We’re all living in the past

Cozolino and Santos explain there’s a half second lag between information being processed by our brains, and it registering in our conscious awareness. It essentially means that, “we feel we are living in the present moment when in reality we live a half second behind”. 

Our brains can draw some pretty wild conclusions in this time, leading many of us to “continue in old and ineffective patterns of behavior despite repeated failure”.

Wondering why you keep seeming to make the same mistakes? It might be thanks to this neural mechanism basing your present perceptions on past, usually unrelated, experiences. Therapy can help you recognise this tendency and pull yourself up on it.

Understanding our parents/caregivers

Ever wonder why you do that thing you always do? 

Deep in your past something might have happened to make you learn that behaviour or thought pattern. We could understand or make sense of this behaviour from our parents or carers. Even the experts say: 

“The parents are the primary environment to which a baby’s brain adapts, and their unconscious minds are a child’s first reality. Their nonverbal communications and patterns of responding to the infant’s basic needs can shape the baby’s brain and how he or she perceives the world.”

But it’s not JUST our parents’ fault, to be fair. Things like trauma, war, prejudice or social systems can mold us too. Therapy can help us understand that we respond to things the way we do for a reason. It can prompt us then to be kinder to ourselves in our everyday life.

At times shame has kept us alive, but made us question our worth

Protecting our young is a basic instinct. It’s why your parents may have yelled “NO!” when you were doing something incorrect as a kid, like sticking a fork into a powerpoint. (It’s okay, you didn’t know any better.)

But interestingly, our brains can distort the message from one of love and protection, to one of shame and rejection. And that may stay with us for life.

“The fundamental question of “Am I safe?” has become woven together with the question “Am I loveable?” And with core shame, the answer is often usually a painful and resounding “No!”

Therapy works to unravel the stories we’ve constructed about our own self worth from a young age. It can give us the opportunity to fact check our beliefs.

We often just need to talk it out

At times we can get stress in certain situations. (Traffic. Bad hair days. Work presentations.) And when we’re all worked up, sometimes it can become hard for us to speak.

Ever wonder why?

Often, high states of arousal can inhibit the brain areas responsible for speech, known as Broca’s area. As a result, we can get tongue-tied. Our voices get shaky. Our minds go blank. We literally lose our ability to communicate, and when doing presentations or speeches this can make things difficult.

Therapy works with us to do the exact thing we struggle to do – talking in a safe environment. And it can often makes us feel better.

“By stimulating Broca’s area, connecting words with feelings… we help restore a sense of perspective, agency, and an ability to edit dysfunctional life stories.”

At times our brains just make stuff up

At times our brains can get carried away with information, resulting in a false perception of reality. Over time, we can become so confident in “our point of view that we repeat the same dysfunctional behaviors for decades, filtering reality through character flaws, anxiety disorders, and depression”.

It’s not simple to recognize these false beliefs in ourselves. But therapy works with us to question our assumptions and interpretations. It also educates us on the sneaky ways our brains mismanage information, so we can put a stop to it.