RE/solve it = RE-member RE-frame RE-form RE-vitalize RE-do RE-new
The mind’s job is to figure things out, and it does the best it can considering it only has about 7% to 20% of the information. It’s like being handed 20 puzzle pieces and expecting to be able to figure out a 1000 piece puzzle. No matter how much you shuffle those 20 pieces around, they won’t give you the whole picture. You are giving it your best guess, and so is anyone else coming at it from the conscious mind.
A swedish brain specialist just released these numbers, and even I was shocked. Ready? According to him, the CNS (central nervous system) processes 11,000 bits of information for us...and we are consciously aware of...75! That changes the figures considerably-75 pieces of information to make our entire reality. The rest our of our conscious experience is supplied by remembered bits.
This is why if you don't WATCH yourself put your keys down, literally taking a picture of it, and you don't put them in the usual place, you stand the chance of having lost them. There is no remembered information to supply, so LOST means your brain can't re-member where they are. On our computers we have a FIND function.
Think of it this way - your conscious brain is your desktop, or working memory, and the rest of your computer is subconscious. There has to be a system to retrieve information though, and that is your sensory apparatus, and the primary sorting mechanism is your SKIN. The rest of those pieces are sent into the subconscious and unconscious processing which releases information to the thinking mind on a ‘need to know’ basis. Sometimes the bits are submerged because they are boring or redundant or memorized.
The thinking brain hates to be bored, which is why you can be driving one place and end up at another place automatically. In its efficiency to save energy, it will click you into automatic pilot if it thinks it knows what’s coming. That means you have an ENERGY SAVE function in your brain, and it is saving energy in the most energy expensive part - the front lobes.
The frontal lobes use 50% of all the nutrition, oxygen and energy of the entire brain! So, it clicks itself off when we aren't requiring it-exactly like your computer.
Sometimes it’s because there is just too much coming at us at the same time, so it’s like slamming your hands over your eyes in a scary movie, or hitting the pause button on the DVD right before the really bad part. It can be PAUSE function as well as an ENERGY SAVE.
Sometimes we don’t understand something, or it doesn’t make sense, or there is too much coming at us too fast, and our system just does an EDIT function. It PAUSES us at the conscious level, continues recording at the subconscious level. The conscious memory has a cut and splice in it, skipping the bad bits. We delete and edit all the time which is why we can be at the same event as others and remember it completely different.
We have a feeling self/brain, and a thinking self/brain, and they don’t RECORD or STORE the same information in quite the same way. The thinking self only gets the 20 pieces and is trying to ‘make it make sense’ with part of the story. Lots of things are edited out, like the government files with big black lines through pages of text, we’re left with bits that don’t make sense. But we try! We chase those bits around and around. Maybe it’s because of this, or maybe it’s because of that? We can do a lot of work and not get very far.
Now, the feeling self has all 100 bits, but it has to deal with them, and they can be overwhelming. When it feels the same sort of stuff coming in via the senses, it associates with all the other times it was the same feeling, and now it then and then is now. The feeling self/brain is always in an associated past/present/future state which is what PTSD is all about. The feeling self/brain can’t tell it’s a memory that is in the past and it cuts off from the thinking brain that can, so that it can gather up the skirts and run for the hills. It’s quite literally, “run don’t think” time, so we have an ESCAPE function. It doesn’t have the ability to transcend the feelings or put it in the past either, much as we might want to, because it is always focused on surviving the next time ‘this’ comes at us. We have to ‘marry’ the two selves in order to get to transcended feelings which are forgiveness, acceptance, true understanding and compassion because time is sorted in the frontal lobes-the thinking brain. And, for the feeling brain, which is all sensory based, vividly imagined is the same as real. If it evokes a physical response in us, it is real.
Our system learns based on experience, whether it’s our experience or someone else’s. We learn from watching our parents, siblings, friends. We learn by watching movies and we learn from reading books. Our mind is a constantly absorbing organizing principle that makes sense out of all the streams of data that are constantly coming at us, and most of it is processed at the subconscious level based on the quickly organizing filters, or filing folders if you will, that our brain makes.
