Human By Choice III: The Living Breathing Conundrum
“The experiences we learn to survive, become the
conditions upon which continued survival will depend.”
– Carl Buchheit (Founder of Transformational NLP)
Have you met the first gentleman who managed to make his way around the world by foot, horse and boat? Unlikely. But what an adventure he had. During his time, not many were afforded the gift of seeing the world in one lifetime. But this gentleman was.
It took him a long time to make his away around the world going by today’s more modern standards. However, he achieved what he set out to achieve! Though today, we can access the internet, plan a few flights, pay for them online, and travel around the world in as little as a month.
Humanities’ pioneering in technology has afforded us new and better options to get what we want. And we take them. However, many of us are still stuck with old ways of doing things. Old ways which were perfectly appropriate and served us greatly in the past. However, those ways may not be useful at present, and often hinder us from continuing our journey of growth, learning, and great choice.
Think of a friend you know who consistently struggles to be in a happy relationship. A friend who, after breaking up with their partner and exiting the painful relationship, repeatedly finds new partners who initially seem promising. Yet given some time, somehow, that new partner ends up being the same person with a different face. The experience of that is often heart-breaking, heart-aching, and exhausting.
Think of someone you know, who continually puts themselves in professional setting, a workplace or business, with a narcissistic bully of a boss who creates an environment where some team members feel they can’t do anything right (our person in questions), and others (his/her colleagues and peers) feel like they can’t do anything wrong. And again, no matter where he or she goes, no matter how promising the new job, somehow … just somehow, a crazy abusive, demoralizing, and existential-shamer of a boss is still present. The experience of that is often frustrating, exhausting, and dis-heartening.
Think of someone who is talented at making a lot of money, but struggles to keep any of it. They might be great at business and sales, but they also have a habit of finding promising investments that seem so picture perfect on paper, yet find themselves devastated by how sour those investments turn out.
Think of people who engage great willpower and discipline to lose weight, exercising frequently, eating the right foods, and practicing mindfulness. Yet no matter how much comes off, they find themselves in the predicament of putting it on again. Whether it is some injury that prevents them from moving, or a chronic illness; they find themselves exhausted, depressed, and back to square one.
Same story. Different cast. Different set.
These experiences I just shared drive people crazy. But as we will soon explore, these reliably repeating experiences are by and large a result of our brain’s efforts to keep us safe. Carl Buchheit, one of my main instructors, coined these repeating experiences as safety patterning.
Though the repeating patterns seem illogical for the human being who is experiencing them, these experiences are running perfectly to make sure we are safe. They are also a testament to the brilliance and creational authority of the human being in question. After all, it is quite a feat to reproduce an experience with crystalline precision no matter where we go and no matter who we are with.
There is good news about all this. When we access the information surrounding the moment of their inception, it makes perfect sense how we often continue to have experiences we do not want, and how we continue to not have the experiences we do want.
How do you access the information? We’ll get to that soon. But first, it’s important to provide some definition to your understanding by exploring the basics of how our brains work.
Human beings don’t have just one brain. We have four including the reptile brain, mammalian brain, neo-cortex, and our pre-frontal cortex. To simply illustrate the living breathing conundrum, the brains we will focus on for this discussion are our pre-frontal cortexes and reptile brains.
Firstly, by way of our forebrain (especially the pre-frontal cortex), human beings seek expression, variety, divinity, abstraction, and purpose. This part of the brain loves “new-ness” so to speak. This part of our brain cares about quality of life and loves change. The main driver for the forebrain is love. If we could characterize the forebrain, its main organizing question could be simplistically expressed as:
What else can I experience?
The other older brain we have is more commonly referred to as the reptile brain. We share this brain with all creatures on this planet. The reptile brain controls the body’s vital functions such as heart rate, breathing, and body temperature. Its main function is survival and continued survival. You may have heard of the following representation called the 4 F’s:
Flight.
Fight.
Freeze.
Fornicate.
Our reptile brain loves “Same-ness.” Simple examples: people’s tendency to use the same toilet cubicle, or sit on the same bus seat all the time. This is all reptile behavior. It helps generate repeat experiences on condition that the experiences were survived by the human in question.
No matter how painful, terrifying, or heart-breaking the experience was—if we survived those experiences, they are coded in the brain as having survival value. These painful experiences will be re-produced regularly, or the reptile brain is not doing its job! As Carl Buchheit says, “The experiences we learn to survive, become the conditions upon which continued survival will depend.” This is premise of safety patterning.
The main driver for the reptile brain is fear. The reptile brain does not distinguish between real or not real. If you send a series of sounds and pictures to it, the reptile brain will think they are real. Just like if you are watching JAWS at the movies, your heart rate will suddenly elevate when the shark is shown on the screen. That doesn’t seem logical, since you are sitting in the cinema and there is no water around you. Your human brain knows it is safe because it can deduce that. However, your reptile brain does not.
This isn’t a bad thing. This is a necessary function for physical reality. Our reptile brain serves to keep us safe from harm. Our reptile brains care about quantity of life not quality. If we could characterize the reptile brain, even though it doesn’t have a sense of self, its main organizing question could be simplistically expressed as:
Are you dead? No? Great! Let’s keep that running.
So here we have ourselves a conundrum. Metaphorically speaking, one part of us wants to look left (our lovely pre-frontal cortex) and the other part of us wants to look right (the reptile brain) at the same time. If you ever have an unwanted experience in your life that keeps repeating itself, you can bet it’s due to the dissonance between our brains.
