The truth in me

We are born with the need to be unconditionally loved, the need to feel attached, the need to feel safe, the need to feel the freedom to act authentically, and the need to declare to ourselves and to the world that we are, and that we are who we are, being loyal to the only person we know: our Authentic Self. We are given a physical body that gives us constant updates on how we are doing in our environment, that strives for maintaining a harmonious relationship with our environment, and that helps us express what we truly feel regarding our environment. We are completely helpless, being fully dependent on our caregivers.

Welcome to the world!

Building a belief system

Being a newborn, we don’t have a lot of options to survive. This means that if our primal needs aren’t met, we have no other choice than to develop a Second Nature on top of our Authentic Self, with only one goal: to secure the relationship with our caregivers by being the perfect child to them, no matter what.

This Second Nature will be built based on our innermost interpretations of how we interact with the world. These interpretations are a combination of unconscious perceptions and a set of beliefs that all get embedded at a cellular level in the so-called psychoneuroimmunoendocrine (PNI) system. This system governs much of what we feel, what we do, and how we react to events.

It is also how we build our emotions: as constructions of the world, with the meaning we have given to the physical sensations we feel as a result of our interactions with our environment, based on our belief system. They basically tell us “I want more of this” or “I want less of this”. The goal of our constructed emotions within the PNI system is to prepare our body for the most likely event to happen next, so the body has enough energy to stay alive and well.

Two hemispheres

It is important to understand that the way the information is processed in the brain is different for the right and the left hemisphere.

The right hemisphere creates a master collage of what the present moment in time looks like, sounds like, tastes like, smells like, and feels like. The present moment is the “now” where everything and everyone is connected together as one. As a result, our right mind perceives each of us as equal members of the human family. It identifies our similarities and recognizes our relationship with the planet, which sustains our life. It perceives the big picture, how everything is related, and how we all join together to make up the whole. Our ability to be empathic, to walk in the shoes of another and feel their feelings, is a product of our right frontal cortex.

The left hemisphere takes each of those rich and complex moments created by the right hemisphere and strings them together in timely succession. It then sequentially compares the details making up this moment with the details making up the last moment. The belief system plays an important role in this organizing process.

By organizing details in a linear and methodical configuration, our left brain manifests the concept of time whereby our moments are divided into the past, present, and future. Within the structure of this predictable temporal cadence, we can appreciate that “this” must occur before “that” can happen. Our left mind thrives on details, details, and even more details about those details. Our left hemisphere language centers use words to describe, define, categorize, and communicate about everything. They break the big-picture perception of the present moment into manageable and comparable bits of data that they can talk about.

One of the jobs of our left hemisphere language centers is to define ourselves by saying “I am.” Through the use of brain chatter, your brain repeats over and over again the details of your life so you can remember them. It is the home of your ego center, which provides you with an internal awareness of what your name is, what your credentials are, and where you live. Without these cells performing their job, you would forget who you are and lose track of your life and your identity.

The world we live in

During the child’s early relationship with their caregivers and the culture they grow up in, the intricate circuits responsible for the release of crucial neurotransmitters such as serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine, which are essential for mood stability, arousal, motivation, and attention within the PNI system, are activated and coordinated in relation with our belief system, thus establishing the child’s perception of the world. This happens in both hemispheres. It becomes a reflection of whether the child experiences a world of love and acceptance, a world of neglectful indifference where she must strive to have their needs met, or, worse, a world of hostility that demands constant anxious vigilance.

Developing our Second Nature

These early relationships serve as templates for future connections, imprinting neural circuits that shape our understanding of ourselves. Our self-perception is intrinsically linked to how we felt understood, loved, and cared for at the deepest unconscious levels during our early years.

Let me give you some examples.

A child who perceives that her caregivers cannot support her emotionally might choose to develop an attitude of “I can handle everything myself” to avoid feeling rejected. One way to NOT feel rejected is never to ask for help, never to admit “weakness”, and to believe that she is strong enough to handle everything that life throws at her all by herself.

A child who perceives stress in her caregivers might choose to do everything she can to make her caregivers happy. She might end up constantly taking care of her parents first and pushing her own emotions away. She also might end up being a person that never says “no” when asked for something, being feared that she will be perceived as a non-loveable person.

A child who perceives that she is not wanted by her caregivers can develop a belief system that is dominated by the feeling that she is useless, or not worthy of being alive. She might end up with the urge to prove to the world that she IS worthy, loveable, or important.

All these children develop a Second Nature that is separating them from their Authentic Self. This leads to an overload of conflicting information on the PNI system. This Second Nature can be reinforced by our society where having success is considered of great value. When caregivers want their child to excel in such a society, or to be “happy” for what they consider to be “happiness” (for their child’s own good, of course), you can imagine the damage this can cause to a chronically stressed child. She will have the feeling she isn’t strong, caring, worthy, loveable, or important enough, resulting in even more stress.

When traumatic stress becomes a disease

Remember, this is what the child perceives as their reality. This is what the child did choose unconsciously at a very early stage in her life in order to become a perfect child to their caregivers, resulting in a belief system and a set of emotions that got embedded at a cellular level. This is how the world she is living in consequently gets translated to her because she has incorporated what she is told by her caregivers and her culture, filtered by her own belief system that told her how to be the perfect child. This is how the child believes her constructed world to be true. This is how she convinces herself and her thoughts, feelings, behavior, and emotions to be true.

This battle between unmet basic needs with unconscious belief systems that are embedded at a cellular level leads to permanent traumatizing stress that is acted out in the body, resulting in a set of symptoms that can vary greatly, because all the systems that try to maintain the harmonious equilibrium between the Authentic Self and its environment are involved. Examples are: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), multiple sclerosis (MS), inflammatory ailments of the bowel such as ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease, chronic fatigue syndrome, autoimmune disorders, low back pain, chronic pain, fibromyalgia, migraine, skin disorders, endometriosis, cancer, irritable bowel syndrome, rheumatoid arthritis, scleroderma, ankylosing spondylitis, systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), asthma, depression, psychosis, cognition disorders, Alzheimer’s disease, metabolic disorders, digestive disorders, eating disorders, self-harm, diabetes, heart disease, to name a few…

And that is the truth in me!

Knowing this, it is hard to believe that when you arrive at the clinic with your symptoms, none of the healthcare providers will even think of asking you about possible traumatic stress during your childhood years because none of them understands the importance of it as a causing factor of disease…

Getting to know your Authentic Self, your personality, your traumatic stress

All caregivers, whether they are parents or healthcare providers, should be fully aware of how stress is handled by the PNI system. All caregivers should be fully aware that the world is perceived through the belief system that gets incorporated at a cellular level from a very early and still unconscious age onwards. All caregivers should take traumatic stress into consideration as a possible cause of disease, especially in inflammatory diseases of the PNI system. All caregivers should ask the right questions about the perceived childhood of their patients, understanding the basic needs we all have and which have remained unfulfilled. All caregivers should get to know the Authentic Self and the Second Nature personalities that live in their patients.

Source

• Between Us; Batja Mesquita; Ww Norton & Co; 2022 • The Biology of Belief; Bruce Lipton; Hay House Inc; 2005 • When the Body Says No; Gabor Maté; Vermilion; 2019 • The Myth of Normal; Gabor Maté; Random House UK Ltd; 2022 • My Stroke of Insight; Jill Bolte Taylor; Penguin Putnam Inc; 2008 • Whole Brain Living; Jill Bolte Taylor; Hay House Inc; 2021 • How Emotions are Made; Lisa Feldman Barrett; Pan Books; 2018