What doesn’t make sense then, what doesn’t ‘fit’, is deleted. It’s just not paid attention to. This is called confirmation bias, and it is a structure that is fast and constant within us. You ALSO have a DELETE function. Well, it’s deleted...yes and no.
It’s not really deleted completely, at least not permanently. Just like your computer, you can delete something, and still manage to get it back. Hitting the delete button and dropping it from sight, isn’t the same as permanently deleting it, right? I mean, a good computer programmer can still find those files. You have to do something else entirely to delete it permanently. It’s still stored somewhere, and in this case, it’s still stored in the subconscious even though it may be deleted from the conscious memory.
Suppose you are in the middle of writing a report, or a paper. You want more information and without it you can’t continue. You might just leave it for a bit to get more information, clipping to another screen. The unfinished paper is still there, still open and waiting, on pause. You might even have a program in your computer that will automatically save it every so often. Either way it pauses for you to come back to some other time. It holds, with an incomplete. The rest of you goes on.
You might do more research, find what you need, and go back to that paper. Or not. You might NOT, if the computer files it neatly away somewhere and you forget where it is. The conscious-busy-you that has a thousand and one things going on and a crowded desktop might just forget about that incomplete file. The computer knows where it is, but can’t retrieve it for you without exactly the right command. You have to remember what you named it, or if you are really organized, you are paying attention when you hit save, but for the most part, you have a keyword that can get you to it if you need to so you might not bother or it might be better to lose it for awhile, and that automatic save function might also name it something odd like ‘recovered file #--” which is neutral and innocuous until you accidentally find it. There is your FIND function.
Another part of you has the memory of the open file so that when the time is right, there it is. It’s the ‘find’ function on your computer. You have to want to find it though and remember enough to call it up, but you really only need one word to find it. That programming was installed in the original programming of your computer, and it’s the same within us. Now you have a RECOVER function. It’s in our subconscious processing, not software we deliberately picked out for ourselves. When you come back to the file, it’s paused exactly where it was last, waiting for more information. Good computer. We are exactly like that, only the amygdala is the pause button. His job is to check all the sensory data as it comes in - sight, smell, taste, touch, sound, feeling, associations (same, similar, close enough) and he has a red button and a green button on his desk. If no bells or whistles sound from the constant stream of data, the green button just stays lit and information is relayed up to the thalamus and to the cortex for thinking on it, reasoning, judging, criticizing, and responding.
If anything at all twinges, the amygdala hits the red button. Those buttons are relays. Red button and it goes to the limbic brain and we are triggered into survival programs of fight, flight, freeze, collapse, comply, and the amygdala changes course and plugs into the brainstem survival programs and not the higher thinking programs. It’s get-the-heck-out time!
Sometimes, a pause button on an open file is activated associatively. The amygdala doesn’t sort things as the story memory, it sorts it in bits and pieces of sensory data, all marked #1, so they can be selected separately. It also makes constellation grids, that are associative. The files are then marked same/similar/close enough. The amygdala motto is it’s better to err on the side of caution, because afterall it’s about survival!
The amygdala is the emotional color or flavor of memory, storying sensory data, and it flavors the memory that the hippocampus records. The more sensory data that is activated, the stronger our memory becomes. The more we think about something, the more times it circulates in the hippocampus, and the more myelin that is laid down. I think of it like when you watch them make cotton candy. They go around and around, and the more times they go around, the bigger your cotton candy is going to be!
When the amygdala feels a tidal wave coming, it slams both hands on theEMERGENCY pause button which kicks the conscious mind off line. It is quite literally a time out button, and its triggered by what doesn’t make sense. The conscious mind goes pause, but the subconscious self continues recording. Everything. It can be a parent’s unexpected reaction, it can be a medical process that wasn’t explained. It is anything that causes the apple cart to start to tip. Pause. too much coming in all at once.
