thetraumaofself

The biggest trauma we have in our lives is the trauma of self. This is the seed from which all other traumas spring.

We are a certain way and this gets encoded into our brain. Dopaminergic signalling causes neural pathways to take form. These settle and become rigid, but the reality of our situation changes. Suddenly, the past self does not fit the present situation, and we are in conflict.

This is not our fault; it is how we learn. Those with dysregulated dopamine learn faster and harder, so the trauma runs deeper.

We are exposed to violence as a child, and we learn ‘this is me: I have to fight’. We carry that pain through our life.

We are praised for a good deed and learn ‘this is me: I am good’. Life becomes more complicated and the dissonance gnaws at our soul.

The second we learn something it is defunct, old, outdated.

We draw a picture of who we want to be and encode it hard, but the world does not play ball and we suffer. Or we succeed and then struggle to hold on to something which will inevitably pass.

We are sent to war and learn to fight; we do it well and we are one of the best. We come home, our code does not fit, we are labelled as having ptsd and turn to the bottle.

Our poison of choice takes hold and ingrains more patterns: you are an alcoholic or an influencer or a gambler and you have a certain image about whether these things are desirable or not, and it eats your soul.

You stop the alcohol or the like-hunting or the gambling and you are ‘the one who broke free’ but the next thing comes along and off we go again.

All the time you are trying to exert your influence on a world which does not care and rarely plays ball. You are trying to achieve that ‘best self’ and then to hold on to it.

But your best self is only here for an instant; this instant. Your best self cannot exist in stasis because the world does not exist in stasis.

The world will never play ball. And even if it does, the ball is always moving. This is the reality.

The reality of the world and your self is that everything has always and will always be changing. 

The reality of our brains is that they learn patterns which become rigid and do not change at a rate sufficient enough to keep up with our circumstances.

Neuroplasticity is a slow process. Time heals all, apart from when it doesn’t.

What if you could speed this process up? Unlearn at the same speed at which you learn?

Letting go is not so easy. But we can train ourselves.

We can raise our tonic dopamine through behaviour like aerobic exercise and meditation. This will lower the impact of phasic dopamine spikes and enable us to better prune old neural pathways.

Your brain is software. The software is outdated.

The buddha walked and meditated until the day he died. He knew that the instant the code goes live, it is out of date.

What he also intuited is that more stable dopaminergic signalling to your time cells lengthens the perception of time and makes your world fuller and warmer. 

There is no downside to this.

The self is the trauma.

It’s not your fault.

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