Let's Talk About "Normal" People!

​I hear clients say so often “I just want to be normal” but the question is, what is that?  What is ‘normal’ for one person is not the same ‘normal’ as for another. The myth of normal is that we all experience the world in the same way as other people, and this is simply not true. This is because our perception of normal is processed through our own neurology and what I mean by that, is that everything is filtered through our own bygone experiences, through the association our brains have made with what has happened to us, in similar circumstances, in the past, which then informs our response in the present.  

 Allow me to give you an example; let’s say your boss is shouting at you for something that s/he thinks you have done. And whether you have done what you have been accused of or not, your brain, in a matter of milliseconds, whizzes back through your past experiences and finds all the memory files relating to “shouty wo/man” + “accusation” + “threatening body language”. When your brain finds a pattern match to any of those experiences, which have been stored from way back in the past, probably between the age of 0 – 10, from some teacher that shouted at you at school or a parent telling you off for some misdemeanour, then the body sends up an emotion that leads you to behave in a certain way; behaviour that is coming from outside of your conscious awareness.

Now, if the past experiences I have spoken about are stored as a negative memory with negative emotion still attached to that memory, then your unconscious mind, which is always there to protect you, instructs you to respond in a particular way; you feel the negative emotion, which is the same emotion that you had with the original experience and then the fight/flight/freeze kicks-in to protect you, which means that you will either yell right back at your boss in anger, you’ll run away and hide at your desk in fear hoping no one will notice you, or you’ll stand there dumbfounded in shock! Now, for you, that response is completely ‘normal’ because the negative emotion that you are feeling is still reverberating from the past, making you behave in ways that you wish you didn’t. The pattern of behaviour keeps on repeating in every similar situation and you can never understand why, but it is a ‘normal’ response in the context of your life learnings and circumstances.

There may be many reasons why you are still holding onto that negative emotion in your unconscious and the essential purpose of it is always protection, to avoid being hurt. So, if you think about anyone who is acting out of protection, (someone who is terrified of spiders and runs screaming from the room for example), then you may conclude that the behaviour they exhibit in that moment is anything but ‘normal’.

The thing is, what you observe in others as being normal is often not normal at all. All this activity of pattern-matching to past experiences is going on in each and every individual, all behind the scenes in the unconscious mind, filtering through deletion, distortion and generalisation[i], producing personalities that appear normal from the outside, but which are in fact being motivated by the fight/flight/freeze response. I would guesstimate that a good 85% of the population are walking around in the world, completely unaware of how their normal can be different and so much better than it is right now.

Let’s compare the above to another person who is having that same present experience as you; their boss is shouting at them.  The only difference between you and this person is, that when their brain fires off their memory banks, they find other occasions of being shouted at, but there is little or no negative emotion attached to the experience. This is because this person has a certain number of resources that they have learned through their experiences growing up. They can pattern match to other memories of being shouted at that have had neutral or even positive outcomes. They know that when another individual shouts and displays anger, that the anger is not to be taken personally, because that negative emotion says more about that other individual than it does them. They know that they can take a breath before responding and that if they use a calm voice tone and give the other individual space to come back to a calmer state before saying anything, then the situation can be resolved in a more rational way. This person knows from past experience that these techniques work and perhaps they even love the challenge, so their ‘normal’ response is to allow the person to blow off steam, knowing that “strong emotions make us stupid”[ii] and they will only attempt a rational counterstatement when that other individual has returned to a state of homeostasis.

Meanwhile, you watch this other person receiving the same treatment as you, make the comparison that they are better and more normal than you, and wonder why you are not able to respond normally (behaviour) or worse, you wonder why you are not normal (identity).

[i] Refers to how the mind filters information, taken from the NLP Model of Communication
[ii] Quote from Joe Griffin

As a therapist, I teach my clients how to break out of the normal that they experience, through re-processing and letting go of the negative emotions that are keeping them stuck in the past. Once you can let go of the negative feeling it allows us to give new meaning to the past event, because the brain is no longer being hijacked by strong emotion. This means the pre-frontal cortex, the rational thinking brain can come back online, which enables you to access more resourceful states of thinking, producing new solutions and responses. The scenarios that once triggered you into fight/flight/freeze no longer do so, which means you can change your behaviour and be more of the new normal that you want.

So, my question to you is, what are you doing that is ‘normal’ but that gives you a negative twinge every time it happens? If you can identify that, then you can get to work on changing it. And what would happen if you stopped asking to be other people’s normal and instead you could embrace being uncomfortable with normal, get uncomfortable with your protective personality, so you could be more of who you truly are? How much better would that be?

If you would love to experience a life where you can stop being reactive and instead feel the freedom to respond in the way that you would like, I can support you with everything you need to help navigate that new pathway. Please get in touch at www.backintunecoaching.com

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