The mind, which only has about 7-20% of the perceptive memory of a situation anyway, thinks “I know what this is” or it thinks “I don’t know what this is, and I don’t want to find out”, and it only has those two choices when the limbic self is active and screaming-get me outta this!
Part of us experiences an event, and part of us doesn’t. The part that doesn’t experience it is in pause. When the event is over, the amygdala takes its hands off the pause and recording resumes, and what just happened is in a different file. It like there are two sets of books, two records.
So there we are.
Something has caused a reaction. A tremor big or small is still a feeling. Feelings are associative. Feelings don’t necessarily make sense, which is what caused that tipping of the apple cart. The mind makes things make sense. It takes the pieces it has and puts them together, often seamlessly collapsing the pieces that don’t work. It can’t take everything in, so it distorts, with the best of intentions based on what we believe. “Oh I know what this is.” is the mind going ‘whew’. Got it. I know. That’s just the branch of the tree outside making a scritchy sound. The mind can also go “I know what that is. It’s the fingernails of a witch, clawing on the glass and she wants to come in and...” and real or imagined, there is a fear response within us. The inside doesn’t know what is causing the reaction, only that there is one.
Then the next night, the child goes to bed, and looks at the window. She remembers the fear, but may have dropped the rest. She starts to have nighttime panic attacks. Even years later when she lives in a high-rise apartment complex with no trees anywhere near. It doesn’t make sense.
The adult, still having panic attacks at night for no reason, has long forgotten the apple tree and that one summer when the branch was so close to the house. The adult wants to clean up the file. She wants to sleep. She has had to take meds for years so she can relax. She starts to contemplate on the level of fear she has always had. She begins to be absolutely sure something awful must have happened in order for there to be so much fear. She reads some books, and wonders if maybe she has blocked the memory out because it was so awful? Maybe it was a satanic cult? Maybe there was some horrible thing that happened to her in the night? The adult mind is just as flexible as the child’s, and it still is trying to make sense of the something, without all the pieces. She vaguely remembers something about a witch. What was that? It niggles at the corners of her mind. Could that be it?
When our desktop if full of paused incomplete files, the tidy office manager inside us feels overworked. She starts to get cranky. She is frazzled. She can’t find things. She drops messages. The switchboard starts to jam. Finally in frustration she starts to bring up the dead files in an effort to get someone to clean things up for her. “We need sleep” she says to herself and her self says back “yes we do. Clean up this unfinished business would ya?!”
Sometimes, an association, seemingly random but similar enough to the amygdala, triggers a reaction response from us. There we are, reacting to something, and not knowing why or what, because the reaction response of the amygdala, and the sensitive survival programs she is in charge of, can get triggered in 8/10s of a second or less.
Often I hear from people “That’s what it was??? All this time I thought it was this, and it’s not!” What feels like a tremor on the outside, may be an earthquake on the inside. And what the mind conceives MUST be an earthquake to cause this much fear, may in actuality be only a child’s misperception. But don’t underestimate the misperception. Wars have been fought to retain our view of the world, our belief system. Never underestimate how hard our mind will fight to maintain it’s view and it’s control.
When we are ready to go back and look, with our adult eyes, at what the child is afraid of, we may find an entirely different view from inside the feeling body. The body doesn’t lie. The reaction that is stored within, is an accurate recording of something that made no sense at the time, paused until we can go back with new eyes.
And sometimes, what was terrifying to the child, truly was terrifying and we can be there for that frightened child we were, knowing that we did survive or we wouldn’t be here. Sometimes I think the only reason we survived those traumas is exactly because we are here now, learning how to go back, and be there for ourselves, as the adult that the child is counting on to find her.
These parts of us are frozen in time. Waiting. Waiting for us to find them and bring them home, with understanding. Isn’t it time?
Once we find them, we get to call ourselves back by awakening the frozen energy, and resolving the misunderstood moments of our lives, big and small. The more we clear the open pending files up, the more energy comes to us in the now. We literally have more presence to participate in today’s life because we aren’t called constantly to the past.
