Retraining the brain

  I grew up in a very negative environment. It seemed as a child every idea I had was met with "you can't because....." And so my brain became trained to respond to any idea with "you can't because" and it would then seek out ends to that sentence, even if it had made them up. This did not seem fantastical to me, because from my perspective that was what the adults were doing. A relatively simple deed required an overwhelming number of complications. And so was trained my thinking. This made me very negative and pessimistic. I recognized that about myself when I was in my thirties and wanted to change it. 'Change your thinking and you change your life', they say, 'we create our own reality'. So, knowing I was extremely negative, I consciously began to make the effort to think of the positive in absolutely everything; a person's best qualities, the good things to come from any situation experienced or proposed, the silver lining to every dark cloud. I engaged in only positive entertainment; TV, movies, news stories. I became a New Age junkie.
   A friend called me one day when I was undergoing this self-prescribed process and began to tell me all about an interaction with her mother, full of complaints about it. I apologized and gently explained to her what I was trying to accomplish, so unless she had anything positive to share, I would have to end the conversation until another day. She got angry and hung up. A very long while later, a month or two maybe, she called me again. She told me she decided to do what I had been doing and that it really helped her.
   I stopped solely focusing on the positive when I sensed my purpose was accomplished. Now my brain can travel thought paths of both positive and negative, allow in many more potentials, and not fall into constant depression due to repression. It is learning to only dismiss an idea if it is inappropriate or unrealistic.
   Over the years I learned to observe my own thinking, to follow the pathways of my brain and come up with observations and questions that cause them to change, seek alternative routes/alternative potentials...explore the possibilities, avoiding extreme thinking. It is crazy delightful to notice a thought heading in a literal, physical direction and meet a dead end where once lived only dark cynicism, or where thoughts could only travel around the front to the point of a certain measure of happiness and potential...only to keep going into happier!
     Another little trick I learned is to not let thoughts attach themselves to my emotions. I noticed I would begin to feel a feeling and my brain would begin to seek out an explanation for it. So, I decided to just breath through strong emotions as I let my mind rest. When the emotion had passed, I would ask myself, why was I so upset? If there is no valid explanation, I began to realize what I had heard somewhere was correct: we store up a lot of emotions, so that many which keep trying to come up are just resurfacing, trying again, old, from the past. Unless addressed and allowed to exist, acknowledged and accepted, they just keep getting triggered. And if we attach thoughts of our immediate environment to them, we simply compound the problem, bring it into the present and add to it's extent. I have noticed this usually happens in a cycle, a circular rainbow of positive to negative thinking and emotions constantly spinning and coming up to the surface until they are all healed, used appropriately: until they have reached maturity. I suspect it might even be a memory loop from the various stages of development: if traumatized at age three, that three year old inner child/patch of emotional and intellectual development keeps coming back until it is nurtured appropriately and reaches maturity. Just a personal theory. We have no problem accepting women have an emotional cycle, but I have observed it in men and then once in domestic violence circles you are introduced to the cycle of abuse/emotional cycle of an abuser. I think maybe the emotional cycle of an abuser is simply a loop caught up in extremes and thus more obvious than the one that might be in a more nurtured human being. Not unique, simply more pronounced.
     One very empowering agent for change in my own thinking was taking a new name. Sure I was hiding from something: the derogatory tone I experienced in association with the saying of my name by certain people in certain tones which carried over to anyone who used my name with specific tones. If my name was said in an authoritative manner, I would immediately shrink emotionally into that fearful, intimidated child unable to think clearly,  maturely. And abusers LOVE to use our name. They sense the amount of control they have over your emotions and thinking when they say your name pointedly or in a derogatory tone. It gives them power. A pointed tone before my name, always meant an argument or criticism was coming if not flat-out abusive language.
     So how did I do this? For all the bashing people do about the evils of it, the internet can be a tool for restoring our brains and training ourselves for healthy interactions. Choose a strange place and a log-in name different than your own: an internet forum on a hot topic for you. Do not respond immediately. Observe, read, learn. Ask a question. You begin to see your new name used respectfully, affectionately. For me it was taking on a "pagan" name, so my online name came with me in person to meetups and social activities. People take on street names. People go from using a childhood nickname to their given and thus chosen "adult" name. Name yourself. Define yourself, choose who you want to be and "fake it 'til you make it". Eventually, when someone comes along and tries to use your new name abusively, you laugh at them within, "this person is a highly respected, dearly loved, extremely intelligent member of society and you're calling her stupid? What does that say about you?" You are empowered. And eventually, your brain and emotions are retrained to the point where the use of your childhood name in any tone becomes irrelevant, your name "untouchable" along with our emotions.
     I have noticed as well that we hear often what we fear we'll hear, read what we fear or hear and read only what we want to hear or read into things. An abused mind lacks clear reading/receiving comprehension. This can be distressing. It often has nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with presentation, environment in which it is expressed and how it is accepted/received.  When still trapped in "you can't because" thinking, even if workable options were presented, I didn't hear them. Seriously, they passed right through me. My mind would lock right on to the only negative foreseeable consequence. "Ut! Can't do it, knew it!". Negative thinking actually brought relief from stress because it was not forcing my mind to go where it very literally couldn't! Woot, woot! New discovery for me as I'm writing. Love it when that happens!
      So, back to receiving information. It is difficult to do at first, but preventing one's self from reacting to expression presented: someone else's opinion, feelings, perceptions, etc can be very difficult. Stopping ourselves from reacting is the first step to then opening our minds. Just stop and breath for 10 seconds. Next time wait a little longer and then longer. Eventually you stop feeling a need to respond to a lot of things and you begin to actually hear what is being said. When we are used to constant criticism and assault on our thinking processes, we start arguing in head with what we ASSUME someone is saying, about to say. We are expecting an argument so we create one that didn't have to happen. We've created our own reality, self-fulfilling prophesy: "women always argue with me", maybe it's because you always begin the argument in yourself before you even approach them and cannot hear anything else?
       And we cannot assume tone: a doctor does not have to hate you to tell you that you area bout to die because you have cancer. It may be the last thing he/she wants to tell you. It is the same with people who may have observations about us. They do not want to hurt us. They are ridiculing us, calling us fat or stupid, they are just pointing out that if we want to stop perceiving ourselves that way, we might try something they have to say.
      Something amazing happens as you go back and read old writings and internet interactions. You begin to see supportive thinking was there all along, you really did simply and quite literally never see it.  You re-read books, watch old movies and get something entirely different out of them. People often report that about the bible, those who read it cover to cover independently. every time they read it, they find something new in it: a story that was not there the first time or an understanding of a word or phrase they didn't remember seeing previously. Having read several version from cover to cover, for me it became going from a literal interpretation to "oh, wow, this is all about me, my inner personal journey!" The bible became my story.  I think that is why children can watch movies over and over again. Their relatively open minds pick up new things in it constantly, new perspectives from each character. They imitate it in play or interaction and then integrate what works for them in their environment.
       I would not say I have the perfect brain, I am still discovering hitches. But I can honestly say, I know my own brain, I know my own thought processes and while I may not have an MRI handy, I know what it looks like from within, I know how it's working. I know it better than anyone else could and so I am the only one ultimately qualified to treat it, aside from it's Maker, who I know helps me do this.