The reptile brain guarantees the repeat of an early unwanted experience because the experiences you initially survive are coded as safe, and these experiences are then repeated to keep you safe. They are perfect solutions that have expired.
This sort of safety patterning is well in place by the time we are four years old. And as many of my peer practitioners have learned: our clients’ problems and self-afflictions are a direct product of decisions made by a child that is barely knee high in height, and who has no education about personal growth, self-development, and how stuff works in this reality … really.
Within the early portion of a single change session, a trained practitioner can elicit the; pictures, sounds, feelings, and decisions that the little one made. Decisions that are of an executive order given by the four-year-old, and continue to have the indisputable authority over the major life decisions and experiences of the adult.
Oh My Gosh (OMG)!
In your mind’s eye, picture a four-year-old girl who is being gravely heart-broken by the fact that she reached out to her parents, but one time, her parents did not reach to her. It’s known to happen. After all, parents are often occupied with many things. But a 4-year-old isn’t often aware of this. To manage that severe heart-break of being ignored, or to prevent further heart-break from continuing, she might disconnect from her heart and distance herself entirely. She might decide something to the likes of: “No one wants me.”
This becomes the organizing generalization about her experience (what is known as belief) that must be demonstrated to be true consistently in her life thereon in order for her to be safe. Her reptile brain considers this heart-breaking experiencing to hold great survival value.
Imagine that same girl at 30 years of age, trying to experience a sustained sense of intimacy, love, and connection with her partner. However, time after time, she finds herself breaking off the connection, and ending her relationships with heartbreak. For her, it just seems that all promising relationships fail to work out. These results are all executed with precision outside of her conscious awareness. And if she is acutely self-aware, she will observe herself making decisions she seems to have no control over no matter how hard she wants to behave differently.
She is running a perfect solution that has expired. Every time the opportunity to experience intimacy from another arises, she shuts down and distances herself to protect herself from the experience of severe heart-break. She disconnects now and in the future to manage the fear of experiencing heart-break when she was four.
The severe heart-break was a survived state at an early age. Her reptilian brain registers this survived state and sets this command in stone: continued survival depends on heart-break. In NLP Marin terms, we call this survival equivalence. Remember, the reptilian parts of our brains long for what is safe, same, and survivable.
If we survived a traumatic experience, it will code it as a safe experience simply because we didn’t die, and therefore an experience which continued safety relies upon. The reptilian parts do not compute about the quality of our life, only that we are breathing and alive. It determines this by monitoring our pulse and respiration.
But can you imagine what life would be like for that little girl if she continued without ever re-visiting this memory? Without ever re-solving what was once a perfect solution that has now expired?
Let’s bring your life into focus now. Try this out: imagine a change you are wanting but struggle to be having. Wherever you are now, take a breath and relax. With the power of your mind and the spirit of your heart, create an image of a version of you from yesterday. Noticing that version of yourself, and what that version of you yesterday, is experiencing in relationship to life as whole.
Place that image in a specific location within your viewing. Preferably directly in front of you, ten centimeters up, and ten centimeters to the left. How you manage to do it is perfect, and is in fact, the only and best way you can. Got it? Okay. Lock it in place.
With your mind’s eye now, create an imaginary thread that connects that version of you from yesterday, to the version of you who is here now, noticing all that is. As you breathe in, notice the you that is now present. The one that now has all the choice-making authority from here and into the future.
Looking at the image of you from yesterday that you placed in an appropriate location in front of you, I wonder:
What is the perfect expired solution you might be running?
How is that repeating unwanted experience keeping you safe?
And for you, the human being in question, what experience is that unwanted experience better than?
Take a log of whatever answers come to mind now and continue to come to your mind over time. This will serve our next inquiry:
How do we adjust things so that safety and the desire for growth and fulfilment
are no longer conflicting operations?
Tricky business. Let’s not jump to conclusions as to what the answers are yet. Except you can be guaranteed that some younger version of you has a positive intention for you and has been calling the shots till now.
Now, I want to share a story with you. The story of a gentleman and his family who got stranded on an island during the war. Using weapons of attack and structures of defense—he protected everyone from every ship that tried to approach its shores. Though the war ended in a few short years … he continued to fire upon any ship in the horizon for many years. Each moment of the day.
No one told him the war was over. When he discovered it was, he and his family could finally rest knowing that life can be different now, and in better ways; brighter and flowing in a way that requires little push or pull. Rather, an allowing of new blessings to unfold in the most amazing ways possible.
One of the first steps to getting unstuck in life, is to pause and take log all the aspects of our early Self whom did the best they could with the information they had at the time. Whether that solution included feeling hopeless, depressed or terrified, it is better than what it replaced.
So, just like that man, there is a younger version of you, likely 3 or 4 years old (even younger), who has been fighting so hard to ensure your continued survival. In the way that younger version best knew how at the time, that version of you has kept all of you safe from something that could have been much worse. Something unbearable. Notice, and connect to that younger version of you. Because this connection will help that younger version of you realize how long gone the war has finished already.
Where you are sitting now, I would like you to create an image of that younger version of you, somewhere to the top left of your field of vision, further left to the image you placed of the version of you from yesterday.
Now, with your mind’s eye connect that younger version of you with an imaginary thread, all the way to the version of you from yesterday. And allow that thread to turn a corner, connecting with the heart of the version of you now, who is reading this. And in the silence of our minds, allow the voice that comes from our heart to say to that younger version of you: thank you for all you have done.
Nicely done. From your vantage of Now, looking back at the version of you from yesterday who is connected to the younger version of you, you are positioned to invite the many parts of you to service the future. To be in service of Life anew.