In this work you will learn how the brain codes memory, and how to change it. You will learn how to move through time and find frozen and incomplete memories so that you can heal them. You will learn how your brain works!
A swedish brain specialist just released these numbers, and even I was shocked. Ready? According to him, the CNS (central nervous system) processes 11,000 bits of information for us...and we are consciously aware of...75! That changes the figures considerably-75 pieces of information to make our entire reality. The rest our of our conscious experience is supplied by remembered bits.
This is why if you don't WATCH yourself put your keys down, literally taking a picture of it, and you don't put them in the usual place, you stand the chance of having lost them. There is no remembered information to supply, so LOST means your brain can't re-member where they are. On our computers we have a FIND function.
Think of it this way - your conscious brain is your desktop, or working memory, and the rest of your computer is subconscious. There has to be a system to retrieve information though, and that is your sensory apparatus, and the primary sorting mechanism is your SKIN. The rest of those pieces are sent into the subconscious and unconscious processing which releases information to the thinking mind on a ‘need to know’ basis. Sometimes the bits are submerged because they are boring or redundant or memorized.
The thinking brain hates to be bored, which is why you can be driving one place and end up at another place automatically. In its efficiency to save energy, it will click you into automatic pilot if it thinks it knows what’s coming. That means you have an ENERGY SAVE function in your brain, and it is saving energy in the most energy expensive part - the front lobes.
The frontal lobes use 50% of all the nutrition, oxygen and energy of the entire brain! So, it clicks itself off when we aren't requiring it-exactly like your computer.
Sometimes it’s because there is just too much coming at us at the same time, so it’s like slamming your hands over your eyes in a scary movie, or hitting the pause button on the DVD right before the really bad part. It can be PAUSE function as well as an ENERGY SAVE.
Sometimes we don’t understand something, or it doesn’t make sense, or there is too much coming at us too fast, and our system just does an EDIT function. It PAUSES us at the conscious level, continues recording at the subconscious level. The conscious memory has a cut and splice in it, skipping the bad bits. We delete and edit all the time which is why we can be at the same event as others and remember it completely different.
We have a feeling self/brain, and a thinking self/brain, and they don’t RECORD or STORE the same information in quite the same way. The thinking self only gets the 20 pieces and is trying to ‘make it make sense’ with part of the story. Lots of things are edited out, like the government files with big black lines through pages of text, we’re left with bits that don’t make sense. But we try! We chase those bits around and around. Maybe it’s because of this, or maybe it’s because of that? We can do a lot of work and not get very far.
Now, the feeling self has all 100 bits, but it has to deal with them, and they can be overwhelming. When it feels the same sort of stuff coming in via the senses, it associates with all the other times it was the same feeling, and now it then and then is now. The feeling self/brain is always in an associated past/present/future state which is what PTSD is all about. The feeling self/brain can’t tell it’s a memory that is in the past and it cuts off from the thinking brain that can, so that it can gather up the skirts and run for the hills. It’s quite literally, “run don’t think” time, so we have an ESCAPE function. It doesn’t have the ability to transcend the feelings or put it in the past either, much as we might want to, because it is always focused on surviving the next time ‘this’ comes at us. We have to ‘marry’ the two selves in order to get to transcended feelings which are forgiveness, acceptance, true understanding and compassion because time is sorted in the frontal lobes-the thinking brain. And, for the feeling brain, which is all sensory based, vividly imagined is the same as real. If it evokes a physical response in us, it is real.
Our system learns based on experience, whether it’s our experience or someone else’s. We learn from watching our parents, siblings, friends. We learn by watching movies and we learn from reading books. Our mind is a constantly absorbing organizing principle that makes sense out of all the streams of data that are constantly coming at us, and most of it is processed at the subconscious level based on the quickly organizing filters, or filing folders if you will, that our brain makes.
