>90%?! Really?!

Use it or lose it…

You’re an intelligent creature who’s fully functional in most of your life, but you keep screwing up in your most important relationships… Why, why why do you think you do that?!

Some time ago, I wrote a post about the 90/10 rule, and since then, I’ve heard a fair amount of apprehension, or downright disbelief, about the weight our past experience carries. I get it, but unless you have a better reason about why you keep acting like this, maybe consider this:

From birth throughout childhood, your brain is developing at a rate that will never be equalled in your lifetime. Simply put, your brain codes your early emotional experiences and firmly connects them to ideas like safety and security, versus danger and fear. Under-used connections get eliminated, (so if you know someone who seems to be missing a ‘compassion chip’, maybe this could explain it.) Then, around 10 years old, your brain rests for a while; it doesn’t entirely stop coding, but it does slow down quite a bit. You do have another burst of brain growth during adolescence, but nothing like this early time.

Because you’re a kid, you don’t consciously process this stuff, it just gets laid down as a foundation for your future emotional functioning. You don’t consciously think, ‘my parents hate each other, so loving someone is scary‘, but it’s still there!

The good news is that there is scientific evidence* indicating what psychologists have known for years; the brain never stops growing, so change is always possible. It just gets harder as you age, because you have a wealth of experience telling you one thing, and a small amount of time trying different strategies that may refute that experience.

Therapy works by pulling up that “old” stuff so you can better understand it, and reprocess it in your current life. An example of therapy working for you is, “…my parent was incredibly rejecting, so I can be attracted to people who reject me because it feels familiar. It’s important for me to be aware of that and choose a partner who shows me compassion and caring…” Then, you can work on learning and using new strategies to combat the old patterns that keep getting you stuck. You can get out of your own way and find the life you were looking for, the life you truly deserve.

You really, really deserve it!

… if that statement bothers you, what’s the 90% coming up that has you convinced that you don’t?!

*Geek out and read the article here – Check out the 5th paragraph.


by

Tags:

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *