How Healing Works
Good news! Modern neuroscience has proven that the brain never stops changing and developing. In other words, if you’re struggling with mental health issues, you’re not stuck with them forever because it’s possible to change your brain no matter your age.
Change your brain, change your life
Granted, it’s easier to change your brain the younger you are. Changing a 5-year-old brain is a lot less work than changing a 50-year-old brain.
This also explains why early life experiences are so influential. What happens when we are a child shapes our soft little brains very easily, therefore having a much bigger and longer-lasting impact on our lives than things that happen to us later in life.
So, you can change and heal your brain! You’re not screwed after all 🙂 The healing and the change just take a lot of hard work.
Your thoughts and behaviors have created well-worn pathways in your brain. Literal pathways made up of your brain cells. And since the human brain is built for efficiency and convenience, your brain wants to take the well-known and easy way every time.
Therefore, it’s been hard for you to heal. Those frequently used paths are just too easy for your brain to resist! So even if unhealthy thoughts and behaviors are causing you pain, you brain will still favor them strongly because of how convenient their pathways are.
Brief digression
Please don’t be too hard on yourself about these thoughts and behaviors. You’re a smart person. You developed these things as coping mechanisms to help you survive tough times.
Think of them like inflatable water wings you made and wore as a child. You were out there drowning, and smart little you came up with these ways to keeping your head above water. You kept yourself alive with those things!
And as you grew… your water wings didn’t. So now you’re an adult wearing kid-sized water wings. They are cutting off your circulation and causing you to drown, doing the exact opposite of what they were created to do.
“But these used to work so well!” you shout as you flail in the water. Agreed, but it’s clearly time to let them go. Cut them off and swim to shore with me.
Ok, back to the healing!
Healing happens when you consciously decide again and again and again to choose different thoughts and behaviors. And damn, is that hard. When you do this, you are creating new little pathways in your brain.
And just like the well-worn paths in your brain, the more you take these paths the easier and more convenient they become. Plus, the less you use the old paths, the more they “grow over”and become harder to use.
You don’t have to be perfect and pick the new paths 100% of the time. That’s pretty much impossible, and expecting perfection is counterproductive to healing.
But the more you use the new healthy paths… and the less you use the old unhealthy paths… the closer to healing you get.
Contact me today to get your healing started!