What doesn’t make sense then, what doesn’t ‘fit’, is deleted. It’s just not paid attention to. This is called confirmation bias, and it is a structure that is fast and constant within us. You ALSO have a DELETE function. Well, it’s deleted...yes and no.
It’s not really deleted completely, at least not permanently. Just like your computer, you can delete something, and still manage to get it back. Hitting the delete button and dropping it from sight, isn’t the same as permanently deleting it, right? I mean, a good computer programmer can still find those files. You have to do something else entirely to delete it permanently. It’s still stored somewhere, and in this case, it’s still stored in the subconscious even though it may be deleted from the conscious memory.
Suppose you are in the middle of writing a report, or a paper. You want more information and without it you can’t continue. You might just leave it for a bit to get more information, clipping to another screen. The unfinished paper is still there, still open and waiting, on pause. You might even have a program in your computer that will automatically save it every so often. Either way it pauses for you to come back to some other time. It holds, with an incomplete. The rest of you goes on.
You might do more research, find what you need, and go back to that paper. Or not. You might NOT, if the computer files it neatly away somewhere and you forget where it is. The conscious-busy-you that has a thousand and one things going on and a crowded desktop might just forget about that incomplete file. The computer knows where it is, but can’t retrieve it for you without exactly the right command. You have to remember what you named it, or if you are really organized, you are paying attention when you hit save, but for the most part, you have a keyword that can get you to it if you need to so you might not bother or it might be better to lose it for awhile, and that automatic save function might also name it something odd like ‘recovered file #--” which is neutral and innocuous until you accidentally find it. There is your FIND function.
Another part of you has the memory of the open file so that when the time is right, there it is. It’s the ‘find’ function on your computer. You have to want to find it though and remember enough to call it up, but you really only need one word to find it. That programming was installed in the original programming of your computer, and it’s the same within us. Now you have a RECOVER function. It’s in our subconscious processing, not software we deliberately picked out for ourselves. When you come back to the file, it’s paused exactly where it was last, waiting for more information. Good computer. We are exactly like that, only the amygdala is the pause button. His job is to check all the sensory data as it comes in - sight, smell, taste, touch, sound, feeling, associations (same, similar, close enough) and he has a red button and a green button on his desk. If no bells or whistles sound from the constant stream of data, the green button just stays lit and information is relayed up to the thalamus and to the cortex for thinking on it, reasoning, judging, criticizing, and responding.
If anything at all twinges, the amygdala hits the red button. Those buttons are relays. Red button and it goes to the limbic brain and we are triggered into survival programs of fight, flight, freeze, collapse, comply, and the amygdala changes course and plugs into the brainstem survival programs and not the higher thinking programs. It’s get-the-heck-out time!
Sometimes, a pause button on an open file is activated associatively. The amygdala doesn’t sort things as the story memory, it sorts it in bits and pieces of sensory data, all marked #1, so they can be selected separately. It also makes constellation grids, that are associative. The files are then marked same/similar/close enough. The amygdala motto is it’s better to err on the side of caution, because afterall it’s about survival!
The amygdala is the emotional color or flavor of memory, storying sensory data, and it flavors the memory that the hippocampus records. The more sensory data that is activated, the stronger our memory becomes. The more we think about something, the more times it circulates in the hippocampus, and the more myelin that is laid down. I think of it like when you watch them make cotton candy. They go around and around, and the more times they go around, the bigger your cotton candy is going to be!
When the amygdala feels a tidal wave coming, it slams both hands on theEMERGENCY pause button which kicks the conscious mind off line. It is quite literally a time out button, and its triggered by what doesn’t make sense. The conscious mind goes pause, but the subconscious self continues recording. Everything. It can be a parent’s unexpected reaction, it can be a medical process that wasn’t explained. It is anything that causes the apple cart to start to tip. Pause. too much coming in all at once.
The mind, which only has about 7-20% of the perceptive memory of a situation anyway, thinks “I know what this is” or it thinks “I don’t know what this is, and I don’t want to find out”, and it only has those two choices when the limbic self is active and screaming-get me outta this!
