Understanding how we mentally and emotionally process things can be confusing. The thing is, it’s important to try and understand, because healthfully moving forward from any experience, depends on the outcome of this natural information sorting process.
How our minds process our experiences can impact things like whether or not we feel like we have closure versus no closure with painful events, whether we feel better about ourselves or worse after doing something, whether we feel good enough after trying our best at something, versus feeling inadequate and unworthy after trying, etc...
When your mind’s Adaptive Information Processing System is working seamlessly (ie. No "glitching" resulting in trauma is occurring), there is a general flow of steps that occurs inside you brain, to healthfully bring you closure to really any experience. However, for the purpose of providing an example, the following focuses on the common experience of
Seeing a Picture of Yourself you do not like.
You experience seeing the unflattering picture and take in the details- your
thoughts and feelings about the picture, and other relevant contextual details like the time it was taken, the place, whether you had fun that day or not, etc...
These details enter your mind’s information processing system and are all sorted based on their perceived usefulness for future situations you find yourself in.
Generalizing this- think of categories like “useful stuff,” “random stuff,” and “not useful or accurate stuff.”
Useful details might include thoughts like “I didn’t know the picture was being taken” or “cameras can often distort size and shape.” Useful feelings might involve relief, after thinking the useful thoughts listed.
Random details might include which of your friends took the picture, or where you bought the outfit you’re wearing in the picture.
Unhelpful or non-useful details might include the physical & emotional feelings that noticing what you like least about the picture gives you.
How you make sense of your experience, in seeing that unflattering picture of yourself, is the result of which connections form between its details and that of your successfully coped with previous experiences’ details. For example, maybe your current experience’s details get helpful linked to a previous experience of not liking a picture and then learning about photoshop, a common tool used to alter the appearance of things, in times when other people feel similarly insecure in pictures.
Then, your mind does an information purge of all the details it doesn’t think will be relevant or useful for you in the future. This is a common point in which trauma can occur if there are glitches in the process. BUT, at this stage of healthy processing, your mind doesn’t necessarily erase these details per se, but deprioritizes their value in your mind. Doing this saves your mental energy for more effectively focusing on the connections between info that’s going to useful in the future. With the unflattering picture example, the details categorized above as “Random” and the ones that were considered “Non helpful” are deprioritized, in comparison to the things considered “Helpful.”
And of course then, you continue with your life, tackling new experience after new experience, and in more efficient ways than the ones before them. And who is to thank for this?
YOU, and the web of useful information connections your mind’s mental and emotional processing system has created for you.
Bonus: If you can understand this basic explanation of how our minds sort information, then you also now understand the system in which EMDR Therapy works to heal trauma.
In processing and reprocessing details, EDMR Therapy helps people let go of the painful parts of the past, feel, function, and enhance their performance in the present, and highlight the useful information from past events, that can be practiced and applied in therapy sessions and in real life, to better prep them for dealing with future situations, with challenges that feel similar to their once painful past ones.
To learn more about EMDR and how it can help you, if other forms of therapy didn't, read this post:
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