Insightful Counseling, LLC

You learned things nobody ever taught you.

You learned what a certain look means.

You learned what kind of silence means something is wrong.

You learned whether mistakes are safe.

Whether conflict means someone is leaving.

Whether love feels steady or has to be earned.

Whether you should ask for what you need or figure it out yourself.

Whether another person’s mood is something you need to monitor.

Whether it is safer to speak…

or disappear a little.

And here’s the fascinating part.

You may have absolutely no memory of learning any of it.

I’ve spent years sitting with people who can tell me, with complete sincerity:

“I don’t know why I do this.”

And I believe them.

Because sometimes the answer isn’t hiding in a memory you haven’t tried hard enough to remember.

Sometimes the answer is in how human beings learn.

That’s where we’ve arrived in An Insightful Perspective.

Over the past several lessons, we’ve been building something together.

Not inspirational quotes.

Not another collection of “nervous system hacks.”

We’re building an understanding of the actual human system.

We’ve followed information into the brain.

We’ve watched the brain use experience to predict.

We’ve met some of the structures involved.

We’ve watched protection begin before conscious understanding catches up.

We’ve explored why the thinking abilities we desperately want can become harder to access when we’re overwhelmed.

And now I want to answer the question underneath all of it:

How did your brain learn what to expect in the first place?

Because memory is much stranger and more remarkable than simply being able to say:

“I remember when…”

Some learning has words.

Some has pictures.

Some becomes a skill.

Some becomes an expectation.

Some becomes a feeling.

Some becomes something your body seems to know before you have any idea why.

And once we understand that distinction, some of the things we’ve spent years calling personality flaws begin to deserve a second look.

Not an excuse.

An explanation.

And explanations give us somewhere to begin.

If you’ve ever thought:

“I know I don’t want to keep doing this. So why do I keep ending up here?”

I made this lesson for you.

Don’t just read the first slide.

Come all the way through this one with me.

Lesson 6

Learning Without Words
How Your Brain Can Remember What You Can’t Explain

Insightful Counseling, LLC
An Insightful Perspective • The Human Experience 1.0

And if one person came to mind while you were reading this, send it to them. Maybe there’s something here they were never taught either.

There are things I know about myself because I can remember learning them.

And then there are things I seem to know that I don’t remember learning at all.

I think that distinction is fascinating.

How did you learn which tone of voice means something is wrong?

How did you learn what someone’s silence means?

How did you learn when it is okay to ask for help?

Or whether you should?

How did you learn what happens when someone is disappointed in you?

How did you learn what love feels like?

What conflict means?

When to speak?

When to become very quiet?

When to move closer?

When to pull away?

Most of us couldn’t identify the exact moment we learned many of these things.

And yet somehow, we learned.

That’s the part of being human I want to explore with you this week.

Because we’ve spent the last several lessons getting to know this remarkable brain and nervous system of ours.

We’ve watched it gather information.

We’ve watched it use previous experience.

We’ve watched different parts of the brain communicate.

We’ve begun to understand how quickly protection can change what we think, feel, notice and do.

But that leaves us with an enormous question.

Where did all of that learning come from?

Some of the most influential things your brain has ever learned may not exist inside you as a story you can tell.

You may simply find yourself reacting.

Expecting.

Avoiding.

Bracing.

Reaching.

Repeating.

Feeling.

Knowing.

And wondering why.

This week, I want to show you something about the human brain that I think has the potential to change the way you understand your own history.

Not because everything about us comes from our past.

It doesn’t.

And not because understanding where something came from means we are destined to keep doing it.

Quite the opposite.

Sometimes understanding how we learned something is the beginning of discovering that we can learn something new.

This is where our journey gets even more interesting.

Come learn with me.

Lesson 6

Learning Without Words

How Your Brain Can Remember What You Can’t Explain

An Insightful Perspective
The Human Experience 1.0

Insightful Counseling, LLC

There has never been anything wrong with you for being human.

Have you ever looked back at something you said or did and wondered:

“Why couldn’t I see that in the moment?”

Because afterward, it seems so obvious.

You can see what you wish you’d said.

You can think of the boundary you wish you’d held.

You remember the coping skill you absolutely knew.

You can identify the choice you probably would have made if you’d had five quiet minutes to think about it.

And sometimes that becomes another place we hurt ourselves.

“I knew better.”

“I’ve worked on this.”

“Why am I still doing this?”

“I should be farther along than this.”

