When we look closely at our life we may notice that many events seem to repeat, many relationships seem to resemble the last one. It seems like aspects of life repeats akin to a broken record. Why? Do we really have choices in our behavior, or do we seemingly behave in preprogrammed ways?

To answer these questions we need to review how brain works. Brain is shaped by experience. A new experience results in formation of many neural connections that result in adaptation and response to the experience. Thus our brain is formed (wired) by our experiences starting from our early formative years. Every time a given experience is repeated the corresponding neural networks are strengthened. This statement is a direct corollary of Hebbian axiom which says that the neurons that fire together wire together.

Brain can be thought of as an information processing organ (an organ of compare and contrast), 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 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 mammals, 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 (existing wiring in the brain) with some modifications. This is how we repeat our past. Freud called this phenomenon “Repetition Compulsion”, or the compulsion to repeat past trauma.

An implication of the above assertions is that we unconsciously seek to repeat what is known to the brain. Thus we unconsciously seek similar relationships to the ones we have experienced before. And what is even more astonishing is that even if the relationship is inherently different, our behavior will resemble the past relationships (activation of the same neural pathways), thus changing the new relationship, in essence, to be similar the ones we have experienced in the past. After all, that is all that our brain knows! In psychological terms this is known as projective identification. It means that we may project the image of a past relationship onto our current relationship and the partner may identify with the image and act it out – resulting in repetition of the past! This happens since brain will try to compare the current relationship to what it has stored in its neural connections, and respond in the same way. Projection identification then is brain's attempt to adapt to a new experience based on what is learned in the past.

How can we then avoid repeating our past? The answer to this question is quite simple! I mentioned above that brain is shaped by experience. Thus if we have a new experience in which we do not respond in the old ways, then new pathways in the brain are formed that conform to this new experience. As this experience repeats newly formed neural connections get stronger until they become the dominant connections in the brain. However, this change usually occurs in therapeutic settings in which the therapist, aware if his own counter transference and internal processes, can present the client to a new relational experience and, resist and not identity with the projected image by the client. Thus it is primarily within the therapeutic relationship that change occurs. This also means that the therapist must have done his/her own work, otherwise there is high likelihood that he/she will either identify with client's projected image (projective identification), and/or project his own past onto client (countertransference).

Healing can also occur in our day-to-day relationships as well, if we are aware of our internal processes, and become aware when our partner is projecting an image onto us (reacts to us in a programmed way based on his/her past). When we resist the temptation to identify with the projected image or project our own, and when we can be lovingly present and nonjudgmental, when, we are aware of our self and maintain a strong sense of self, we then pave the way for healing and change. Over time, as this process repeats our parter experiences a different reality from what he/she is used to, which will result in formation of new neural pathways (healing). 

In conclusion, I need to mention that any conscious attempt to oppose our fate (our predicatable behavior) will fail as I have indicated in a past blog. It simply will result in the strengthening of the same neural pathways that we intend to oppose or change. Change occurs through acceptance.

“It is only by making the past alive again for a person that a true growth in the present is facilitated. If the past is cut off, the future does not exist.” ― Alexander Lowen,  Bioenergetics

Why are we chronically unhappy? When I speak to practically anyone around me, I hear unhappy voices, see grim faces, and contracted bodies. Most people today complain of being unhappy and not satisfied in life. Of course everyone's ego ideal is to live a happy life and to “live life to the fullest”. But the illusion of a happy life seems to elude most people.
What is happiness? We can say that we are generally happy when we feel pleasure in our body. Pleasure is feeling which like all other feelings is felt in the body. It is related to expansiveness and openness. Are we then incapable of feeling pleasure to a large extend? The answer based on what people say regarding being unhappy must be “No”! People seem to be able to sense excitement which results in very short lived sensation of pleasure. Excitement is a sensory phenomenon that diminishes shortly after excitement ends.

People seek excitement and thrill in order to feel some level of aliveness in their bodies. We live in a narcissistic age, in which image is more important than reality (it may even replace reality), consequently our true self is denied, and replaced with an image. If we deny our true self, we also must by very definition deny our feelings as feelings are perceptions of emotions that originate in our body – our true self.

We also had to cut off our feelings as children when our heart was broken through many disappointments, rejections, and loss of love by our significant caretakers. The narcissistic identification with an image and denial of our true self also serve to compensate for the shame of not being seen for who we were and consequent rejection and heartbreak by our caretakers. Having to deny or cut off our feelings all that is left is excitement which gives us a passing moment of feeling “something” which quickly fades. The more alive we are the more we feel, and conversely the more we feel the more alive we are. Dead people have no feelings.

Having suffered many rejections and heartbreaks, we become fearful of life and aliveness. Being alive means feeling our emotions, but this will take us back to when we suffered heartbreaks which are too painful to bear. We thus develop a fear of life and living. We seek refuge in our head and deny our body, and focus on achievements, power, money, thrills and excitements, push ourselves to the limit until life breaks us down (heart attack, cancer, auto-immune diseases, etc). We have thus failed! Ironically it is this failure that may provide us with the possibility of recovery. For some this breakdown occurs too late, making it very hard to recover. For some the breakdown provides a moment of self reflection and change in the direction of life. To paraphrase John Pierrakos, MD (co-founder of Bioenergetic Analysis): One of most important tasks of therapy is to help our clients before life breaks them down.

To regain our ability to feel pleasure and the capacity to live a happy life, we need to recover our body. We need to breathe, open and soften the thoracic cage which keeps our heart in isolation in order to protect us from heartbreak. If we don't breathe, we won't feel. Dead people do not breathe and do not feel. Suppression of feelings occurs through chronic contraction of musculature responsible for expression of those same feelings. Thus, we also need to release the tension held in our tight musculature which contains a record or our traumas and heartbreaks. Earlier I pointed out that pleasure is related to expansion and pain/anxiety to contraction of body and musculature. The converse must also be true, in that our capacity to feel pleasure is greatly diminished if our body is tight and contracted.
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I will end this blog by quoting Alexander Lowen MD (founder of Bioenergetic Analysis): “We deaden our bodies to avoid our aliveness, and then pretend to be alive to avoid our deadness.”

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.