Let Go Of The Negative And Fill Up. Traps Of Our Brain

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Very often I hear from other people the phrase "I let him (her) go and forgave" … And after a pause, all the epithets about how he actually turned out to be "so and so", how he hurt, humiliated, offended, betrayed, disappointed … but … "I let him go and forgiven"! True, it happens that people, with all their words and actions, declare how they "let go" of this or that situation and immediately begin to revive it in paints in their memory, retelling all the horrors in great detail over and over again. When I pay attention to this, they say, "Well, what's the big deal, yes, I remember everything, but the main thing is that I let go, I don't hold any evil!" "Eh, no, that won't work that way," I answer, and here's why:

1. In the world of physiology there is no concept of yesterday, today is tomorrow. Everything in it is here and now.

When we emotionally turn on and recall negative events from the past, our brain does not regard it as "past and reacted", but accepts our experiences as new, happening "here and now." Remembering the conflict, we experience despair, annoyance, fear, anger, and sometimes guilt, i.e. self-directed anger, disappointment, etc. Some clients even say that remembering, they maintain an external calm, while deep down, in their imagination, they scream out of impotence. Often the resurrected images are so strong that tears suddenly roll into the eyes, it becomes difficult to breathe, someone's heart or stomach barely reacts - all these are signs that the brain has received information and reacted to it by releasing certain hormones. Turns out that the situation happened to us a long time ago, and we send the brain a command to deal with stress now, again and again.

Even if we are not experiencing strong emotional distress, the brain is still forced to process information as actual, to spend energy on it - to analyze and make decisions. So people who discuss negativity from the life of other people and even TV shows (and any other people's negativity finds a response in our brain through mirror neurons), over time, begin to complain of a decrease in immunity, weakening of memory, attention, general physical weakness, and the more, the further according to the classics of psychosomatics (ulcers, heart, allergies, etc.). Therefore, it is important not only not to resurrect your negativity, but also try not to listen to someone else's, communicate with people who are discussing something interesting, causing positive experiences.

In psychotherapy there is such a concept "retraumatization", in general it means the same thing, ie. the fact that remembering the trauma at the level of psychophysiology, a person experiences it again. Therefore, the first thing he needs during its development is the creation of a safe environment, support, support, resource, exit plan and support. It is important to talk about the problem, but if you stay at the level of speaking and replaying traumatic memories in your imagination, over time, hormonal imbalances only lead to psychosomatic problems. The situation needs to be worked through and released. But letting go is easier said than done.

2. Problems of "letting go". There are certainly a lot of them, but I will write about those that we don't often hear.

In dealing with complicated grief, psychotherapists have often noted such a phenomenon that the grieving ones seem to be deliberately stuck in the grief. This served as the impetus for various experiments. So, for example, in one study of the psychophysiology of grief, women were selected in the control group (survivors of grief) and the experimental group (stuck in grief). When they were provided with photographs of deceased loved ones, the equipment diagnosed the inclusion of the pleasure center in women of the second group, while in the first group it was silent. However, even without such experiments, psychotherapists working with traumatics often note clients for whom trauma becomes an addiction, and in order to obtain the production of natural opiates (hormones of pleasure), they seek to constantly recall negative events in their memory, subconsciously resisting psychotherapy. This happens not because they are "bad", but because more often such people grow up in conditions where it was not possible to learn how to receive positive reinforcement in any other way, except through suffering.… Before working on an addiction to trauma, we set the task of creating the very resource that would help to have fun differently … Because "a holy place is never empty." The brain does not tolerate emptiness, and strives to fill any information "hole" that has arisen, if there is nothing to fill, it returns to the past experience.

In fact, in addition to the above, there are many psychophysiological phenomena, according to which the brain can get stuck on this or that information. The most frequent of them boil down to the fact that having entered into this or that conflict, we:

- did not complete it (something interrupted and we could not fight back or dot the i);

- did not find a solution (they had a conflict, but for themselves did not find an option that could be effective in solving this issue);

- did not understand, did not endure the experience (entered into a conflict, but did not understand what created it and what made it possible for it to take place and turn around);

- supplemented the conflict situation with unverified details (they saw the opponent through the prism of stereotypes and did not understand what actually happened and how he sees the situation);

- we could not integrate (it seems that everything is logical in the conflict and everything is clear, everyone is right in his own way, but we do not accept the situation as it is), etc.

