Your brain/behavioural lateralization is not just your “handedness.” It’s the neurological dominance of one side of your nervous system in many kinds of perception, action, threat response, motor patterns, and especially social actions such as territory, belonging, and sexuality.

Structural and functional lateralization occurs not just in social mammals or humans. In comparative neurobiology, lateralization is widely observed across vertebrates, including fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals.

One side of your nervous system became dominant at the moment of first cell division after conception, when you went from a “zygote” (a fertilized egg) to an “embryo” (a multicellular organism).

(Interestingly, in identical twins, at the first cell division, the two cells remain separate. Each of these two cells then divides to become an embryo. But one of the twins will be left-dominant and the other will be right-dominant)

Mother-Child vs Partner

Think of your dominant side as your “sword arm” and your non-dominant side as your “shield arm.” Certain people and animals that you know will be those you protect unconditionally and expect to be protected and cared for unconditionally, like a mother with a baby. Others are those that encourage you, give you “tough love,” or outright compete with you.

You “map” everyone you know into one of these two categories.

Your partner category encompasses all relationships that are peer-based, competitive, territorial, or sexual.

The mother-child category of individuals you know encompasses all the individuals in which you experience a relationship of unequal dependance.

What matters here is how you perceive the other individual, not the objective nature of the relationship. For example, you might see your pet as your child, but your pet is likely to perceive you as a partner and only perceive her own mother and her own offspring as mother-child.

Your laterality comes into play in all your “crossover” body tissues: those tissues in which the organ or tissue on the left side of the body is relayed from the right side of the brain and those tissues on the right side of the body are relayed from the left side of the brain.

This begins at your cerebellum: the old mesoderm germ layer. Your dominant side will map to relationships of equality and partnership, while your non-dominant side will associate to those you consider to be nurturing relationships: mother-child.

In new mesoderm germ layer (the cerebral medulla) conflicts, you will create DHS’s and biological conflicts on your dominant side when you experience capability problems and devaluation in relation to equals or competitors, but your symptoms will appear on your non-dominant side when you experience capability problems and devaluation in relation to unconditionally-nurturing relationships, such as a parent to his child or a child to his mother.

In the cerebral cortex – the ectoderm germ layer – laterality is a key determinant in a majority of special biological programs, both in relation to the organ or tissue that is involved in the program, and in “rule of weight” for temporal lobe conflicts.

For brainstem (endoderm) conflicts, your nervous system dominance does not matter. Conflicts relayed through the right side of your brainstem have to do with incoming morsels, and conflicts relayed through the left side of your brainstem have to do with outgoing morsels.

Our nervous system laterality never changes throughout life, even though many people learn to use their non-dominant side for certain tasks.

Normally, the way that we map others into our psyche and nervous system also stays the same throughout our lives; however, changing dynamics between people over time can affect the way we perceive someone and we may experience them “on the other side” in certain contexts. For example, our parents or extended family may become frail and we may begin to perceive them as “children,” even though they are older than us or we initially saw them as “partners.”