Can we escape our fate? (Homayoun Shahri, PhD, MA, LMFT)

by Fate is defined in dictionary as “that principle or determining cause or will by which things in general are supposed to come to be as they are or events to happen as they do; the necessity of nature.” One of essential characteristics of fate is its predictability. Prediction is possible wherever there are structures, since structure determines function or action.

Personality (character structure) is one such structure, which is formed as a result of conflict between culture and nature, between the instinctual needs of the child and the demands of the culture acting through parents. It is maintained by chronic contraction of musculature in the body. Chronic tension in the musculature reflects superego inhibition against the expression of certain feelings. In the beginning the tension was consciously created to block the expression of an impulse that could evoke a hostile response from our parents. Thus the fate of person can be predicted from their character structure.

Can we escape our fate? The short answer is no! We cannot escape our fate for as long as our character structure remains fixed, our fate remains inescapable. Any attempt therefore to alter our fate is doomed to fail, and must fail as I will explain below. A primary goal of therapy therefore is to get the client to stop struggling against himself (fate). But by struggling against our fate we will ensure that our fate is fulfilled. We can only change our fate by accepting it. Ironically acceptance allows our fate (character structure) to change.
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In 1949, Donald Hebb, a Canadian neuropsychologist, wrote what has become known as Hebbian axiom: “Neurons that fire together wire together.” Each experience we encounter, whether a feeling, a thought, a sensation—and especially those that we are not aware of—is embedded in thousands of neurons that form a network. Repeated experiences become increasingly embedded in this network, making it easier for the neurons to fire (respond to the experience), and more difficult to unwire or rewire them to respond differently. Brain is thus shaped by experience.

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Brain can be thought of as an informations processing organ, in the sense that when faced with a stimulus, it performs very fast correlation-like operations with what it has stored in memory to find the closest match to the stimulus just encountered. The correlations are performed with stored events that contain more information – are more emotionally significant. Emotional significance is marked by Amygdala – an almond-shape set of neurons located deep in the brain's medial temporal lobe (one in each hemisphere), very close to Hippocampus which manages organizing, storing and retrieving memories. In humans and other animals, this subcortical brain structure is linked to both fear responses and pleasure. Amygdalae therefore assign emotional significance and information to stimuli. Once the closest match is determined the emotional response will essentially be the same as the response corresponding to the past experience with some modifications. This is how we repeat our past, and fulfill our fate. Freud called this phenomenon “Repetition Compulsion”, or the compulsion to repeat past trauma.

Note that any attempt to avoid our fate (past trauma) results in strengthening of the same neural networks. The reason for this is that in trying to avoid our fate we activate the same neural networks, which will be strengthened (Hebbian axiom). However, by accepting our fate we will reduce the emotional significance (information content) of our past experiences resulting in the possibility of change. When we accept our fate, brain may no longer quickly match a stimulus to what it has stored based on past experience. This may then result in formation of new neural networks that adapt to the new stimulus. The new experience when repeated, reactivates these new neural networks which will then get stronger until they become the dominant networks and result in reshaping our brain (Hebbian axiom). Thus it is by acceptance of our fate that we can change it, and change our character structure.

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