Awareness of the reason that makes us scroll this or that negative event in our head - 70% of overcoming the path to its solution. If we want to let go of the situation, then the brain must be given a final command for it according to what has been revealed, otherwise it will constantly scroll through it in memory, demanding the completion of the process. At the same time, we are not talking about positivism in the context when, looking at black, people force themselves to believe that it is white. The end of the conflict can be both positive and neutral and even negative (interruption of communication). It is just important to accept as a fact that partly to let go = complete, to put an end (either by real physical action, or by available visualization techniques).

3. Time and perseverance. Not a single neural connection is suddenly extinguished in the brain.

If we decide to part with any information, we need to understand that in addition to "substitution" for the extinction of the reflex, time is needed, the longer we live with trauma or resentment, the more. Making the decision to get rid of negative memories is a very important step. However, it is much more important to implement this decision and see it through to the end. The same physiology often becomes an obstacle on this path. Here volitional processes alone are not enough and an accompanying study of alternative options is needed. The problem is that any habit is, first of all, a "trampled path" of neural pathways, and in order for the "path to overgrow", one must first lay an alternative (new) path and only then not walk along the old one. Every time a problem arises that is subconsciously associated with a past trauma, conflict or behavior from which we seek to get rid of, all associative connections lead to the "old path". Our task: to identify the reason for "not letting go" = to create a model of a solution to the conflict that satisfies us (at least to write it down on paper) = by pronouncing and analyzing to identify associations with our problem = directing them to a different path - the end of the conflict acceptable for us (from real actions and reciting the topic with the "offender", to an elementary visualization of a solution that satisfies us).

4. Letting go of the situation to take its course

You can often hear that having started working on a particular conflict or traumatic experience, a person begins to pause, and after a while he rolls back. One of the reasons for this state is that just as the brain does not tolerate emptiness, it does not tolerate the unknown. The brain will strive to complete any processes and if we do not give it constructive answers, it will find them on its own in what is already stored in our memory. And there in the arsenal "on occasion" most likely past mistakes, unreleased negativity, destructive patterns of behavior, interfering with attitudes (otherwise we would not be stuck in a problem or would not come to a specialist with this question). At one time, and for this reason, in psychotherapy, the option of meetings once a week was chosen as the optimal one, because during this period of time the client asked for a search, tried on existing solutions, and at the same time did not have time to build destructive automatisms into the "unfinished emptiness".

5. Projection

Many have heard and know about the essence of the projection mechanism. If we describe it briefly in relation to our question, then the point is that in fact we have no idea what the other person really is. What does he think about, what he strives for, what does he want to say with his behavior and does he want to say anything at all or does this automatically, etc. Even while reading this article, each of you puts into it a completely different meaning and meaning, maybe even different from what I want to say) Precisely because our brain does not tolerate emptiness and uncertainty, it tries to fill all information gaps, and more often fills it with our personal experience, our personal experiences (or stereotypes and prejudices). Analyzing the incomprehensible behavior of another person, he constantly sends a request to our experience - "what would I think about when I did this; what would make me do this; what would I like to achieve by saying this", etc.

It often happens that we carry a resentment in ourselves and experience a conflict situation in the expectation that the offender realizes that he is wrong and will correct the "mistake" he has made. In reality, the offender may not even guess that his behavior touched us, that he did something bad, from our point of view, etc. The transfer of the position from "I was offended" to "I was offended" opens up opportunities for finding options for completion and letting go of the conflict. I was offended because what was happening touched some of my deepest unsatisfied feelings - which ones? What needs to be done to satisfy them? People often say - I made a conclusion from this situation and let it go. Most likely, this means that he found what experience the offender actualized (awakened), made conclusions about how to strengthen himself in this issue and thus ended the conflict - there is no point in thinking it over again and again.

6. Resource

Once on the subway, two girls were discussing their parents. One complained about how her mother only knew that she was discussing neighbors' conflicts, news and TV horror films, her ailments and problems. And the second one answered - "and what else can she do, she sits at home all day, does not work, her husband is not there, you are on the road …"

Above, I always write that if we want to get rid of something negative, we need to create something alternative that will take this place. If we do not know how to find and see the positive in our life, getting rid of one negative, we will urgently find another and start analyzing it, simultaneously poisoning our body with unnecessary hormones. Therefore, when you are faced with the task of letting go of something, first create yourself a resource from which you will fill … The exercise from this article will help you with this