Often in personal development circles we will here of how your “ego” is sabotaging you or you need to overcome what your mind is doing or some other plausible sounding nonsense about how your mind is working against you. It’s simply not true.
Your mind and brain are designed ultimately to keep you alive and safe. All of your behaviours are rooted in having served some perceived positive intention for you at some level, it’s hard-wired in.
What tends to happen is that as we learn and grow, some of the habitual behaviours that we adopted because they were useful start to become less useful and can seem to trip us up.
What we need to realise in those moments is hat the brain has habituated those behaviours because they were useful in some context and what we really need to do is understand what the behaviour is trying to accomplish and then learn a new more useful behaviour to replace the one that is running currently.
What we don’t want to do is create an environment where we make our own mind the enemy. Talk of self-sabotage and the ego controlling us is pure poppycock! When we are describing elements of the mind and functions within the brain, we are using metaphor and similes to convey what we mean.
Taking these metaphoric explanations literally leads us into all sorts of bother. For instance, when someone describes the “part of you” that wants x. what they’re doing is separating a behaviour and giving it a name. It doesn’t mean there is actually a separate entity within your mind.
If there was, the mind would become a pretty crowded place very quickly. With all sorts of weird and wonderful creatures in there. When someone talks about the “chimp2 part of the brain there isn’t really a Chimpanzee in there, similarly there’s no human/reptile hybrid in there either.
What’s being described is a set of processes that have been simplified down to give a sense of understanding in lay terms.
When we take these things literally, we begin to try to exorcise the “demons” and create a schism in our own minds as we wrestle an imaginary foe.
Once we realise that these are in fact labels for types of behaviour, we can begin to understand the utility in the behaviour and learn new more resourceful behaviours.
We work with our own mind and brain to create a harmonious interaction and, because there is no enemy, the changes happen as they’re supposed to: without resistance.
