Hey there, it's Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson, and this week in the weekly vlog, I'm going to teach you the science behind the butterfly hug. This is not to be confused with a butterfly kiss, which is when you put your eyelashes next to somebody's skin and flutter your eyelashes and give them a butterfly kiss. That's not this. The butterfly hug is something you give to yourself, and it's a therapeutic technique that involves crossing your arms and then tapping yourself on the shoulders slowly or quickly in alternating taps.
Let me describe where it comes from. First, the butterfly hug was developed by two Mexican therapists in 1998 out of the need for some way to support the throngs of people who were traumatized after Hurricane Pauline. They developed this technique by blending tapping, which was already well studied and well understood at that point, and bilateral stimulation, which also had some good evidence base at that point. They put them together, bilateral stimulation and tapping, and they get the butterfly hug. It's now widely used in trauma work, EMDR for panic attacks, for helping people bring down their emotional arousal for helping people feel more grounded and self-resourced, and for helping people to process big time trauma or emotions.
This came up this past week in Bright Line Eating® Land when I was teaching this course called, "The Resourced Self," and in the first week, I taught everybody the butterfly hug, and I've been in there moderating the Circle community, and it was just such a hit. So many people said, I love the butterfly hug. I love the butterfly hug. Just all through the thread, everyone was mentioning the butterfly hug, and I thought, "Oh, I should probably teach this in a vlog. I think the broader community would like it because it's not just knowing that it helps, it's also understanding the science behind it. "
That's where I come in. I'm a neuroscientist. So, what's going on in the brain? Why does this work? Well, what's going on in the brain is when you cross your arms and then you tap yourself in alternating taps, what happens is the right hemisphere, which is controlling the left hand, is now tapping the right shoulder, which is controlled by the left hemisphere to feel it. And the right hand, which is controlled by the left hemisphere, is tapping the left shoulder, which is controlled by the right hemisphere to feel it. That coordination is being sent across the corpus callosum, which is the big bundle of nerve fibers that connects the left and right hemispheres together. It's a rapid fire of, in hemispheric and interhemispheric communication, the likes of which the brain and the body don't normally experience. You've got sensory motor cortex right behind the central sulcus here and motor cortex right in front of the central sulcus and the left and right sides are both firing all rapid fire, and then parietal cortex is having to integrate all that. The basal ganglia is having to help with the smooth muscle movements. The prefrontal cortex is having to activate just because it's an executive control function to say, "I'm going to do this," and to monitor yourself to actually get it done right. There's even some auditory cortex involved as the tapping sound is integrated and so forth. Then what happens is the parts of the brain that deal with emotional regulation, the limbic system, the amygdala, get online because rapid fire left and right, hemispheric integration signal that there's something big and emotional going on because the two hemispheres don't typically have to coordinate that rapidly. And so, as the brain goes, "Oh, there's some sort of big thing here for us to process," the limbic system comes online. We're talking about the amygdala, we're talking about the basal ganglia, the nucleus accumbens, and all of this extra activation. If there is some for a threat response or for heightened emotional arousal now gets to be integrated and processed, and the threat response can come down. That's going on in the brain. It's actually kind of a remarkable feat of coordination and just a way to give your brain the information that it's time to get regulated.
There's one more piece I need to give you here, which is that the speed at which you tap really matters. It will signal different things to your brain. If you cross your arms, you put your fingertips on your shoulders, sort of at your chest and your shoulders, and you tap fast. what that is signaling to the brain is one of two things. Either wake up like, hello, come online. If someone is in sort of a hypo aroused state, meaning numb, catatonic, staring into space, so traumatized that they can't get here online, if someone needs to be woken up to come back to the present, or if someone is actively trying to process a memory or a trauma, the fast tapping is what you want in that case, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Tap fast. If what you are is anxious in a panic attack, freaked out, wanting to calm yourself down and activate the sympathetic nervous system, sorry, the parasympathetic nervous system, you want to rest, digest, calm down. Then what you need to do is you need to tap slowly. So, now you're going boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, with deep breaths, deep breaths. Tap slowly, and that's what will help you come into the present moment, bring down that sympathetic arousal and transition into parasympathetic arousal. Get yourself grounded. The speed of tapping really matters.
The butterfly hug, it's fun, it's easy, it's portable, it's delightful, it's loving, it's self-caring. It's quick, it's effective. There's brain science behind it. Why wouldn't you fall in love with this technique? It's so fabulous. All right, that's the weekly vlog. I'm Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson. I'll see you next week.
