You ever think about how when someone asks you to handwrite a paragraph or ride a bike that you don’t really have to think about the details of each letter, its phonetic background, how it is supposed to look or in order to stay balanced on two wheels, you have to have just the right weight on either side of the bike plus some force. These aren’t things we have to readily recall on a daily basis and there are thousands of these things that are brains just do. The brain just streamlines the process which is pretty awesome…in most cases.
Things like riding a bike and handwriting are great to have streamlined. We don’t need to think deeply anymore bc we learned this a long time ago. What if I told you that this same thing happens with emotional reactions? We have tons of experiences throughout our lives that have invoked a direct reaction because of an event that occurred in the past. A lot of these patterns we learned from childhood; whether that be from a parent or friend or sibling. And some of these things for serve us well, but ultimately, if we notice ourselves reacting(an instantaneous move) in a way in which we would rather respond (take a moment and thinking before feeling or acting), we may need to reconsider some of our prior learning. The only way to correct these things is to recognize and make a conscious effort to reprogram the old behavior. This means taking a moment when you notice your typical reaction coming up and turning this into the response that you’d like it to be; just like when you started writing or riding a bike.
We call these programmed reactions implicit memories. But these were all explicit memories to start. Explicit meaning there is a thought pattern the connects the event to an action or emotion. So as you move forward into the New Year, take some time to find some of these implicit reactions that you’d like to turn into explicit responses and go for it!