Dealing With Your Past (Part 4)

Dealing With Your Past (Part 4)

Over ten years ago Cognitive Neuroscientist Martha Farah demonstrated the effects of poverty on brain development (link is external). Some of the brain differences associated with childhood adversity, including the reduced size of the hippocampus (crucial for learning and memory), the greater reactivity of the amygdala (involved in fear and other emotions), and abnormalities in the parts of the frontal lobes associated with regulating emotion and planning complex behaviors.

These kinds of studies make it clear that your experiences literally shape our brains. Thankfully, your later experiences can continue to shape your brain and stress responses in a positive direction, given the right conditions, and with the help of the Lord in overcoming our past.

Because your experiences affect your brain, it shouldn't be surprising that they also affect your mind. Your core beliefs are defined as your fundamental way of seeing the world and yourselves, which develops through your experiences. They can be constructive and creative or destructive and negative. If you perceive in your mind because of your past that you have no future, then you won't. Why? Because you've already convinced yourself your can't change your core belief of self-annihilation. You did it wrong, you messed up, so you deserve what you're facing now.

Core beliefs in the context of cognitive behavioral therapy are addressed in the book, Retrain Your Brain. The same author wrote another book with an entire chapter devoted to recognizing and changing them, because of their power to influence our automatic thoughts and our resulting feelings and behaviors. Although these were not spiritual books per say, they provided information that helped me retrain areas of my brain that were affected by my stroke.

Core beliefs have a poisonous quality of being self-reinforcing:

-They bias your perception of reality and ability to change.

-Drive your automatic thoughts toward unfulfilled dreams

-Reinforce your core beliefs that because you failed once you will always fail.

It takes a considerable effort to recognize and reshape these beliefs. Let me help you with these words:

2 Corinthians 5:17 "Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new." 

2 Corinthians 12:9, 10 "And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ's sake: for when I am weak, then am I strong."