How the brain and therapy work together

The Brain's Job: Keeping You Alive Through Predictions

Our brains are essentially prediction machines with one primary job: keeping us alive. To do this, they rely on past experiences to predict future events. This is all based on what we've encoded in our memory.

When we encounter danger in the past but only manage to cope with it instead of solving it, those coping mechanisms get stored in our memory. Then, when we face something similar in the future, our brain automatically uses those past coping strategies. It's like if you taste a delicious cake and later encounter ingredients like eggs, flour, and butter. Your brain might label the new dish as cake, even if it isn’t.

This automatic process helps the brain save energy. It's unconscious and hard to recognize, let alone slow down to evaluate whether the past is truly repeating itself.

The Hose and the Snake

Imagine seeing a hose coiled up on the floor and for a moment thinking it's a snake. Your brain uses the shape of the hose to make a quick judgment to protect you. After a second, you realize it’s just a hose, and you can go about your gardening.

In relationships, these automatic assumptions are harder to recognize. We often mistake our gut feelings for objective truth. For example, if you grew up with parents who couldn’t handle big emotions like sadness, anger, or fear, you might have learned to suppress these feelings to cope. This coping strategy gets encoded in your brain.

Coping vs. Solving

As an adult, when you feel sad, scared, or angry in a romantic relationship, you might automatically suppress these emotions. You might feel anxious, irritable, or distracted but not recognize the underlying sadness, fear, or anger. This can lead you to stay in unhealthy relationships because your emotions, which are meant to guide you, are being ignored.

The Role of Therapy

Describing this unconscious process is challenging because it's designed to be unnoticed. This is where therapy comes in. Good psychotherapy helps you recognize the core issues behind your behaviors, like difficulty focusing, irritability, numbness, or getting overly upset. Therapy guides you in creating new, healthier responses that truly solve your problems rather than just coping with them.

By working through these issues in therapy, you can update your brain's prediction models with new data that reflects actual solutions, allowing you to live a more fulfilling life.