“It’s your ancestors’ fault.” Relax, your emotional self-sabotage is because of a 40,000-year-old tiger. But is it?
The blame-shifting toward our reptilian brain is a popular excuse. Your uncontrollable instincts are making all the bets. You can only fasten your seatbelts for a bumpy ride. Find the most effective workarounds and pray they work when it matters.
Indeed, we should not add feeling bad about ourselves on top of destructive emotions. Blame ourselves for the responses, exacerbating the experience. Self-compassion is important. Accepting there was a cause for the emotion without self-loathing.
But instead of using emotional data as a precious opportunity to learn, we “throw the baby out with the bathwater.”
“It is natural to feel what you feel” relieves us from accountability. There is nothing we can do. The mind avoids the discomfort of touching the experiences that cause pain. Even if processing them could prevent them in the future.
Disempower ourselves
We settle for workarounds. Ignore, mask an emotion or apply a band-aid. Eventually, accumulate enough repetitions for the emotion to overpower our conscious control and break out. We suffer from the long-term consequences despite minor tactical wins.
Neuroplasticity
The mind is the most flexible instrument in our possession. But it must be trained intentionally to produce the responses we want. Otherwise, we are mindlessly allowing circumstances, and other people to do the training.