It can be helpful to know that your reactions, behaviour, emotional responses and thought patterns in any moment will likely occur much faster than you can control with any positive thinking or snazzy distraction technique. Its really helpful to have strategies available, but the truth is, your experience is determined much less via conscious choice and much more by your early experience and the way your nervous system learned to respond to the world.

The most helpful explanation of this I have come across goes like this:

Your brain is wearing history coloured glasses.

Each of our lenses are entirely individual, based on all the usual – our genetics, our family history, our culture, identity and experience of safety or danger in the world, the way we were seen, soothed and how secure we felt. But our lenses are so familiar, so real to US (because we’ve never looked through any others) that it feels like they’re absolute reality – like we’re not wearing glasses at all.

This is the reason why you and someone else can both be present in the same situation, but remember and interpret it in entirely different ways.

The neuroscientific truth is that in any moment, your reality is made up both of what you see and experience in the present moment, AND is greatly influenced by how your brain was built (through relationships and experience).

When you’re calm and safe, you are much better able to use the here and now information (glasses off). But in times of stress, the balance tips significantly into using less of the now and more of the “what I learned before” (glasses on). Its like your brain says “shucks, this seems like it might be risky, lets forget being open and integrated, and default to what saved us in similar situations in the past – JUST IN CASE”

And these response patterns are stored in your nervous system.

Remember the moral when understanding our nervous system responses is that even if it feels unhelpful and a problem, it will always make sense. At one time, your system thought it needed to respond this way to keep you safe – and chances are – it worked – because you’re here. So it will keep using that strategy until it receives (and feels) the clear message that it doesn’t need it anymore.

Getting to know the colour of your lens’ can be a great place to start.