Are You Ready for a Deeper Connection with Yourself?

Let's review some key concepts to prepare for a meaningful inner conversation.

Building Blocks of Your Mind

Throughout our early years, we encounter experiences that shape who we are today. These experiences become the "building blocks" of our adult personalities and our thought patterns. Here's why:

• Brain Development: Our brains are incredibly flexible during childhood. Experiences create neural pathways that influence how we perceive and interact with the world.
• Attachment Styles: Our relationships with primary caregivers significantly influence how we form and maintain relationships as adults.
• Schema Development: We create mental frameworks (schemas) to understand the world. Early experiences contribute to these schemas, shaping our beliefs and expectations.
• Emotional Learning: Children learn how to regulate emotions through interactions with caregivers. These early experiences impact emotional responses and coping mechanisms in adulthood.
• Self-Concept: Our sense of self forms in childhood based on experiences, feedback, and relationships. These early perceptions influence self-esteem and self-worth.
• Implicit Learning: Many things are learned implicitly in childhood, without conscious awareness. These implicit memories can influence behavior and decision-making.

As you can see, both positive and negative experiences in our early years are more than just memories – they are foundational to our adult thought patterns.

The Long-Lasting Effect of Negative Experiences

Unfortunately, adverse experiences often have a more profound impact on brain development than positive ones. Here's why:

• Negativity Bias: Our brains prioritize and remember negative experiences more than positive ones. This evolutionary adaptation helped our ancestors avoid threats.
• Emotional Intensity: Negative experiences, especially those associated with fear, helplessness, or horror, activate the amygdala, which strengthens the encoding of memories.
• Hippocampal Dysfunction: Research suggests that extreme stress or trauma can impair the hippocampus, leading to fragmented or disorganized memories of adverse events. This can disrupt how memories are encoded and retrieved, potentially contributing to conditions like PTSD.

For example, the hippocampus is responsible for time-stamping memories. Traumatic events might not be time-stamped properly, causing associated feelings and beliefs to persist into adulthood. Another term for these painful experiences is trauma, which can be acute (a single incident), chronic (repeated and prolonged), or complex (varied and often interpersonal).

Repression and Avoidance: A Double-Edged Sword

The human brain naturally attempts to cope with trauma through repression and avoidance. This happens through dissociation and memory suppression. While that may temporarily relieve overwhelming emotions, it also leads to disconnection from our feelings and true selves. This "wrapping up" of pain may even begin as the traumatic event unfolds.

Western culture unfortunately reinforces this natural tendency. It often undervalues emotional expression and emphasizes external achievements over internal well-being. This can make it even harder to deal with painful experiences.

When Pain Finds a Voice (and Why It's Not Pretty)

Imagine leaving a dog alone in a house for an extended period. It might begin by barking, making messes, and potentially chewing furniture. The dog eventually gets tired, but it will continue to express its distress until it's rescued.

Similarly, abandoned emotions from our past can manifest in unhealthy ways, such as:

• Anxiety and worry
• Depression and hopelessness
• Anger and irritability
• Isolation and withdrawal
• Substance abuse and addiction
• Self-harm
• Eating disorders
• Difficulty concentrating and making decisions
• Problems in relationships
• Low self-esteem
• Increased risk of physical illness

The point is that ignoring pain does not make it disappear. It simply finds alternative ways to express itself, often leading to negative consequences.

Reshaping Our Thought Patterns

On a positive note, while early experiences are incredibly influential, they don't determine our destiny. With self-awareness and intentional effort, we can reshape our thought patterns and behaviors. But make no mistake; this reshaping process has traditionally been either very elusive or quite slow.

Fortunately, we can jump-start the reshaping process by drawing from several therapy modalities, most notably Internal Family Systems (IFS). Unlike nondirective talk therapy or mindfulness and affirmations, IFS takes an actionable approach, quickly providing our repressed pain with a healthy outlet for expression. In this way, we can unburden ourselves from our baggage, moving forward with a lighter spirit and greater internal and external harmony.

Intentions

Let's get started by outlining what we intend to accomplish with the guided inner conversation:

• Increased self-respect
• Increased self-compassion
• Renewed connection to the authentic core self
• Relief from what may be called "unbearable aloneness"
• Increased harmony between mental factions
• A softening of the wall between the conscious and subconscious
• A healthy outlet for our pain to express itself
• Decreased self-vilification

Wow! That's a lot to hope for in 7 minutes. Let's see what we can do.

The Inner Conversation

Please take a moment ot relax. Then start this video and close your eyes for its duration. When the video is over, continue reading the text below.

You can move forward with this new friendship, feeling a deep connection throughout the day.

Recognize that trauma isn't so much about what happens to you, but what happens inside you as a result. And much of that is about whether you feel alone in the experience. This is called the "unbearable aloneness" of trauma. Going forward, realize you're not alone; you have a partner in your everyday being, your successes, and your struggles.

You can use this partnership when making important decisions. Ask your younger self for advice and then listen. Sometimes there will be an immediate response; other times, the response may come into your head a little later.

As you go forward, realize that when you say harsh things to yourself, that harshness, in part, goes directly to your younger self. This needs to stop. The goal is to heal, not cause more pain.

The overarching goal is to bring all parts of your personality into harmony, even the parts you dislike.

Did we cover all the intentions? Here they are again:

• Increased self-respect
• Increased self-compassion
• Renewed connection to the authentic core self
• Relief from what may be called "unbearable aloneness"
• Increased harmony between mental factions
• A softening of the wall between the conscious and subconscious
• A healthy outlet for our pain to express itself
• Decreased self-vilification

Finally, it's important to note that our brains don't like change. They're designed for stability and can even resist positive change, keeping us stuck. This might play out by forgetting the benefits of this session, feeling too busy to check in with your younger self, or simply forgetting about it.

Instead, become your own healer. Every time you ask your younger self a question, you're giving the pain it carries a voice – one that would otherwise come out in an undesirable way.

Moving forward, you can start even deeper work on your own or with an IFS therapist. This deeper work might involve saying to your younger self, "I know you've been through a lot. I want to hear about it. I'm here to witness what you've been through, and I'm strong enough to help you unburden yourself from distressing memories and feelings." You might say, "I know connecting with this distress might create unpleasant feelings for me, but I also know they'll ease up in a few days or weeks." Here, the adult is willing to lift the distress from the younger self more or less permanently, knowing the adult's unpleasant feelings will subside in a few days or weeks.

As the burdens are lifted, the younger self will likely begin to do what it wanted in the first place: play and have fun.