serves as a catalyst for further exploration of what our bodies may be trying to communicate via physical and emotional distress. If you have ever struggled with reconciling your rational understanding of the physical nature of the universe with your innate understanding of the nature of spirit, prepare to be delighted.

I first met Dr. Bartley while serving as a presenter at an annual leadership retreat for the Josie R. Johnson Fellowship Program–a program that seeks to identify and nurture future community leaders. I had been invited to speak to the Fellows at a leadership retreat on emotional trauma. Dr. Bartley took the podium shortly after my presentation and effortlessly captivated the room. She is a tall, elegant woman with a deep, rich voice and larger-than-life presence. When Dr. Bartley spoke, people took notice. As co-chair of the Board of Directors for the Minneapolis African American Leadership Forum, she is known as someone who regularly rubs shoulders with the who’s who of the Minneapolis philanthropic, corporate, and political elite. As the younger generation would say, she’s kind of a big deal. In spite of her many accomplishments, the thing that most stood out about her was not her social status or innumerable achievements, but her humble nature and truly beautiful spirit. I consider myself blessed to have been fortunate enough to forge a friendship with one of the most genuinely kind human beings that I have ever had the pleasure of knowing.

Yours in spirit,

—Reba Peoples

Psychiatrist, M.D.

To a scientist, viewing the world and life in the strictest sense means that most matters will be pretty textbook. Relationships, power struggles, violence, joy, sadness, and health can all be demystified to basic principles in biological or physical science or those under study. Where do faith, spirit, fate, or religion fit in, or how do they interface with science? When I was in high school one of my classrooms had a small sign with the famous 1954 quote from Albert Einstein: Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind. This notion brought me some comfort that both science and our spiritual faith can explain and account for our personal percepts. We all likely fit along some continuum of what balance best creates our sense of purpose or meaning and perhaps we each journey to find our personal equilibrium.

Now, years later, I am a neuroscientist, professor, father, and husband, and similar to Dr. Sylvia Bartley have seen medical science do wondrous things for those in need. And yet we are still mystified by many wondrous things that can’t be explained or whether our brain and soul are separate or one and the same. New technologies to study the brain have opened new windows to this query and have spurred new hot topics. The power of our minds over matter can create profound neurochemical responses to account for the placebo effect revealing that there is a pharmacy in our own brains ready to remedy our aliments or similarly how our moods can alter our immune health. Our body is far more sophisticated than our conscious minds can grasp, yet we can unleash powerful examples when our faith is put to the test.

In this remarkable journey of spirituality and science, Dr. Sylvia Bartley shares her many experiences that unite her inner faith with her objective training and career as a neuroscientist. Sylvia’s life has been unique and personal yet her path to transcendence and finding peace and emotional health will be relevant to all who seek such balance. Battling the remnants of racism and gender bias in a seemingly inclusive world, enduring the commitments of earning her PhD, standing up to the insensitive, caring for her family, and confronting personal demons builds the fabric of this fascinating autobiography. Sylvia is a dear friend and former colleague of many years and our paths have crossed many times on topics of how advances in medicine are for healing the individual as well as the patient. I invite you to share in her experiences to help foster enlightenment out of your life travels.

Gregory F. Molnar, PhD

Associate Professor—Department of Neurology at the

University of Minnesota School of Medicine

I write for those women who do not speak, for those who do not have a voice because they were so terrified, because we are taught to respect fear more than ourselves. We’ve been taught that silence would save us, but it won’t. –Audre Lorde

Audre Lorde described what so many of us have felt. We’ve all been there. A dark, closed and yet familiar place that we turn to when the pressures of work, family, or relationships threaten to overwhelm us. Here, we are invisible when life gets to be too much. We don’t want to be here but it is the place that we can count on. It seeks us out. It will not disappoint us. It is familiar. And it keeps us silent. Women, and black women in particular, have been taught to keep our feelings of sadness, fear, and pain to ourselves. We are told, be strong, that this, too, will pass. It does pass but not without taking a toll on our health in the process. Audre Lorde captures black women’s long and arduous history of marginalization and invisibility that has forced us to question our abilities, satisfy others first, do it all and bear it all, in silence.

In our community, we do not generally speak openly about emotional health or mental illness. We do not say depression, schizophrenia, or bipolar. We say, Tamara’s down today or Kim’s not herself or I’ve got the blues. We also tend not seek professional help for mental illness and when we do, we are often underdiagnosed or completely misdiagnosed within the mental health system. And black women who do seek therapy will often struggle with insurance limitations or the lack of culturally sensitive mental-health professionals who can meet our unique needs. All of this is understandable. The stress of racism, sexism, and classism has created an environment where we do not trust the seemingly good intentions of healthcare providers. Black women are at increased risk for mental-health problems and psychological distress. In our community, to be depressed is to be weak. So, to handle these stressors, we turn to our faith. We try to pray the pain away.

At the Black Women’s Health Imperative, we see how stress and pain are expressed in women’s health every day. Thirty-four years ago, we began as a self-care organization because there was a need for safe spaces for black women to talk about their pain, that to be silent about something so profound was to deny our very humanity. Research has shown that black women have elevated levels of the stress hormone cortisol in our bloodstreams. This triggers our inflammatory response and raises our risk for diabetes, hypertension, cancer, and other chronic conditions. It also increases our allostatic load, the wear and tear on our bodies. The effect of this wear and tear is that by the time we’re sixty, our bodies have aged five to seven years faster than those of our white counterparts.

While we may pride ourselves on being strong, the inconvenient truth is that we can no longer take a passive approach to meeting our mental-health needs. Thankfully, one woman had the courage to share her deeply personal experience to help us understand that we can take control of our mental health, that we are not victims and that science and spirituality combined are powerful force for healing.

In this book, Turning the Tide, Sylvia Bartley grants us an unvarnished view of her journey through depression, coping, vulnerability and, ultimately, awareness as she discovers that science and spirituality are, in fact, mutually reinforcing properties of emotional well-being. In many faith traditions, we are taught that science and spirituality are incongruent. One cannot be both a scientist and a woman of faith. That notion is disrupted here as we are shown how spirituality makes us healthier and how neuroscience underpins our modern spiritual concepts.

In the first chapter, The Personal, we are shown how Sylvia’s unusual experiences have contributed to her feelings of isolation and bold exploration. From growing up black in London, to surviving open heart surgery and not speaking for an entire year, to pursuing a PhD in neurophysiology as a mother of young children, Sylvia describes the self-doubt, humiliations, and fears that threatened to drag her to unrecoverable depths. Despite her brilliance and successes, she still questioned and denied her accomplishments as if somehow they had been accidental. What she would discover in Paris shook her to the very core and nearly ended her life.

The following chapters, The Spiritual and The Scientific, reveal the dark dream that haunts Sylvia, the evil she believes is hers to be a revelation. It put her on an incredible and grueling path to spiritual discovery and opened her mind to the possibility that science can lead to awakening. Research shows that meditation and spiritual practice can actually create new neural pathways in the brain that, in turn, make us more aware and more connected to our emotions and the ability to heal. Our brain chemistry, like our emotional state, is not fixed. We all have ANTS–automatic negative thoughts that result in FEAR–false evidence appearing real. In this book, one woman’s bravery shows us that we can peel back the layers of these thoughts to reveal truth of who we are. And that we can love who we see.

In the final chapter, The Convergence, the coping strategies we’ve all tried, denying our emotions, submerging ourselves in work, being the perfect parent, over-eating and many others are