Why We Think and Do the Things We Do
According to current understandings in neuroscience, up until the age of seven, our brains are in Theta brainwave state. The same state as a hypnosis state. As children, our minds are literally being programmed by our significant external environments, in particular by our main care givers, our siblings, extended families, and more broadly our culture, religion, as well as our social and educational circles. Our brains aren’t capable of developing critical thinking skills until after the age of seven, meaning young children often have trouble discerning right from wrong and don’t think to question anything that makes them feel uncomfortable, instead internalising those feelings, thinking that something must be wrong with them.
These early experiences start to develop the neural pathways of the mind, helping to form our core belief systems and behavioural patterns.
As children we are hardwired by nature not to reject our primary care givers. We believe that if we do, we will surely die. All is well if we receive the nurturing we require to become physically and emotionally healthy, relatively stable adults. However, if we were subject to any kind of physical, sexual or emotional abuse, when very young, we are biologically wired not to reject our parental care, so instead we try to find ways to normalise the bad, telling our little selves that it must be because there is something innately wrong with who we are, that we are deficient in some way. These thoughts and feelings can become the core wounds we carry into adulthood, driving our behaviours and beliefs – the ‘I’m unworthy of love, I’m a bad person, I don’t deserve a good life, life is always difficult, I’m ugly, I’m not good enough’. They influence our relationships, careers, social groups, political preferences, religious beliefs, financial patterns, as well as our health and general wellness.
Some of us have experienced anxieties and traumas before we were even born, fed to us through the umbilical cords meant to nourish us. This is not to blame our mothers for the unresolved pain or addictions they pass down the genetic line, this is to acknowledge that before the baby took its first breath, its mind was already being wired to not feel safe, making the world seem like a very frightening place indeed, the disconnection from love and trust in self, beginning before they had their first feed. We often hear about children living in inadequate situations, unable to reject their parents, even when they live in the most awful of circumstances; their sense of belonging to their tribe far outweighing their need for personal safety. They adapt, becoming streetwise, thrust into survival mode, finding ways to adjust to their surroundings, the wiring of the brain forming into unhealthy patterns.
Our mind is not our brain. We use our mind to think, chose and feel. Our mind is the unseen energy that builds the extensive network of neural pathways informed by our life experiences. There are three levels of the mind, the Conscious (awake, aware), Sub-Conscious (dream state) and Non-Conscious (conditioned belief systems, memories, source of wisdom and intelligence).
As adults we spend 99% of our time reacting from our Non-conscious minds, meaning, we only spend around 1% of our lives in a Conscious state of right here, right now, where we are capable of using critical thinking skills to assess information, and use our intuition to problem solve. Essentially, most of us are making decisions in a reactionary way, automatically tapping into the Non-Conscious programmed beliefs that were conditioned into us before we were seven years old. Scary, right?
Therefore, it is crucially important that as adults, we regularly run a quality assessment of the stored information in our Non-Conscious minds, clearing out and healing any deficient programming from our formative years, retraining neural pathways away from faulty patterns. This allows us to trust ourselves to make healthy, informed decisions in our lives. This is our real work as humans. It is critical to our overall health and wellbeing, ensuring we steer our lives towards love, joy, purpose, deep wisdom and meaning, as well as building our resilience muscle so that when we do go through difficult times in our lives, we are better able to cope and heal.
Centred Soul Life Coaching can help you to do that by supporting you to bring to light some of your unhelpful patterns, retraining the wiring of the pathways by using techniques like Neuro Linguistic Programming, and other trusted coaching methods. Possibility and Potential in motion.
