Common Ground: Why We Close Doors

March 2007 | Art & Soul

Why We Close Doors

In his new book, researcher featured in What the Bleep… shows how to outsmart our brains for our own betterment

By Joe Dispenza, D.C.

We’ve all been there or had friends who were: bad patterns. Relationships, for example: jumping from one psychotic badger-mean person to another, or worse… musicians [rimshot].

In his latest book, Evolve Your Brain: The Science of Changing Your Mind, Dr. Joe Dispenza explains how emotions are tied to thinking, and how new thinking can literally rewire one’s brain to change emotional reactions and break habit-forming patterns. “Aside from dealing with physical ailments,” he says, “this book addresses emotional addiction. Among its symptoms are lethargy, lack of ability to focus, a desire to maintain routines, the inability to complete cycles of action, a lack of new experiences and emotional responses and the persistent feeling that one day is the same as the next and the next.”

In the following segment from chapter nine, “The Chemistry of Emotional Addiction,” Dispenza writes that as we begin to exit our youth, our lives get smaller and we start closing doors. This, he contends, can mean a lot, and explains how this phenomenon takes place in our minds, and how it can affect our lives.

“Settling in and Settling For”

You’ve surely heard of the midlife crisis, and you have probably seen its effects as well. The number of marriages ended and sports cars bought are probably directly proportional to the number of people turning 50 each year. Why is midlife so fraught with people wanting to make a change in their life? We know that emotions and feelings are the chemical markers of prior experiences. As we grow older and embrace new experiences in life, there is a period in our late twenties and early thirties in which we think that we have experienced most of what life has to offer. Perhaps we have pretty much stopped having new experiences and are repeating the same experiences, which produce in us the same feelings. Because we’ve had diverse experiences in our earlier life, we can say that we know what most of our unique experiences feel like—and so, we can predict them. In a midlife crisis, it is as if we are trying to feel the way we did the first time we experienced the emotions associated with novel experiences.

From childhood through young adulthood, we are learning and growing from our environment. Then we reach a point in midlife—whether midlife is a genetic, natural phenomenon or a learned, environmental effect—in which we certainly have experienced a lot of what life’s experiences and emotions have to offer. By this time, for the most part, we understand sexuality and sexual identity because we have experienced it. We have embraced pain, suffering, victimization and pity. We know what it is like to feel sad, disappointed, betrayed, unmotivated, insecure and weak. We have reacted without thinking. We have been afraid. We have sunk into guilt. We have been embarrassed, shamed and rejected. We have blamed, complained, made excuses and been confused. We know success and failure…

Because we have experienced so many of life’s emotions by our late twenties and early thirties, we are able to predict the outcome of most situations. It becomes easy to determine how they will feel, because we have experienced what similar prior circumstances felt like. In this way, feelings become the barometer to determine our motivation in life. We then begin to make choices based on how they will make us feel. If the personality self knows that a potential experience is familiar and predictable, we feel good in choosing that option. This is true because we feel confident, and that feeling tells us that we have already experienced the event before, so we can forecast the outcome.

However, if we cannot predict the feeling of a situation, more than likely we will not be interested in engaging that experience. In fact, if we can predict that a potential experience is likely to have an unpleasant or uncomfortable feeling associated with it, we will tend to avoid that situation.

By the time we are in our late twenties to early thirties, then, we are thinking almost exclusively based on feelings. Feelings become the means of thinking. The two are nearly inseparable. Most of us cannot think greater than how we feel. The feedback loop of thoughts and feelings that are intrinsically connected to the body becomes complete right around this point in our life, because we spend more time feeling than learning. Feelings are the past memories of experiences; learning is making new memories that have new feelings. At this life stage, we are forced to stop focusing primarily on growing and learning, and start surviving. Jobs, homes, cars, mortgages, finances, investments, kids, colleges, extracurricular activities and maintaining a relationship or marriage are just the right ingredients to begin living in survival instead of expansion.

And so, given the opportunity for a new experience at this stage of our life, we typically try to predict the outcome based on how it might feel. This is when we say things like, “What will it feel like? How long will it take? Will it hurt? Do I need to bring something to eat? Do I have to walk a lot? Will it be raining? Will it be cold? Who will be there? Will we be able to take breaks? Who are these people?” All these concerns reflect our anxieties about the body, the environment and time. This is a sign that youth is slipping away and we are beginning to age.

To continue this line of reasoning, now we become further trapped within the limits of our box. We hesitate to step outside the familiar to experience anything unknown or new to us because we will not be able to identify a feeling to go along with that potential experience. The box of our limited thinking creates the same “frame” of mind.

The explanation is simple. A new experience evokes a new feeling. An unknown experience might expose us to an unknown feeling, so it initiates the survival mechanisms of the personality. Because we have not experienced this novel event, the “self” runs through its databases of prior experiences, looking for familiar patterns and associations to forecast what feelings that situation might bring. The neural nets of inherited memories are also activated in an attempt to evaluate the future. When we run out of options, we will simply steer clear of the unfamiliar experience. The chance to experience a novel opportunity is now overridden by the firing of our old neural hardware. In other words, it is outside the limits of our comfort zone. And so, we fear the unknown.

Excerpted from Evolve Your Brain (Health Communications Inc.) ©2007 by Joe Dispenza D.C. Used with permission. All rights reserved. Available at independent bookstores, hcibooks.com and drjoedispenza.com

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