I’ve sat with enough human beings to know how quickly “I wish I had handled that differently” can quietly become “There must be something wrong with me.”

But those are two very different statements.

And there’s something remarkable about the human brain that I wish we were taught much earlier:

Having knowledge and being able to access everything you know in every moment are not the same thing.

Think about that for a second.

Because if you’ve ever been incredibly wise for someone else and then found yourself completely unable to access that same wisdom in one of your own hardest moments…

there’s a reason that’s possible.

If you’ve ever walked away from an argument and suddenly found all the words you couldn’t find five minutes earlier…

there’s a reason that’s possible.

If you’ve spent years in therapy, learned the skills, understood the patterns, made enormous progress—and still occasionally found yourself in a moment where all of it seemed to disappear…

there’s a reason that’s possible, too.

And no, understanding that reason doesn’t mean we aren’t responsible for what we do.

It means responsibility becomes much more useful when it begins with understanding instead of shame.

Because we can’t consciously work with a system we don’t understand.

So this week, we’re meeting another member of the remarkable team we’ve been building together.

And this one helps answer a question I think nearly every human being has asked themselves at some point:

Why is it sometimes hardest to think clearly at exactly the moment I need my thinking the most?

There’s neuroscience behind that question.

And once you understand it, I think you may look at some of your hardest moments—and perhaps some of the people you love—a little differently.

Come learn with me.

Lesson 5 of An Insightful Perspective: The Human Experience 1.0

Your Prefrontal Cortex: Why Thinking Gets Harder When You’re Overwhelmed

Insightful Counseling, LLC

There has never been anything wrong with you for being human. But there is so much power in understanding how your humanity works.

I had every intention of sharing the next lesson of An Insightful Perspective last week.

And then life happened.

It was busy. There were things that needed my attention. The week got away from me, and the lesson didn’t get posted.

My first instinct was probably the same one many of us have when we don’t do something we intended to do:

I should have gotten it done.

And then I had to smile a little.

Because here I am creating an entire series about understanding ourselves instead of immediately judging ourselves…and apparently I get to practice what I teach, too.

I am human.

Sometimes humans get overwhelmed.

Sometimes we have a lot happening at once.

Sometimes something important gets moved to next week.

Sometimes we need a break without realizing we needed one.

And sometimes the healthiest response isn’t pushing harder to prove we can keep up.

It’s simply recognizing:

This was a full week. I did what I could. And now I begin again.

No dramatic restart.

No beating myself up.

No turning one missed week into evidence about who I am.

Just…continuing.

Maybe somebody else needs that reminder today, too.

You are allowed to have rhythms.

You are allowed to have limits.

You are allowed to rest.

You are allowed to miss something and come back to it.

Consistency doesn’t require perfection.

In fact, perhaps being willing to return without punishing ourselves for needing a pause is part of what sustainable consistency actually looks like.

So, yes, An Insightful Perspective took a little human-sized break.

And now we’re back.

And strangely enough, the lesson we’re returning with couldn’t be more appropriate.

Because we’re about to go even deeper into understanding what happens inside these remarkable human brains and bodies of ours....and why sometimes our reactions make far more sense than we’ve ever been taught to realize.

Lesson 4 is here.

And this one…

I really want you to read.

Insightful Counseling, LLC
An Insightful Perspective: The Human Experience 1.0

There is a moment I see over and over again in therapy.

Someone will be describing something that happened and say:

“I know it wasn’t that big of a deal, but my whole body reacted like it was.”

And that sentence tells me there is something important worth understanding.

Because sometimes what we know and what our body does seem to be having two completely different conversations.

That can be incredibly confusing.

It can leave us questioning why we became defensive so quickly, why our heart started pounding, why we suddenly wanted to leave, why we froze, or why a reaction felt so much bigger than the moment seemed to deserve.

But what if there is more happening in those few seconds than we realize?

This week in An Insightful Perspective, we’re going to slow those seconds down.

We’re going inside the conversation between the brain and body and meeting more of the remarkable systems working behind the scenes—often before we are consciously aware they’ve begun.

And as we continue through this series, I hope something else begins happening too:

Instead of simply judging your reactions, you begin getting curious about them.

Because once we understand how something happens, we become much better equipped to decide what we want to do with it.

Lesson 4: Why Your Body Reacts Faster Than Your Thoughts

Come meet a few more members of the team.

Insightful Counseling, LLC
An Insightful Perspective: The Human Experience 1.0