Part of us experiences an event, and part of us doesn’t. The part that doesn’t experience it is in pause. When the event is over, the amygdala takes its hands off the pause and recording resumes, and what just happened is in a different file. It like there are two sets of books, two records.
So there we are.
Something has caused a reaction. A tremor big or small is still a feeling. Feelings are associative. Feelings don’t necessarily make sense, which is what caused that tipping of the apple cart. The mind makes things make sense. It takes the pieces it has and puts them together, often seamlessly collapsing the pieces that don’t work. It can’t take everything in, so it distorts, with the best of intentions based on what we believe. “Oh I know what this is.” is the mind going ‘whew’. Got it. I know. That’s just the branch of the tree outside making a scritchy sound. The mind can also go “I know what that is. It’s the fingernails of a witch, clawing on the glass and she wants to come in and...” and real or imagined, there is a fear response within us. The inside doesn’t know what is causing the reaction, only that there is one.
Then the next night, the child goes to bed, and looks at the window. She remembers the fear, but may have dropped the rest. She starts to have nighttime panic attacks. Even years later when she lives in a high-rise apartment complex with no trees anywhere near. It doesn’t make sense.
The adult, still having panic attacks at night for no reason, has long forgotten the apple tree and that one summer when the branch was so close to the house. The adult wants to clean up the file. She wants to sleep. She has had to take meds for years so she can relax. She starts to contemplate on the level of fear she has always had. She begins to be absolutely sure something awful must have happened in order for there to be so much fear. She reads some books, and wonders if maybe she has blocked the memory out because it was so awful? Maybe it was a satanic cult? Maybe there was some horrible thing that happened to her in the night? The adult mind is just as flexible as the child’s, and it still is trying to make sense of the something, without all the pieces. She vaguely remembers something about a witch. What was that? It niggles at the corners of her mind. Could that be it?
When our desktop if full of paused incomplete files, the tidy office manager inside us feels overworked. She starts to get cranky. She is frazzled. She can’t find things. She drops messages. The switchboard starts to jam. Finally in frustration she starts to bring up the dead files in an effort to get someone to clean things up for her. “We need sleep” she says to herself and her self says back “yes we do. Clean up this unfinished business would ya?!”
Sometimes, an association, seemingly random but similar enough to the amygdala, triggers a reaction response from us. There we are, reacting to something, and not knowing why or what, because the reaction response of the amygdala, and the sensitive survival programs she is in charge of, can get triggered in 8/10s of a second or less.
Often I hear from people “That’s what it was??? All this time I thought it was this, and it’s not!” What feels like a tremor on the outside, may be an earthquake on the inside. And what the mind conceives MUST be an earthquake to cause this much fear, may in actuality be only a child’s misperception. But don’t underestimate the misperception. Wars have been fought to retain our view of the world, our belief system. Never underestimate how hard our mind will fight to maintain it’s view and it’s control.
When we are ready to go back and look, with our adult eyes, at what the child is afraid of, we may find an entirely different view from inside the feeling body. The body doesn’t lie. The reaction that is stored within, is an accurate recording of something that made no sense at the time, paused until we can go back with new eyes.
And sometimes, what was terrifying to the child, truly was terrifying and we can be there for that frightened child we were, knowing that we did survive or we wouldn’t be here. Sometimes I think the only reason we survived those traumas is exactly because we are here now, learning how to go back, and be there for ourselves, as the adult that the child is counting on to find her.
These parts of us are frozen in time. Waiting. Waiting for us to find them and bring them home, with understanding. Isn’t it time?
Once we find them, we get to call ourselves back by awakening the frozen energy, and resolving the misunderstood moments of our lives, big and small. The more we clear the open pending files up, the more energy comes to us in the now. We literally have more presence to participate in today’s life because we aren’t called constantly to the past.
In this work you will learn how the brain codes memory, and how to change it. You will learn how to move through time and find frozen and incomplete memories so that you can heal them. You will learn how your brain works!
