Part 2: Secrets
Last week we talked about secrets. They aren’t just person to person, sometimes our brains keep secrets from us in order to keep us safe.
This isn’t a lie, or a forgetfulness. It’s not a defect. It’s a protection mechanism.
And there are several layers to this, and some of the circumstances get pretty dark. I will try to keep it PG and give a warning before I get there.
We’ve all been really stressed for a big event, gone to do something utterly mundane and realized that we’ve forgotten what we were planning on doing. This is forgetting the milk. Or walking into a room and not remembering what we were going to get.
This is a brain focus thing. Our bodies are stressed, our minds are trying to get all the details together - some things are going to get lost in the mental shuffle in the brain’s quest to not get overwhelmed.
Now, it’s not a deep dark secret that you forgot the milk. But survival brain could drag you back to a time you got yelled at for forgetting the milk.
You won’t have to be aware of it - but your body will feel extra tense, and your hands might shake. You might be more emotional and easily frustrated.
This is a survival trait, because the brain is taking you back to a time when your survival was threatened and its warning you by these extra signals and higher emotions, that you need to remember to get the milk.
You might ignore these things too, because grown up you is going, “that’s silly - why am I shaking?”
But the body remembers. The body got rewired when you were yelled at, so it’s wired into your nervous system, “Stress! Stress! Stress! Remember the milk!”
However, the body doesn’t read individual memories - it just reads, “Stress!!!!!!!!”
Unfortunately that means that being stuck in traffic, forgetting the milk, or being chased by a lion all send the same signals.
If you’re able to calm down and solve the problem, as in walking into the grocery store and getting the milk… the stress resolves. Its mission accomplished. Task is done. Threat is gone. You have the milk.
But there are plenty of life circumstances that are much higher stress and are not resolved by getting the milk. And unfortunately, when we try to stuff our emotions into boxes of control - our body might escalate the stress response to the next level.