Following our compulsions through to the end

​It's easy to come to believe our brain is for helping us figure out what to do next. For dreaming that next step and mapping it out and making it happen. And that is true. Our brain can be very good for that.

But what our brain is most good at, if we let it be good at it, is telling us what NOT to do.

Our brain, very basically, is divided into two halves. The bottom have is full of habits and instincts and compulsions. Some of them good, some not so good. But left to its own devices, the bottom half of our brain would run our lives. We would become humans that simply follow our instincts.

Is it too late, maybe that is what we already largely are?

The problem with that is the bottom half of our brain is where our emotions take place as well. And, so often, it's our emotions that are trying to dictate what we do next.

What we think and say and do.

The top half of our brain is where those emotions ideally get sorted out, and in the sorting the brain helps us determine healthy and unhealthy responses. It's where we get a chance to know our emotions have just conjured up a really bad idea. Then our brain kindly says, I understand where they're coming from, those emotions, but I can't let you follow through on this idea.

It only leads to destruction.

Many times, the brain knows this because it has seen this idea followed through to destruction in your life previously.

One of the most destructive instincts and habits in my life was alcohol. Not the substance, necessarily, but the way I used it. Which was heavily and consistently and ALWAYS to forget.

Even if I didn't always know exactly what it was I was trying to forget.

But one of the main impacts of alcohol is it actually shuts that top brain's mouth. The part of our brain that is trying to tell us what to do and not to do, what to remember, the part of the brain trying to help us understand the implications of our future and of our past, the part of the brain that is trying to help us make sense of our lives, alcohol kicks that part of the brain to the curb.

Alcohol says, we don't need the menacing voice of logic from that know it all top brain. You and I will be forever enough hanging out here in the basement of your brain, so I will remove the part of your brain from our relationship.

And so we did hang out together. We were all that each other needed. For better than three decades we leaned on each other. Heavily. And in many ways, we mutually destroyed my plans and my brain's basement.

I am on a far less destructive path in my life these days. Maybe that's another phrase for healing? Somewhere along the way I elected the top half of my brain as president of my life and voted my lower brain out of office. Or, maybe it's much truer to say, I have taught them how to work together in my best interest.

The top half of my brain is good these days to take my hand and say, let me walk you through this idea all the way to the end. I feel you, that part of my brain says, I know how friendly some of those compulsions were to you at times, but they are also liars.

They promised you so many good things, but came through with glimpses of hell.

And then, the top part of my brain plays the tape of my life, all the way through, beyond the parts where I used to clip the tape, to the end where I am forced to witness the downfall.

I witness it, and then I say thank you.

In turn, the lower brain these days is much less committed to deceiving me. It seems to have struck a deal with the commander of that top brain, offering me more emotions that feel like joy and contentment and hope, and much less like fear and shame and guilt.

The lower brain seems to be giving my higher brain more permission to say yes these days, yes, I think that's a great idea.

It's useful to look at our lives and examine where we have, even if unknowingly, decided to live in the basement of our brains. Where have we turned our brains over to our compulsions, much against the will of a top brain screaming, that's a really bad idea.

For many of us I fear it's our phones, we seem to retreat there often even against our own wills.

For others I am sure it's substances.

​Food. 

Unhealthy relationships.

Our work.

There are many places we retreat to forget all that we want to forget, all the paths to destruction we'd rather not have to think about.

It is worth remembering our brain is really good at helping us plan where to go next, but maybe not nearly as good as it is at telling us which plans lead to destruction. Maybe not nearly as good at telling us where not to go.

A beautiful favor our brain will do for us - if we'll only come out of the basement long enough to listen.