In 1995, my mother passed away, and I went into a depression.
This was a major life event catalyst that motivated me to change.
Unfortunately, it sometimes it take a 2 X 4 across the forehead before we get it, right?
As we begin our exploration, there are some things to understand about how the unconscious mind works. (I promise you’ll learn a ton and it will be easy to understand)
When you repeat a pattern over-and-over again, it becomes engrained, or what we typically call muscle memory.
Between the ages of 0-7, we rely heavily on muscle memory.
Everything that crosses our path, especially situations that are emotional or scary, gets recorded in this muscle memory system.
The problem with this type of memory, also called implicit memory, is it has no date code or timestamp associated with it.
Even though the original event happened many years ago, that caused you to take on a particular coping pattern, when it get's triggered again with something even remotely similar, the brain literally thinks the same event happening again right now. It's almost like the brain is stuck on the "ON" position.
So when someone upsets you, you’ll typically default to this muscle memory system. You’ll default to the patterns you learned, maybe even when you were a month old. It all depends on your environment growing up.
All of your current communication patterns stem from these early patterns you adopted.
But here is the BIG problem that brings you here today…
Because you are on autopilot with these "muscle memories", the chances are pretty good you are not asking your partner for more information to make the best possible decision when conflict arises.
Instead, you are defaulting to the patterns that started a long time ago when your “fear brain” was highly active and cared little about details. You are pretty helpless when you are little, so your fear brain does the best it can unless your caretakers reassure you everything is okay.
As you can probably imagine, people fall on a spectrum between very reactive to not so reactive.
What made the difference? Why do some people react and others don't?
The primary caretaker.
If the primary caretaker understood what you needed and soothed you, you learned that even when life is scary, you’ll be fine. Over time, that pattern got wired into your nervous system through repetition.
In attachment psychology, we call this type of person a securely attached person.
The securely attached person has a default pattern or belief that assumes everything will work out fine.
Some people, however, are left to fend for themselves. The caretaker didn’t know what you needed to feel safe.
This causes the nervous system high stress.
...so it resorts to fear based coping mechanisms to resolve itself.
These people become insecurely attached because they don’t understand what predictable means.
Insecurely attached people stay stuck in a defensive fear based orientation to life. A common pattern is they will see life as an unsafe and unpredictable place. They will perceive relationships through this lens.
Guess what happens when we filter things through a fear-based lens? You probably guessed right. We shape the experience from a fear perspective rather than an optimistic possibility perspective.
What do you think would happen if the next time you got into conflict with your beloved, and your mind chatter was something like, “I wonder what amazing solution we could come up with here?”
When I was little, it was dangerous to tell the truth. I felt my life was in danger if I told the truth.
In my first marriage, I remembered lying once to my wife.
When I used the AWARE process, I could easily see why. I went back to her and shared that truth with her.
For a few hours she was great, but later she got furious as my unconscious anticipated. 🤣
Fortunately, by that stage in my understanding of how this new way works, I could allow her to be angry without choosing dysfunctional coping mechanisms to protect myself.
When you use the AWARE principles, you get far better results.
You will learn to make alternative choices moment-by-moment and rewire your response to life.Your unconscious mind stops dictating your responses. Your conscious desires dominate and win out over habituated patterns.
One more thing that is useful to know about the brain is it likes what is familiar.
An onlooker may look at a pattern in another person and say, “Wow, that’s pretty crazy.”
But to the person who adopted that pattern, it works perfect for what they think is happening.
To them, their response or belief is familiar and predictable, so why change it? (This is where the AWARE program rocks.)
I often hear people groan when they attract someone, only to realize a few months in that they have attracted the best and worst of their parents.
