Imprinting of Thinking, Feeling and Acting

The Past Always Determines Present and Future

You already know: Human beings possess two souls - the rational and the emotional (reason and feeling, or “head and gut”). Since rationality (the cerebral cortex / neocortex) developed much later - both in evolutionary terms and in the growing individual - the emotional soul is significantly faster and more powerful. Here, age takes precedence over beauty.

Your emotional soul resides in the limbic system. A crucial role, if not the decisive one, is played by the amygdala, also called the almond nucleus. It is the emotional guardian of your being.

Humans possess two amygdalae - one in the right hemisphere and one in the left. The hemispheres are connected via the so-called corpus callosum. Together they fulfill the same function and are not independent of each other. Nevertheless, differences exist in the “command authority” for right-brain-dominant and left-brain-dominant individuals.

Why Does the Past Determine the Future?

Why does the past determine the future of the person with borderline, narcissism, schizoid personality, anorexia, bulimia, etc.?

Let us try to explain it simply. We already know that development - meaning upbringing, treatment, attitudes - in the first years of life, and even in the womb, plays the decisive role.

An Example: Eating Disorder

Tell someone with anorexia or bulimia, after not seeing them for a while: “Oh, you’ve really put on weight.” What do you think will happen? Exactly - the person with anorexia will starve and the person with bulimia will purge themselves inside out.

You gave them one (1) piece of information, yet they receive anything but this one rational piece of information. They receive a flood of information that only their limbic system reacts to and is addressed by - meaning their emotional memory. The rational soul no longer reacts at all. The limbic system now has the other person fully in its grip. Your casually spoken information triggers a tidal wave of feelings and emotions that are no longer subject to rational will.

An Analogy: The Dog and the Child

I would like to explain this initial reaction using another example - man’s best friend: a dog.

The Situation

Family: Man and woman approximately 28 years old, child 3 years old, dog 5 years old
Roughly speaking, the dog goes through the same psychological developmental stages as a human, only in a compressed timeframe
For a dog: 1st year = 7 human years, each subsequent year = 5 human years

The dog grows up with the man, possesses different neural circuits and does not have the developed neocortex that humans have. Thus, its limbic system develops significantly more pronounced than in humans. It is therefore more subject to emotion-driven actions.

The emotional bond to its master is naturally very strong and will last its entire life. When “master” is not doing well, the dog senses this immediately and then tries to protect the man from any threat (in its perception).

The Learning Process

Day 1: The mother is overwhelmed, the child screams, the mother screams and she hits the child. The dog perceives three things:

It smells the stress hormone release (pheromones) from the mother
It sees the agitated reactions of the mother
It senses that the child is not doing well

Since it cannot put this into a logical context, it only reacts with incomprehension. But it stores: These reactions from the mother, this smell, the raising of the hand means danger.

Day 2: The mother is overwhelmed again. After several warnings, she hits the dog twice in the face with the flat of her hand. The dog again cannot establish a logical connection. But in its emotional memory, the previous day was stored. It now grasped one thing: the connection between the smell (stress hormones), the reactions (the mother’s movements), the resulting danger and the emotional pain.

Day 3: The child does something, the mother raises her hand - she hasn’t even raised it yet when the dog already smells it. In fractions of a second, the dog emotionally grasps what is happening. Its limbic system, the emotional memory, is instantly activated. The information stored within it from the past is marked with a negative sign. The command its limbic system now gives is: “Danger to the offspring and protection.”

In this moment, the pecking order and its conditioning play an absolutely subordinate role. In terms of the pecking order, the dog’s imperative now is to protect the survival of the “youngest, weakest.” Lightning fast, before the mother can harm the child, it grabs the mother’s arm or at least positions itself protectively between the child and the mother.

The Synaptic Learning Process

A so-called synaptic learning process (activation of certain neural networks) has taken place in the dog.

The father comes home and the mother recounts the incident - naturally from her perspective (the dog as a beast). For the dog, its action was absolutely legitimate, and had the man seen it and known about the previous incidents, he would certainly react very differently now.

In any case, no one thinks of taking the dog to a psychiatrist to find out why this happened. In many cases, the dog ends up in a shelter. And this for only one reason: “It defended what it loved, which was even its command.”