Can We Rewire Our Beliefs?
Understanding repetition compulsion
It makes sense that we want to repeat what feels good and pleasurable. But why do we repeat what’s painful? It can feel bewildering to watch ourselves engage in the same difficult relationship patterns, over and over again.
You’re not crazy, or broken. This human phenomenon is called repetition-compulsion.
Repetition compulsion is a psychological phenomenon in which a person repeats or reenacts a familiar event, over and over again, in an attempt to resolve the original scenario. This "re-living" can also take shape in dreams, during which the psyche offloads memories and feelings associated with the earlier wound or trauma.
Have you ever ended a relationship, or left a job because of a challenging dynamic only to find yourself, much to your surprise, in a similar relationship dynamic with a new person or job situation months or days later? This is repetition compulsion in action. Familiar dynamics and patterns will follow us until we connect with the beliefs that subconsciously allure similar conditions and conditions into our lives over and over again.
To repeat is to replay history. Without self-awareness and conscious choice, we may suffer in circular cycles of repetition and reinforcement.
We repeat conflicts to find resolution and integration. With self-awareness and compassion, we can repeat and repair. We can interrupt and re-integrate what we missed earlier in life.
Your brain is the mapmaker of your belief system
Belief systems create efficiency. They focus our energy into habitual pathways of operating and responding to life circumstances.
This autopilot process liberates our brain resources so we can attend to newer endeavors. While these subconscious beliefs serve us to an extent, they also leave us with blind spots.
Did you know that 80-90% of the beliefs that drive human behavior live in the subconscious?
This means that our responses to life circumstances are automatic, and often expressed without conscious thought or self-reflection. To become more integrated, we need to become aware of the behaviors, beliefs, and assumptions that drive us.
We need to understand how we’re contributing to our internal conflicts as well as conflicts or disconnection with others.
beliefs create safety
Our brain is designed to create maps that organize and reinforce our belief systems. Beliefs create safety in a world of uncertainty, and optimize our process of sorting through the millions of bits of data and stimulation we receive per second.
When life circumstances repeat enough or when we’re hit with a traumatic event, our brain will fire and wire together the specific stimulus of the events (visuals, smells, words, touch, etc) and the associated emotion into a neural pathway that lives as electrical signals in the brain.
Our subconscious will systematically manage our life through our beliefs patterns, which are stored as neural pathways. These superhighways of belief patterns become data models that inform us subconsciously about how to respond when similar life experiences arise. We seek familiarity to reinforce or beliefs, for better or worse.
Beliefs influence our emotional and physical responses
For example, if as a child, you were bitten by a yellow dog on a hot summer day while eating chocolate ice cream, your brain will fire the various stimuli into a cluster of overlapping sensation of heat, the taste of chocolate, and the terror of the dog lunging towards you and puncturing your skin.
Likely, in the future, when you see a yellow dog again, your brain and nervous system will quickly activate into flight or flight, driven by a subconscious belief of “yellow dogs are dangerous.” You may not have developed an adverse reaction to chocolate ice cream. But if this experience repeated itself enough times, a clustering of these two stimulus, “yellow dog” and “chocolate ice cream” would wire together into a superhighway in which you may feel anxiety with either stimulus; chocolate ice cream or yellow dogs.
Most of our beliefs originate in our early development. You can learn more about the formation of beliefs and behavior patterns in my articles Your Relationship Patterns Are a Pathway to Heal & Integrate and How Does Our Attachment Template Form?.
Beliefs exist as neuropathways
In summary, your neuropathways are superhighways of beliefs designed to:
record patterns of experience (stimulus + emotion) to form beliefs and ways of operating in the future
repeat what is known and familiar to ensure security (even if outdated or hurtful)
protect our vulnerability, based upon what feels safe and what feels threatening
reinforce adaptive strategies is established to manage feelings of rejected, vulnerability, disappointment, helplessness, inadequacy, etc.
respond to conflict based on perceived level of threat, assumptions, history and expectations
establish strategies to manage threat and fear, such as control, blame, shame, manipulation, withdrawal, compliance, etc.
In other words, the brain is an in-exact electrician that wields a refined skill of wiring maps to keep us safe. It plots pleasurable experiences that we wish to recreate, while also storing experiences of fear, disappointment, and emotional pain to avoid them in the future.
To learn more about brain architecture, you can read my article We’re Wired to Connect and Protect.
Can we rewire our beliefs and prune outdated neuropathways?
Suspending habit and studying our relationship patterns is a potent framework to expose the roots that cause repetition-compulsion patterns. You can learn more about unveiling your relationship patterns in my article Your Relationship Patterns Are a Pathway to Heal & Integrate.
Beliefs and adaptive strategies are part of our sense of self. They don’t have to go away to be free. With awareness of our strategies we can, over time, make new choices and magnetize the experiences needed to fulfill the unmet needs we experienced during our early development.
Both self-awareness and personal responsibility create the conditions to courageously embrace reparative steps to rewire outdated beliefs.
THE GENERAL STEPS TO REWIRE OUR BELIEFS ARE:
Understand the five social-emotional developmental needs (if you’re not familiar with this framework yet, you can discover it here).
Identify missing experiences and the decisions you made as a child to get your needs met.
Reveal and embrace adaptive strategies to understand how they are influencing your beliefs, behaviors and relationships patterns.
Study repetition patterns to explore the lesson or opportunity to heal, integrate and move along the path of repair vs. reinforce.
Pause, suspend habit and reveal reactivity, triggers and patterns of protection as they arise to make space for new choices and ways of being.
Identify patterns and take personal ownership of impact and contributions to relationship patterns.
Make new choices through courageously suspending autopilot responses and creating a new reality of possibilities and outcomes.
Repeat new choice over and over again until a new neural pathway lays down its tracks while the old patterns of operating prune away.
These steps are broken down in this map below.
Begin on the right side, like a clock to walk through the steps to rewire outdated patterns.
Your wholeness exists within your imperfections
We aren’t broken, we are human. Our life journey will present us with experiences of nourishment, ecstasy, and profound intimacy, as well as experiences of heartbreak, rupture, and loss. Our interpretation of these experiences can reinforce our belief systems, or challenge us to evolve and inhabit our full capacity to love, create, and express our integrated power.
We can rewire the brain, and upgrade our operating system to support the relational experiences we want to have today. Becoming an integrated human being isn’t about erasing our adaptive strategies, but about expanding and updating responses that reflect who we are now.
As we explore our outdated beliefs with radical honesty, we invite healing through self-compassion. Remember, the answer is within. If we perpetually look outside of ourselves, we miss the wisdom and answers that lie inside of us.
I am here. You’re not alone on this path. I’m deeply committed to this personal journey of integrating exiled parts of myself back home. As I embrace the messy ways in which I operate, I notice that my capacity for self-compassion and empathy towards others has skyrocketed beyond my imagination. Every day is an invitation for me to make new conscious choices and interrupt patterns that are outdated.