How did your experiences shape you?
“The same person can organize in different ways depending on the signals they get early in life...The timing and nature of these experiences plays a major role in how you unfold as a human being.”
Why did I overreact…again?
We’ve all felt the frustration of falling into a negative behavior pattern. The recurring nature is the worst part for me.
We often hear that awareness is the greatest agent for change. It made sense, but never resonated. Experiencing the pattern, and feeling powerless to change it, only made me feel worse.
My conversation with Dr.Bruce Perry, acclaimed neuroscientist, child psychiatrist, and co-author of What Happened to You?, finally illuminated the path towards healing. It traces back to childhood and understanding the impact our experiences have on our brain development. (For reference, we do our rational thinking in our cortex - the top part of our brain. The lower part, the brainstem, is primitive and categorical.)
“Let’s say you grew up in a household where your father was always yelling at you or your mother. Loud male voices made you feel overwhelmed. All that is stored in the lower parts of your brain.
Ten years later, you’re in a relationship and he raises his voice because he’s frustrated about something. Your reaction is: ‘Oh my God, you’re attacking me.’ He’s not. He’s just frustrated that you ordered food and it’s been half an hour. So his little hangry temper tantrum, which wasn’t directed at you, the loud raised voice makes you crumble.
That’s where the lower part of the brain is processing and then acting on the information. Because that part of the brain can’t tell time, it interprets that information the same way you would have when you were six years old and your dad was yelling at your mom.”
I’m grateful to share a brief clip illustrating how this plays out in our lives as the first of more episode snippets to come. It’s my hope that these centering insights may be an invitation for contemplation and practice, individually and together.
This week, when we find ourselves in the throes of an old pattern, let’s reflect on the central theme of Dr.Perry’s book. Instead of asking, What’s wrong with me?, how might your response change if you asked: What happened to me? It’s in claiming our agency that we begin to heal.
Wishing you peace,
Jenna