How Can My Brain Be Holding Me Back From Living My Best Life?
“Our brain’s design and functioning pattern has everything to do with how we live -reactively or proactively; present or dissociated. How are you living?”
By Karla Hardin, MS LPC
By Karla Hardin, MS LPC
If I had a dollar for every time a client looked at me with that “Oh no, here it comes…“-look when I asked them for a little detail about their childhood, I probably could afford a beach house by now!
The reason? Most people don’t see any correlation with the problem they are coming in to talk with me about and their childhood. I get it. It probably feels like to them I am talking about improving the neighborhood when their house is burning down!
So many of us grew up with a mental picture of lying on a Freudian-like couch talking about how we were potty trained –and yes, I can see how irrelevant that seems.
Freud was onto something by looking at the role of the past but he didn’t know that it is more about how the brain stores past memories that plague us in our here and now versus the memories themselves. In other words, your “here and now” is being directly affected by how your brain categorized all the hurtful parts of your childhood.
So in order to experience your best life now you need to understand how your brain plays a primary role.
THE BRAIN
We must first remember that our brain and biology is first and foremost wired to SURVIVE. This basic design trumps every other ability of the brain. Another important fact is that the Brain’s development direction starts from bottom to top, then from the right to the left.
The BRAIN STEM (the first to be formed), regulates your heart beating, breathing and all other life sustaining functions without you even having to think about them.
As you move up into the MID-BRAIN, which houses the limbic system, you find two primary parts of the brain that run this system: the hippocampus and the amygdala.
Both of these parts store memory. The hippocampus stores general memory like what you had for breakfast and the amygdala stores emotional memory like being afraid when dad yelled at mom.
Why is memory so critical? Memory serves to help us remember what was either physically or emotionally dangerous –and with the brain’s primary job to keep you safe, memory is important! When either the hippocampus or amygdala get triggered that something could be dangerous, it immediately moves toward a survival position of either fight, flight, freeze or fawn. All of these are strategies to get you out of danger.
But hopefully, our hippocampus and amygdala don’t find anything “alarm setting” and if not, then we can then access the top portion of our brain – the PREFRONTAL CORTEX.
The right side of the PFC, our creative side, is where we derive our very individual self. Then from a strong sense of self we proceed to the left side which houses our executive function of choosing actions that are not based merely on our biology, but rather our core belief system.
This higher brain is why we are different from the animal world. More importantly, it truly captures the truth in Genesis where we learn man is made in God’s own image. We are moral beings who can choose our actions.
Living in our higher brain –where we are “free to be me” and “free to choose” is where our BEST LIFE is lived.
So here’s the problem.
When we have had physical and emotional hurts that were overwhelming at the time they occurred and we felt unable to escape them, our brain marked those memories with neurochemicals so that if we ever got near a situation like that again, it would warn us so we could escape the danger and pain through our best survival strategy of fight, flight, freeze or fawn.
Of course, this threat of danger sends us back toward the primitive brain (stem) as all focus turns back to survival.
So, imagine you had a lot of times in your early years that you were frightened by your parents fighting, or cruel words said to you when you messed anything up; your amygdala would have many stored memories of times that were unsafe for you emotionally.
You can see how your amygdala could get stuck in a hyper-vigilant loop and see your boss as critical and your husband as threatening when he disagrees. Suddenly this sends you into a spiral of panic and seeking to escape through your primitive style of survival.
BOTTOM LINE: Your past is not only dictating your present experiences, but it is keeping you living in your lower brain and missing your best life found in your higher brain.
Go figure.
Our past experiences and our brain’s commitment to survival can truly keep us from living our best life.
So what do you do?
You have to resolve the past to reclaim your hijacked brain.
How do you do this?
Well, after hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars in training, I know it takes a solid strategy and tools to do both. That is why we have worked for years developing our Hardwired to Heal Intensive Workshop. We want to see you live your best life and far too many never fully reach it. We show you how!
But if you can’t do that yet, start educating yourself as to how your brain works. A popular book that offers a great place to start is by reading “Anatomy of the Soul” by Curt Thompson MD and “Hardwiring Happiness” by Rick Hanson Ph. D.
Karla Hardin is a Licensed Professional Counselor at Passionate Living Counseling and Trauma Specialist for Hardin Life Resources
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