“The following excerpts are taken from Getting Past Your Past by Francine Shapiro:
“The truth is we all suffer at one time or another. Situations arise all the time that affect us negatively. But when we continue to have pain long after the experience itself has passed, it is because the hardwiring of our brains influences our minds. Let’s try the following experiment so you can see for yourself. I’ll give a single sentence and you just notice the first thing that pops into your mind:
Roses are red
“The odds are that the first thing to come up was: Violets are blue. For people born in the United States, it’s basically the equivalent of a knee-jerk response. This is an important concept, since mental responses are based on physical reactions. Your brain is programmed to respond in the same way as the rest of your body. Regardless of age or gender, when your knee is hit in a certain way your leg will jerk. Similarly, regardless of intention, your mind also reacts automatically. For instance, when is the last time you heard that rhyme? You probably learned it in childhood. So, if you don’t live with young children, it was likely many, many years ago. But it came up automatically nonetheless. These types of automatic responses can be wonderful and useful, and show the power of our minds, but they don’t always serve us.
“Take a look at the sentences themselves. Your response to “Roses are red” wasn’t a critical evaluation of its meaning. Your mind just moved along with a response as if it was true. But roses aren’t always red. They are also yellow, pink, purple and most any color you can think of. However, that unexamined sentence looks just fine at first glance. And how about the second one: Violets are blue. Are they really? No, actually they are purple. But the line will come up whether it’s true or not. Now, probably the sentence didn’t cause you any kind of distress. But that same type of automatic response also causes a wide range of problems that disrupt happiness, families and communities. The same mind/brain processes that allow us to recognize a rhyme, or sing along with a tune we haven’t heard in 20 years, are the ones that can also drown us in the misery of anxiety, depression, heartache and at times physical pain.
“The nursery rhyme has even more to offer. Remember the line that comes after “Violets are blue”? “Sugar is sweet and so are you.” Lovely sentiment, and it also comes to mind automatically. But as we all know, while sugar is surely sweet, people are lots more complicated. Everyone is a mixture of sweet, sour and every flavor and variation under the sun. At some point, everyone is angry, sad, jealous, bitter, hurt, insecure, happy or sweet. And when we are, we act accordingly. One moment we cherish the one we are with and cover them with kisses. A day later we may explode and yell at them in frustration. So, basically, some of what we’ve learned growing up is true, but just as with all the other experiences we’ve had through childhood, other things are not. Often as youngsters we can’t tell the difference, and what we take to be real—such as believing we are inferior because we are bullied or rejected, or thinking we are responsible for our parents’ divorce—are really just misperceptions. Nevertheless, these experiences can have effects that come up automatically throughout the rest of our lives, outside our conscious control.
“Every experience we’ve had in our lives has become a building block in our inner world, governing our reactions to everything and every person we encounter.”
“When we “learn” something, the experience is physically stored within networks of brain cells called “neurons.” These networks actually form our unconscious mind, determining how our brain interprets the world around us and governing how we feel from moment to moment. These memories include experiences that took place years ago, and our conscious mind is often unaware that they have any impact on us at all. But since the memories are physically stored in the brain, they can pop up outside our control in response to “Roses are red,” just as they color our view of every new situation we encounter. They can cause us to feel unattractive when we’re not. Depressed when everyone else around us is happy. And they can leave us feeling heartsick if someone leaves us—even if we know consciously that the person is terrible for us and continuing the relationship would be a big mistake.
“Basically, many of the feelings and actions that undermine our happiness are symptoms that stem from this memory system that forms the unconscious.”
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“When most people think of the unconscious, they think of psychoanalysis and movies that involve a Freudian view of psychic conflicts, and symbolic dreams and gestures. From the psychoanalytic perspective it generally takes years of talk therapy and “working through” to gain insight and mastery over forces that are hidden from view. This form of therapy can have great value. But Freud published first in 1900, and many things have changed since then. In the past century there have been new advances in neurobiological technologies that have expanded our understanding of what these “forces” actually are. The examination of the unconscious we are dealing with in this book is one that is based on the workings of the brain itself. Through an understanding of how experiences lay the physical groundwork for our emotional and physical reactions, we can determine how our “stuck” points and knee-jerk mental responses came about and what to do about them.”
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“Nothing exists in a vacuum. Reactions that seem irrational are often exactly that. But irrational doesn’t mean that there is no reason for them.“
“It means that the responses come from a part of our brain that is not governed by the rational mind. The automatic reactions that control our emotions come from neural associations within our memory networks that are independent of our higher reasoning power. That’s why you can watch in amazement as you do something you know you’ll regret later, or get drawn to the wrong people, or feel hurt by someone you have no respect for, or yell at a loved one with little reason, or feel powerless to shake a depression brought on by something that seems inconsequential. It’s irrational but understandable and, more important, it’s fixable. While genetics play an important role, in general, the basis of the suffering is the way our memories of past experiences are stored in the brain, and this can be changed. Happily, appropriately stored memories are also the basis of joy and mental health.”
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“...it’s useful to remember that whatever the persistent negative emotion, belief or behavior that has been bothering you, it’s not the cause of suffering—it’s the symptom. The likely cause is the memory that’s pushing it. Our memories are the basis of both negative symptoms and of mental health. The key difference is the way the memories are stored in the brain. If they are unprocessed they can cause us to overreact or act in a way that hurts us or those around us. If they are “processed,” we are able to react in ways that serve our loved ones and ourselves well.”
Sometimes in EMDR therapy we will know immediately what memories need to be reprocessed (an assault; a car accident, etc); and other times it will take a little more time to identify what specific memories link to our present symptoms. To study some real life examples of how this plays out read “Violets are Blue”.
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