"There's something about walking into our childhood home that can make many of us feel like we're 13 again. We arrive as capable adults with our own lives, and 10 minutes later find ourselves defending choices we made years ago or falling into arguments we swore we would never have again. It can be hard to watch ourselves from the outside and think, I don't act like this anywhere else, so why do I do it here?"
"For many of us, the holidays function like an experiment in predictive coding, the brain's adaptive way of anticipating what will happen next based on what has happened before. You return to your childhood home, spend time in the place you grew up in, and sometimes even sit in the same seat at the table with the very same people. Your brain and body remember what those environments asked of you to belong and to avoid conflict, criticism, or abandonment."
Walking into a childhood home often triggers automatic, adolescent coping responses despite adult growth and therapy. Familiar places and people cue the brain's predictive coding, which anticipates familiar interactions and readies old strategies to keep one safe or accepted. Those anticipations can produce sudden defensiveness, surprising others, and lead to repeated behaviors like overdrinking or withdrawing. Progress is measurable by noticing those patterns sooner. Recognizing an old pattern creates space between the event and the self-critical story of failure. Offering oneself a small act of care when a pattern appears reinforces new responses and supports ongoing change.
Read at Psychology Today
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]