Episode 6: Legos®
The 4th C - Challenging Our Belief Systems
Yes Legos®, that well known children’s toy: colorful snap together bricks, imaginative structures, funny movies, aaaand the painful reality of their sharp edges when you step on them in the middle of the night! They will also serve to help us understand belief systems, believe it or not.
For family road trips when my boys were elementary age, I’d buy them a Legos® Starter Set, like a vehicle or a building, and it typically included a person or two. These starter sets were usually apart of a larger set sold separately, like Star Wars themed playsets, and Superheros. After my boys gave a valiant attempt to follow the instructions, I would eventually be the one to put them together so they could play with them. I'll admit I kind of lived through my boys with these toys because I didn’t have Legos® when I was a kid. And face it, they're fun!
We apparently went on quite a few road trips, because we collected quite a lot Legos® over the years. In fact today we have a huge tub of Legos® bricks that were all once apart of those starter playsets. From this tub, you can build anything your imagination can come up with. If you dig (and also have the parts list and instructions and time) you might be able to find all the pieces to the original design from a particular starter set, but it’ll probably take awhile.
Legos® sets are a good analogy for how the brain works regarding belief systems we build from experiences and memories. You might say that our brain starts small with only a few “bricks” to work with, (like crying when hurt or hungry, and sleeping when tired or helpless). As we experience life before words, memorable events that occur in childhood get stored as “starter sets” of associations. As we mature and our brain develops we have more “bricks” available (more words for our experiences and “fight or flight” options) so more sophisticated “starter sets” collect to make bigger “themed sets” (our lives), and eventually the memories and experiences (bricks) get mixed together blending with new memories and experiences to where it’s harder to locate the original starter sets (like my Legos® tub).
When major events feel traumatic or especially significant, it’s as if those “bricks” associated with the pain get stuck together (or frozen) which then can become the foundation of a belief system. It’s like gluing the Legos® starter sets together. And when the belief system persists, it is like a starter set that is never dismantled, but instead becomes a “building chunk” that’s added to longer enduring belief systems. It may or may not fit properly in the growing personality’s perception of reality and life experiences. Often our young belief systems distort our reality in the present because they have not been “dismantled” or challenged and are awkwardly attached of our new understanding. Young belief systems develop when we have limited, immature resources. But as we grow, the resources we gain must match our maturity for us to see reality clearly. So hanging on to an infantile or young belief system (like a glued starter set) interrupts the development of healthier belief systems.
For instance, what might seem benign to parents, could feel significant to kids. Let’s use diaper rash as an example. Diaper rash is painful! In an infant’s mind with very few “bricks” available to make sense of pain, they, like all humans, want to get the pain to stop. Because they don’t have reasoning logic yet, when the pain does stop and infants feel better, they simply intuitively make associations with what seemed to work.
If there’s a pattern to the pain and pain relief, a belief system may develop around how it happens. Let’ say an infant cries when the diaper rash hurt, if it works to get their diaper changed, they may cry with other types of pain. But if they find a consistent result from smiling to get the diaper changed, they may smile with other types of pain. Or if it helps to fall asleep to cope with the pain because the diaper consistently doesn’t get changed when they need it to, they may try falling asleep with other types of pain. Repeated patterns of experiences are what form those belief system, not just singe event, unless the event was overwhelming, like trauma.
As we grow, we might try to use the same “technique” (crying, smiling, sleeping) for solving other types of pain (like the loss of a lover, or disappointment at work). If we don’t understand that it started in childhood and no longer is the best way to cope, it will become an automatic response we will shame ourselves for when it doesn’t work.
Let me encourage you to remember the second C here, Compassion for your humanity, when exploring your belief systems. You may be tempted to judge yourself, when in reality, your childhood “starter set” of limited “colorful memory bricks” for any given event helped you survive emotionally, psychologically, and sometimes physically at that moment. If you’re still here, it worked!
When all of our “starter set” belief systems from childhood get mixed up together, it takes a long time to identify them and sort them out, just like the big tub of Legos® my boys have collected over the years. But with Curiosity and “instructions”, those original “starter set” belief systems can be discovered and “dismantled” (challenged) if they don’t work any more!
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