Genetics and experience

The fact that each individual has his or her genes does not imply that we are condemned to be a certain way.

Human beings can seem tremendously complicated when it comes to our emotional world.

With more or less frequency we go through a wide variety of states ranging from the most overwhelming anxiety to the most profound sadness..

However, if we look at ourselves with a broad and transversal vision, we can say that we are fundamentally two things: genetics and experience.

The influence of genes and learning

We come into this world with a genetic load that we did not choose and that accompanies us throughout our journey.. This inherited temperament defines the intensity with which we react to different experiences during life.

There are people who carry with them a nervous system that resembles a German autobahn on which there is no speed limit and on which you can drive at 200 km per hour, and people with a nervous system that reacts like a car on a country road on which, except on a long straight road, it will not drive faster than 80 km per hour.

The same objective experience, therefore, can be lived with a very different emotional reactivity, depending on the genetics of each individual. depending on the genetics of each individual.

On the other hand, we have the experiential part. Beyond genetics, our identity, our self, is going to be configured throughout our lives by adding up experiences that will interact with this inherited temperament.. The experiences we live through can be of two types: Emotionally regulating or dysregulating.

Of special relevance will be the relationship experiences lived in the first years of life and especially those that have to do with the interaction with attachment figures (father, mother or main caregiver).

These early experiences will place our emotional system at a base level of activation from which we will begin to experience the environment.

If the environment is lived from a regulated physiological-emotional activation level, the world will be a place with enough security to be explored. On the contrary, if from our earliest childhood, a level of alertness is installed in us, the world will be a threatening environment in which we will have to protect ourselves in order not to suffer. This management of suffering is shown as a maxim in our emotional survival..

Distress reduction strategies

Human brains are programmed to reduce distress and seek well-being, so that if throughout our history we had the bad luck to live some or many "bad experiences", almost certainly, our mind developed one or several defense mechanisms to find the regulation that the environment did not allow us to achieve. defense mechanisms to find the regulation that the environment did not allow us to achieve..

To deal with suffering there are brains that develop avoidance defenses and their alertness seek at all times not to contact that which distresses them, others develop control defenses and dream of dominating and planning the entire environment, becoming frustrated at every moment with the harsh reality in which almost nothing is controllable. Other brains use drugs to find regulation and some brains even develop a tool called dissociation with which they leave out of the vital experience one or several memories or even complete parts of one's identity.

Many professionals who approach in their consultations the emotional worlds of their patients, think that the essence of suffering and therefore of the achievement of well-being lies in the concrete experiences that these people lived in the past and of their echo or resonance in their present moment.

I would contribute here a change of view that I believe that with what has been exposed in the previous lines can make sense: we should not give excessive importance to the concrete lived but to those mechanisms that arose to manage the Pain and that were the only ones that each one of us could find in the present. and that were the only ones that each one of us could find to survive emotionally our own history.

It is with these tools that we continue to use today, and it is with them that our emotional mind deceives itself into believing that we are the person we were when the distress-generating events occurred, and annulling other types of regulatory tools that we can make available to us in our present moment.

In order to be able to make use of our full regulatory potential, clinical experience indicates that it is important, among other things, to develop the capacity to be aware of ourselves, our history and our resources.of our history and our resources, as well as to look at ourselves with the acceptance and compassion of those who know that they are children of their history and that they did not have the opportunity to choose a large part of it, that this same history in constant interaction with their temperament has bequeathed them its strengths and its fragilities, all of them human, enriching and worthy of being lived.

Author: Arturo Lecumberri Martínez, General Sanitary Psychologist and member of Vitaliza..