HOW WE BECOME WHO WE BECOME: Part I

Over the past two years, I have spent considerable time thinking how things in my life could have gone so wrong.  After all, I did all of the things that I was taught and told that I had to do to have a wonderful life: I did great in grade school, I got a scholarship to high school, I got grants to go to the college of my choice, and I went right to graduate school and got my doctorate.  So why did my family move away from me?  Why did my job go away, again?  Why am I sitting in a huge financial hole?  And I just might have figured it out!

I have spent a lot of time thinking this through, and I will be posting my thoughts in several posts.  So...

Let’s go all the way back to the microsecond that a sperm cell enters an egg and creates YOU.  We all were taught that this is the moment when YOU start to develop, in a flurry of cell division and cell organization into the different parts of the body.  Some of that cell activity results in a brain, and once that brain begins to function, the programming begins.  See, besides running your body, the brain processes all of the inputs that run through it.  Yes, ALL of the inputs that run through it!  And that includes while we are still inside our mother.

Studies show that what we hear and feel while in the uterus can have an impact on us after we are born.  Many parents play classical music for us in hopes that it will make us smarter or more creative.  The medical community also has proof that the things that mom ingests during our pregnancy can affect our bodies and our minds: alcohol and drugs having the most negative effect.  Everything that is happening to mom is happening to us: the joy of happy times, the sadness of rough times, the people who talk to her, etc.  All of this has some effect on the developing brain.  What effect?  We do not know, and we may never know, but those inputs ARE being processed.

It is also no small surprise that babies often bond strongly with their mothers in the first few days after they are born.  Why?  Besides the fact that they were sharing the same body for all of that time, mom’s voice was the sound that they heard most often and there has to be some comfort in hearing that voice as we are fed and changed and coddled and caressed in the “real” world.  In most cases, dad is the second person we bond to, and again, his is a familiar voice.  So if those voices were processed into our memory, we have to wonder what else of our pre-birth lives was wired into who we ultimately become, right?  And how much of this did we choose to accept into our brains?  Right, none of it.

And the lack of choice that we all have as to what goes into our brains when we are young will be a recurring theme when I pick this up in my next blog post…

Until Next Time,

Julius