Learn and unlearn; we spend our whole lives doing this. We acquire knowledge, experiences, as well as customs and customs. Throughout our lives, we develop ways to manage our thoughts and needs. We know our parents, our family and our social context.
Does all this experience influence? It’s very! What we become at the end of life, or what we think we are. The difference between these two things is very important, because we usually work with the second, not the first.
- In any case.
- Change and learning form a cycle that would break and it would be impossible to continue to function without unlearning it; In fact.
- In many cases.
- People are also updated.
- Such as computer programs: deleting older files to accommodate new ones.
There are times in our lives when we have the intuition that something is wrong, or we look at each other and we don’t look at each other as we would like, something doesn’t work, it’s not installed, but we haven’t been able to identify exactly why.
We end up circling, which is a big mistake, are we repeating the same strategies as always, hoping that they will give different results to those that have produced so far ?, results that put us in this position of dissatisfaction. This is unlikely to happen.
We do not know that we do not make decisions based on what we see or what we consider good or bad, we make decisions through not always certain convictions and customs already acquired that we carry with us and that we never question.
There is a time when we feel dissatisfied and realize that we need to make a change, but we don’t know where to start, that’s where we should strive to unlearn.
We usually work with rigid models that are structured according to?Should they or shouldn’t I? They are self-imposed obligations, derived from the way we look at reality, which, although speculative, seem to be an absolute truth.
The problem is, these? Truths make us suffer more than objective or tangible circumstances or situations. Many of these rigid patterns are often constructed unconsciously, through a process that avoids critical thinking. Construction is done simply by assimilation.
In this sense, we all have a number of irrational beliefs that seem absolutely normal and true, but are not, we must re-examine them, doubting our most ingrained and seemingly indisputable beliefs.
Albert Ellis, the creator of rational emotional therapy, also known by the acronym TRE, identifies eleven irrational beliefs in which one can unknowingly be trapped, Ellis argues that it is not events that generate emotional states, but how we should interpret them.
We see how often we work and work with preconceived ideas about ourselves, or also about those around us. Realizing the power of this way of processing information is the first step in unlearning.
Now, unlearning is not a simple and easy process, we believe that these are filters that we have very internalized and automatic in us and in our way of being, repeated over many years and becoming practically intrinsic to us.
It’s as easy to learn something positive as learning something negative. Repetition is a strategy that works with both behaviors.
In addition, we must understand that brain plasticity is a mechanism of the nervous system that allows to modify the neurological substrate.
So it’s a double-edged sword of our brain, because the nervous system changes through habit practice and repetition of ideas, and somehow it will eventually adapt to it, and it can do it for better and worse.
The good news is that there can also be positive change, and it will stay there after learning something – after unlearning something that is no longer up to us.
Therefore, we can produce new behaviors, but not at the same speed that we learn the current negative behaviors for us.
Psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Norman Doidge talks about the plastic paradox to refer to this example of negative neuroplasticity. Once the brain has undergone a certain change and it has been established, inertia can prevent or prevent further changes.
On the other hand, without having experienced other contexts and ideas, it is very difficult to realize the arbitrary nature of our beliefs, we can change our minds. We can change habits, but our brain hates changing their ways.
Learning leaves a mark on a group of neurons that interact with each other, leaving a mark on our neural substrate. Faced with a series of new ideas, we may wonder the extent to which our previous ideas are true.
This can cause us a lot of dissonance, because sometimes, according to these new ideas, we can realize that we have made mistakes before, and that until then we had not considered it as such, that is, new ideas can compromise our self-concept and self-esteem.
In this case, the brain can inhibit a number of circuits in the active areas of brain neocortex so that new information is rejected.
It’s as if our brain said: it’s better to stick to the unkistakableness and our concept of me intact than to take on the task of redefining everything we’ve already done and what we thought we were so far because of these new ideas. they’re coming up.
“The same plasticity that allows us to change our brains and produce more flexible behaviors is also the source of our stiffer behaviors. “Norman Doidge.
An important fact: people tend to remember the meaning and meaning of an experience better than their details Are our memories distorted?Memory is necessary to remember the past, but it is also important to imagine the future.
In fact, our ability to imagine the future is inextricably linked to the richness of our past. Furthermore, many of the decisions we make are, in fact, unconscious.
Consciousness allows us to distinguish the past from the present and the future, so that we can place ourselves in time, but the unconscious and the intuition are based on heuristics, simple principles that ignore much of the information because of the demand for speed and speed of Processing.
These heuristics are acquired through our social interaction, our culture and our life experiences, are they programmed?In our unconscious and we act automatically based on them.
The process of unlearning, as we see, is not easy, we cannot reject what we have learned as we do with a eraser when we erase something written in pencil, but we can be aware of these learnings and use them more intelligently.
We can stop identifying with them, and wonder if we really believe in the reality that is marked there, or in the behaviors they engender, once you have identified them, this is the second step.
Unlearning is a process that requires time, patience and analytical skills. We are talking about an investment that always pays off: a result from which we will benefit ourselves, with the people who love us.