Your behavior today is nothing but the product of your emotional reactions from past experiences. These connections between the present and the past are governed by your limbic system (from now on LS). Your LS records every emotional reaction during your lifetime. It triggers this reaction, along with your behavioral, physiological and thought patterns connected to that reaction, every time a present event occurs that is remotely similar to the initial event in which that reaction was learned. Let’s look at an example: Jack (our protagonist) is a loner. At work, he doesn’t socialize with his co-workers. When he arrives to the work place, he only greets them briefly and continues to his desk. He stays there the whole day and even eats his lunch at his desk. When his co-workers invite him to eat with them, he kindly declines. Jack tries to focus on his work but is easily distracted. He loves his work but doesn’t enjoy his working environment. Even though his colleagues seem nice, he feels uncomfortable among them and cannot really trust them. He was once offered to work from home, but he declined, knowing that he can’t concentrate at home either and that he gets distracted more easily. He suffers from these circumstances and would like to connect with other people, as well as be able to focus better. But he just can’t overcome this hurdle. So why does Jack behave like this? Why does he keep to himself and declines offers from his co-workers even though he would like to connect with people? Why can’t he just work from home then? And why has he trouble concentrating?
Jack’s behavior is actually just a pattern that he learned during his time in high-school. At the end of the eleventh grade, his classmate Julie hosted a big birthday party. A week prior she sent her invitations. Everyone was invited except Jack - even Michael and Greg, Jack’s two best friends. Upon finding out that he isn’t invited, Jack felt sad and like an outlier. Jack not only felt harshly rejected by Julie, but also betrayed by his best friends. He was angry at his friends because he felt they abandoned him. In that moment, he had a lump in his throat and was on the verge of crying. He quietly went home alone that day, having a burdensome feeling in his stomach and his chest. He went straight to his room and didn’t want to eat dinner with his parents. He hasn’t talked to them or anyone in his class the whole week leading up to the party. He inferenced that he is not wanted and that something might be wrong with him. He concluded that he cannot really trust people, because they eventually could “stab him in the back”, just like he thought Greg and Michael did. These thoughts kept intruding his mind whenever he was alone in his room trying to work at his desk. In order to cope with that, during work his thoughts are wandering to distract him from these intrusions and the feelings in his body. Eventually, Jack picked himself up a bit and started conversing with his parents and obviously continued with his life. But new information was ingrained into the repository of his LS and a new behavioral pattern was learned.
Let’s recap: During this period Jack’s LS attained the burdensome feeling in his stomach and chest, as well as the lump in his throat (sensations that he hasn’t really felt before in this constellation), which accompanied him whenever he was in a social situation or when he was alone in his room trying to work on something. For his LS rooms in which he is alone (LS reasoning here: every new flat to which he moves in == his room from his parent’s house) and social situations (LS reasons that other people, groups that Jack is somehow a part of == classmates), as well as working at his desk on something, become triggers for the physiological sensations (lump, burden in abdomen), the cognitive impairments (inability to focus) and the ruminations (intrusions). Also, due to the inferences that he made about the world (“people are deceitful”) and himself (“unwanted by others”, “distrustful”), he modifies his behavior accordingly. He keeps to himself and doesn’t mingle with his peers, in order to avoid the pain that he felt during the event in 11th grade. For the present-day Jack (or rather his LS), his work environment becomes his classroom and his colleagues become his classmates. So, every time he gets invited to lunch, he declines, because he fears rejection. His present-day flat, according to his LS, becomes his room in his parent’s house, where he is unable to focus due to mind-wandering.
Let’s take a step back further in Jack’s life. Why did Julie “seemingly” dislike Jack and did not invite him to her party? Here is why: When Jack was six years old, he had an awkward encounter at the playground with a group of kids from the neighborhood, consisting mainly of girls. When his mother introduced him to the group, he felt nervous and frightened, not really knowing what to say. At that moment he was especially frightened around girls. His mom introduced him and left him there while she sat on the bench and observed him from afar. Due to his anxiety, Jack’s
working memory was so impaired, that most of the time he sat quietly among the other children. When he was conversing, he burst out awkward and obnoxious stuff, offending the girls and making one of them even cry. His mother had to pull him away and go home with him. At that moment, that experience didn’t seem extremely dramatic, but as you can imagine, the LS took notice. For Jack, girls became a trigger for the nervous, frightened feeling that he had on the playground, and awkward, obnoxious comments became an integral part of Jack’s conversations with girls making the danger to offend one of them ever so present. And as you can imagine, he accomplished that with Julie in the 11th grade, making a sexual remark about her that led to her not inviting him to the party. You could say, that Jack’s anxious conversational pattern with girls was a disaster in the waiting, making him vulnerable to acquire additional dysfunctional behaviors at some point.
We could even go further back and ask ourselves why Jack was so nervous and frightened when he was introduced to the group on the playground? What aspect of that situation triggered his LS? To not stretch this article any longer, let’s say that at the age of 5, a couple of months prior to the playground incident, Jack was teased by some girls in the kindergarten (because of his accent). Because of that event, Jack was afraid that the girls at the playground could make fun of him as well, so he was reserved and quiet.
By now, you get the point. The behavioral pattern acquired during the kindergarten experience (anxiety around girls) contributed to the playground incident, where Jack’s LS picked up an additional pattern. That pattern led unfortunately to Julie’s party at the eleventh grade, which sent Jack into a downward spiral making him a loner. This sequence of events is called an etiological chain and can be determined for every behavioral pattern and every state that is exhibited presently. When, due to their behavioral patterns, individuals are confronted with situations that they cannot overcome with their existing abilities, suffering ensues and additional behaviors come along. That is what happened at every of the four events described in Jack’s story. The intensity of the emotions that are triggered, as well as the frequency by which they’re triggered then determines the mental state of the individual and the level of functioning. Our friend Jack is obviously not in an enviable position. As you can imagine, these patterns are inhibiting his daily life massively. He is nervous around girls since his childhood and probably didn’t have much experience with dating, he has problems making friends and he struggles with his focus.
Jack can be helped though. Limbic hacking is the process of not just discovering these etiological chains (because that is just the first step), but also going back to crucial events in his etiological chain and extinguishing the behavioral patterns that were acquired along the way. That way Jack can fully transform himself, within weeks or months.
If you want to discover the etiological chains of your behavior, you can book a free strategy session with me on the following
link.
