Understanding how we mentally and emotionally process things can be confusing. The thing is, it’s important to try and understand, because healthfully moving forward from any experience, depends on the outcome of this natural information sorting process.
How our minds process our experiences can impact things like whether or not we feel like we have closure versus no closure with painful events, whether we feel better about ourselves or worse after doing something, whether we feel good enough after trying our best at something, versus feeling inadequate and unworthy after trying, etc...
When your mind’s Adaptive Information Processing System is working seamlessly (ie. No "glitching" resulting in trauma is occurring), there is a general flow of steps that occurs inside you brain, to healthfully bring you closure to really any experience. However, for the purpose of providing an example, the following focuses on the common experience of
Not getting texted back, after being left on "read"
You texted first. You saw the typing bubbles disappear faster than they appeared. Hours begin to pass. No response.
Literally almost as fast as the experience is happening, it's specific details, random info, assumptions you make, and the like, enter your mind’s information processing system and are all sorted based on their perceived usefulness for future situations you’ll find yourself in. Hint-sometimes it messes up...
The Mind's 3 Categories of Sorted Details, when Processing your Experiences
Useful Details
These details might include thoughts like “People get distracted- l still matter” or “I’m worth of relationships with equal interest in connection.” Useful feelings might involve a sense of peace, after thinking the useful thoughts listed. Useful thoughts and feelings get their "power" in helping you process and heal, because they feel similar to your mind and body to certain past situations, from which you were able to cope with and walk away with takeaway knowledge bits for making sense of it and similar future instances- in this case, maybe the instance right now.
Random Details
Unhelpful Details
How you make sense of your experience, with not getting texted back just now, is the result of which connections form between this event’s details and that of your successfully coped with previous experiences’ details. For example, maybe your current experience’s details get helpfully linked to a previous experience of learning about how some peoples’ actions in dating are more about their issues than yours, when you get let down- it’s still worth it to be vulnerable and to have hope in dating other people, and forgiving yourself for making the mistake of panicking prematurely in a past relationship lead you to react more carefully.
Then, your mind does an information purge of all the details it doesn’t think will be
relevant or useful for you in the future. This is a common point in which trauma can occur if there are glitches in the process. BUT, at this stage of healthy processing, your mind doesn’t necessarily erase these details per se, but deprioritizes their value in your mind. Doing this saves your mental energy for more effectively focusing on the connections between info that’s going to useful in the future. With the example of not getting texted back, the details categorized above as “Random” and the ones that were considered “Non-helpful” are deprioritized, in comparison to the information details considered “Helpful.”
You continue with life and collecting dating experiences, processing each with more
efficiency than those before it.
Thanks to the web of useful information connections your mind’s mental and emotional information processing system has created, you bravely continue on your journey, and this pattern, to find love.
Bonus: If you can understand this basic explanation of how our minds sort information, then you also now understand the system in which EMDR Therapy works to heal trauma.
In processing and reprocessing details, EDMR Therapy helps people let go of the painful parts of the past, feel, function, and enhance their performance in the present, and highlight the useful information from past events, that can be practiced and applied in therapy sessions and in real life, to better prep them for dealing with future situations, with challenges that feel similar to their once painful past ones.
To learn more about EMDR and how it can help you, if other forms of therapy didn't, read this post:
I hope this real life example of healthy brain processing can provide you with some degree of clarity and insight! Till next time,
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