Personal Change I: How We Get Stuck with Repeating Experiences We Do Not Want
Overview:
In this blog post, I share a set of frames to illuminate how we get stuck in repeating unwanted experiences. The intention is to create a space to allow you to realize a few things:
If you have ever failed to achieve a certain outcome or set of desired experiences in life— you are not a failure nor is something ‘wrong’ with you per se.
Now is a good time to ease up on yourself for being the way we have been to date.
Same Story, Different Cast, Different Set:
People used to make their way around the world by foot, horse and boat. During their time, not many were afforded the gift of seeing the world in one lifetime. It took a long time to travel around the world going by today’s more modern standards.
Today, we can go online, plan a few flights, pay for them electronically, and travel around the world in as little as a month. In fact, more savvy travelers can even have this automated and optimized with AI-powered technologies!
Humanities’ pioneering in technology has afforded us new and better options to get what we want.
However, many of us are still stuck with old ways of doing things, especially in our personal lives. 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 (in effect) with a different face. The experience of that is often heart-break about the present, and a dis-heartening outlook about the future.
Think of someone who is talented at making a lot of money, but struggles to keep 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. Or perhaps they just can’t control their chronic spending habits no matter how little or how much they make.
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. 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. It is quite a feat to reproduce an experience with crystalline precision no matter where we go and no matter who we are with. Let’s unpack more.:
The Conflict Between ‘Surviving’ and ‘Thriving’
Human beings don’t have just one brain. We have four:
Reptile brain
Mammalian brain,
Neo-cortex, and
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.
First, 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. If we could characterize the forebrain, its main organizing question could be simplistically expressed as:
“What would I like?”
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.” For example, the 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!
This is the premise of survival behavior.
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 theater 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: a 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!
In your mind’s eye, picture a 2-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 comfort her. It’s known to happen. After all, parents are often occupied with many things. But a 2-year-old isn’t often aware of this. To manage that severe heart-break of being ignored (which feels like death for a 2-year-old who is virtually 100% dependent on parental support for survival), 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 experience to hold great survival value.
Imagine that same girl, but she is now a 30 year-old lady 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 a 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-experience at an early age. Her reptilian brain registers this survived state and sets this command in stone: continued survival depends on heart-break.
If we survived a traumatic experience, it would be considered a safe experience simply because we didn’t die. It is therefore an experience which continued safety depends.
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 exercise out:
Guided Exercise: The Future Can Be Safe from the Past
Imagine a change you want but have yet to attain (or sustain). 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.
Place that image in a specific location within your viewing. Preferably directly in front of you, ten inches up, and ten inches 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 repeated unwanted experience keeping you safe?
Take a log of whatever answers come to mind now and continue to come to your mind over time.
Now, I want to share a story about 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 and better now.
One of the first steps to getting unstuck in life, is to pause and take log all the aspects of our early self who 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.