Over time and due to life experiences, we can develop limiting beliefs and behaviours, what we call adaptations, that can significantly impact and control our lives in a negative way. What we think are just personality traits or “just the way we are”, are in fact beliefs and behaviours that helped us cope with difficult times and events in our lives in the past, they were coping mechanisms, which in time turned into adaptations.
These coping mechanisms, which may serve us well while we are going through a difficult/traumatic event, in the long run turns into an adaptation, which at that point no longer serves us but hinders us, creating limiting beliefs and can put us in a state of survival instead of a state of thriving.
These adaptations that limit us affect our physical health and our mental and emotional health. Unresolved traumas can keep us in a flight or fight response which in time takes a toll on our nervous system and our overall long-term health.
Gabor Mate said at the 2024 Trauma Summit, “A dysregulated nervous system causes coping mechanisms that appear to shape our personality, they are adaptations, not actual personality traits that we were born with…. The way we respond as kids to traumatic events, help us endure in the short term, but once those responses become embedded in our nervous system, in our bodies, in our brains, in our psyches, they become sources of pathology that threaten our health.”
We often believe that an event that happened in the past is over and resolved when in fact it continues to show up in the present, in the form of discomfort, triggers, anxiety, worry, negative feelings, physical ailments, etc.
The automatic mind, the primitive mind, constantly interprets the present based on past experiences and past conditioning, often these are all set before the age of ten. Our primitive/automatic/reactive mind does not distinguish between past and present, and even more so when it is being triggered. The trigger in the present sets off reactions and emotions that were programmed and conditioned years and decades ago. What sometimes seems like a reaction to a present situation/conflict is really a reliving of some past emotional conditioning or experience.