Every moment we experience is a confluence of thousands of pieces of information that reach the brain, whether from the environment through our 5 senses, or internal information from our musculoskeletal and visceral systems (interoceptive and proprioceptive pathways).
The brain processes all this information through different cerebral structures and regions in order to provide a response, or not, and normally the most pertinent one.
It's true that the sheer complexity of social interactions means that we don't always come up with the best response to the situations we face. The same applies to our relationship with our environment, which is littered with bumps, stumbles, lost objects and missed steps!
But what happens in our brains to make us lose this relationship with space, however briefly? What is it that causes us to react with a whole range of emotions, many of them inappropriate?
Emotions and our programming
Innate programming
If we leap back in time to our earliest years, we've all been through the learning phase that took us from the playmat, to exploring the house on all fours, and then to the bipedalism typical of our species. All this learning didn't happen overnight. We had to repeat these gestures over and over again to integrate them into our motor patterns, gradually increasing the difficulty and complexity of the actions.
This journey, full of pitfalls and repeated falls, is not only motor-driven; it's also motivated by sensations, i.e. emotions.
These emotions are generated beforehand by internal programming that is both purely species-related (suckling reflexes for feeding...), but also hereditary, coming from the family line. For example, we can all distinguish between people who are emotional, authoritarian, oratorical, conciliatory or relational. There are dominant tendencies in every family that have given rise to sayings such as: "the fruit doesn't fall far from the tree, or cats don't make dogs".
This learning stage is therefore motivated by a pre-installed system that depends on the species and family from which we come. This imposes a notion of transgenerational emotions, which we'll address in another article.
Acquired programming
Then there's behavior acquired over time, based on lived experience. Throughout the learning phase of this motor skill, the suffering caused by falls and shocks, as well as the fears engendered, have led to an adaptation of behavior in order to avoid suffering again. The child avoids steps or approaches them differently, and pays attention to the door that hurt his finger.
We can transpose this acquisition mechanism to social relationships, littered with moments of pleasure and suffering, disappointment, sadness, joy, sharing and so on.
If we look at our actions and emotional interactions in such a simplified way, we should all avoid conflicts, misunderstandings and distance ourselves from people who make us suffer.
Unfortunately, it's not all that simple!
Emotional conditioning
Not everyone experiences an emotion with the same intensity, nor the same valence. A child climbing for the first time and experiencing a fall will experience fear. This is perfectly normal, but depending on the child's preliminary terrain and innate functioning, he or she may either attribute a negative value to this experience, thus defining future behavior with regard to climbing, heights or other associated sensations.
An emotion is not limited to being positive or negative; it's the value we attribute to it that conditions our future reactions.
In my practice, I saw a little girl who, after falling headlong into the water while playing on the beach, generated a fear that made her unable to get her face wet in the shower or go swimming. Two years after this fright, nothing had changed, and her fear continued to influence her daily life and the simple pleasures of bathing in the sea with her family.
After a Neurolink session that enabled her to deprogram her fear, everything returned to normal within a month.
Imagine for a moment a whole life conditioned by this fear, and all the moments she couldn't have lived to the full!
And yet we're all conditioned in this way, with many small and large traumas along the way.
Is our suffering permanent?
Mental suffering
We need to look at all the innate and programmed emotional patterns that are constantly superimposed and confronted in our brains, as they are called upon by the situation we are confronted with. These memories will then compete with each other, leading or not to a repetition of the emotion and the resulting action.
When the emotion is too strong, or the conditioning too ingrained, the individual will inexorably repeat the same pattern throughout his or her life, without ever regulating the information via the cortex. For example, a person may be afraid of a harmless snail, sometimes in an unreasonable way, even though they know it's harmless.
Relational suffering
It's the same thing when we feel, for example, abandonment or sadness when the person we want to be with spends time with other people. Time spent with others is not necessarily a rejection of ourselves. However, we may experience it in this way, leading to reactions that correlate with the suffering we feel. To understand this fear of abandonment or this feeling of being sidelined, we need to look into the individual's past and find the events and relational mechanisms set up in the family that created and anchored this wound.
In this way, we can live with the feeling of separation and abandonment indefinitely, blaming the other person for making us suffer.
Another way of looking at this is to see it as a way of understanding our relationship patterns. We unconsciously choose the people and situations that will stimulate our patterns, highlighting our fears and suffering, like a mirror reflecting our own image back to us.
So, instead of attributing the origin of our suffering to others, we should see them as revealing our memories.
On the other hand, when the prefrontal cortex comes to regulate the information, we have the opportunity to break out of the acquired pattern, inducing another action and thus changing the connection of our emotion to a situation. This is called conscientization. We make an emotion conscious and regulated. Note that this is not a cognitive analysis of the situation, which is something everyone can do, but a real change in behavior, without the need for permanent control.
By addressing all our fears and suffering, we can gradually deprogram these memories and free ourselves from the yoke of emotional conditioning.
Thanks to Neurolink, we can accelerate these awarenesses by gradually emptying our backpacks of the weight of our past suffering.
Intuition and emotional intelligence
This ability to automatically understand an environmental and/or social situation as it really is, and not as we see it through our emotional filters, is what we call intuition. It brings us the reality of the information, without going through cognitive and analytical activity. It's that famous "I know" or "I feel" that you're lying to me, that there's a problem. It's that little voice, full of certainty, that whispers in our ears, but which we don't always listen to.
Yale psychology professor Peter Salovey and John. D. Mayer who introduced the concept of Emotional Intelligence, defining it as follows:
"The ability to understand emotions in oneself and others, and to use these emotions as informational guides for thought and action."
Daniel Goldman later took up this work and added a broader component. He focuses his theory on five main points:
- self-awareness
- achieving self-mastery
- achieving self-motivation
- perceiving others' emotions
- mastering human relationships
This ability to feel intuitively while providing the best response to the situation we're faced with is the definition of emotional intelligence. In a way, this notion allows us to achieve the best coefficient of profitability between the energy consumed, the time allocated to the task and the desired return, based on our own emotions, desires and pleasures. It's all about staying on "our lane", maintaining our integrity while enabling us to respond intelligently to the situation.
So, even if the other person sees us as the cause of his suffering, we can preserve him, by adjusting our actions so as not to reinforce his suffering, while preserving our integrity.
Breaking out of emotional blocks
We all live in the not-so-present! The past is omnipresent, leading us to repeat our actions and generate a future identical to the past we've already lived through.
The result is a succession of disappointments in love and relationships, conflicts at work or on the road, injuries and humiliating or devaluing situations. Each of us will reproduce this pattern over time, to a greater or lesser extent. Some people experience these failures every month, others every year, and still others in larger time cycles.
Understanding our emotions and what they're based on, and understanding what they entail, enables us, if we want to, to break out of these cycles and live the life we want, not the one we repeat.
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