Pause Your Machinery: How Past Traumas Can Shape Our Machinery

An excerpt from my recent book, Your Mind Is What Your Brain Does for a Living, now available at Amazon.

Photo by: yulkapopkova

Stop and take a moment to “pause your machinery.” The concepts and techniques I present throughout my latest book, Your Mind Is What Your Brain Does for a Living, require mindfulness to learn and master, and this brief written exercise will give you the opportunity to rest, step outside the pattern of passive reading, and bring yourself into the present moment to reflect and see how the information I want to share with you can be integrated into your own life.

Keep your written answers, because they will be valuable for you to review and refer to later. You may want to buy a notebook or open a computer file so that you can keep all of your responses together in one place.

• Think mindfully about how you might still be controlled by traumatic experiences in your past. Remember, traumas can be both big and small events. Some of the big traumatic events are when a parent or someone else very close to you dies or disappears from your life in some other way, or when parents divorce, or they may be experiences of emotional, physical, or sexual abuse. Some of the smaller traumatic events are living with a volatile or highly critical parent, which can create daily attachment ruptures for children.

• List any traumatic experiences from your past that you think are embedded in your programming and are running you when you’re on automatic pilot.

• What interpretations and judgments about yourself, other people, and the world do you think you drew from these traumas? Remember, these interpretations and judgments are also embedded in your programming. Describe them.

Think mindfully about and describe how these interpretations and judgments from the past are influencing how you think, act, and react today. Consider how freeing it would be if you could.