Our Brains Lie To Us For REASONS

Unlocking the why behind my brain's lies is the key to my healing.

My mental health makes a lot more sense when I look at it through a scientific lens. This has grounded me and helped me understand what’s really happening in my brain more than once in my life. I thought it would be helpful to process this here, too, especially because I’m currently walking myself through it again.

Postpartum

The first time I can remember really connecting the dots that what my brain was telling me had nothing to do with who I was as a person was when I realized I had postpartum anxiety & OCD when my 2nd baby was 10 months old.

It turned out being on a razor’s edge, unable to shut my brain down from worry, constantly cycling through intense intrusive visions of hurting my kids, red hot anger and panic were not part of the “Congratulations, You Stupid Bitch Who Shouldn’t Have Children!” package. They were symptoms of a real, diagnosable, and treatable disease. There was palpable relief in learning that.

This wasn’t ME. This was HAPPENING TO me.

Burnout

I haven’t done much of a deep dive into our 18 month RV trip, at least publicly, just yet because I’m still processing what felt like my slow motion spinning out. I’m making progress, though. A huge step forward: learning about burnout and trauma responses and grief and betrayal.

I didn’t go from earning 6 figures with my blog, writing my first book in 8 weeks, selling my dream home, and downsizing to an RV in a matter of months, all while mothering 4 children including a breastfeeding infant, to being UNABLE to move myself out of bed or nauseous at the thought of opening my laptop by becoming “lazy” overnight. That wasn’t who I was, it’s how my brain was responding to keep me alive, to force me to stop.

Divorce

My marriage didn’t fall apart “out of nowhere” because of an affair, or because I was selfish or divisive or unwilling to work on it. It looked so good on the outside to everyone- including myself- for so long, until it broke me. I wasn’t a monster because walking away felt like relief. I wasn’t the one who abandoned the other first. I had long been grieving a loss with a smile on my face, clinging to security and normalcy because he was the first person I got to experience that with. Our brains tell us a lot of lies because it wants us to stay clothed and fed.

Heartbreak

My deeply emotional & physically painful reaction to Jay ending our 9 month relationship at the end of 2021 was not the product of a dumb girl who got too caught up in her first post-marriage boyfriend. I was not some stupid, idealistic idiot who had no business being so hysterical about something that didn’t last 1/20th as long as her longest partnership.

In fact, my relationship with Jay, before he abruptly ended things, had very recently entered into the safety of the oxytocin phase.

My brain had worked it’s way through the emotional highs and anxiety driven lows of the dopamine phase- dopamine releases that hook us to someone at the beginning of a relationship. Looking back, I can clearly see the patterns of my brain surging with dopamine throughout our early interactions, making me feel euphoric, followed by the cortisol waves when my brain became stressed that the dopamine wouldn’t last, followed by greater relief and euphoria when the dopamine returned.

Around late October 2021, what I classified as “finally letting myself fall in love with him” was probably the moment my brain stopped feeding me surges of dopamine around Jay, and replaced it with oxytocin- the trust & bonding hormone.

This post from BetterHelp.com does a great job explaining this cycle in detail.

The end of a relationship can be a uniquely painful experience, especially if the relationship was developed over a long period of time and both people still care about each other. This is in part due to the strong bonds that form in the brain. When a relationship ends, especially if the other party ends it, the brain's levels of dopamine and serotonin are temporarily lowered. In addition, stress hormones are raised as the brain tries to restore what was lost. In some instances, this may lead to clinical depression. 

The neural pathways that were established during the relationship are hard to break, and the brain may literally go into withdrawal for a short amount of time… When your serotonin levels dip too low, this can potentially cause a number of mental health issues, including obsessive-compulsive disorder.

- betterhelp.com

Did that just unlock a lot of mysteries for you, too? Or was that just me?

You can quite literally become addicted to a person, to love.

And your brain doesn’t base these hormone responses on technicalities. So you’re “still married”? So what? Did your person emotionally abandon you long ago? Has your heart, your trust, your bond already been broken?

I can look back and see the exact moment I felt abandoned in my marriage, that I experienced the same kind of pain that I did when Jay broke up with me. The only difference is I kept on living like everything was fine, I never processed that hurt. And to be fair to the other party, I did a shitty job at asserting myself and my needs because that’s what I thought marriage was supposed to look like- some kind of noble sacrifice.

Self Sabotage

Now, I’m fighting to pull myself out of another spiral, one that I’ve been in for a long time- self sabotage. Anytime something starts to work out for me in my career, my brain shuts down and becomes my cruelest enemy. I can literally make money selling things that say “Your brain lies,” and still believe what my brain tells me- that I don’t deserve success, that my ideas are dumb, that I look like an idiot, that people just feel sorry for me, that all I’m doing is making things harder on myself and those around me.

And so much more.

I’m still working through what the reasoning behind this is, but acknowledging this pattern is a good place to start. I suspect it has a lot to do, again, with my brain trying to keep me alive-that somewhere along the way I learned it wasn’t safe to be too big, to be too proud of myself.

I do think it’s also possible there’s a part of me that feels I don’t deserve success or security for reasons that are connected to my college experience.

And that’s one of those rusty tin cans rolling around up there that I know I need to pry open and unpack soon- to finally look at those memories and emotions through a lens of science and not the story I’ve clung to. I will.

Bufahlow

My brain tells me this next part is scammy and stupid. That I have no business closing this post with what looks like some kind of sales pitch or, even worse, request for charity.

But I have so much evidence to believe otherwise- that people will at best be excited to be a part of this, and at worst, will be annoyed, but probably just unsubscribe here.

I launched a crowdfunding campaign on IFundWomen.com for Bufahlow- my new business. I have a solid plan for building out inventory, adding additional product lines, and improving shipping times. I need help investing in the upfront cost of all of that, though.

If you’re interested in learning more, go to www.IFundWomen.com/projects/join-bufahlow-herd

Rewards begin at $25, and they will all ship even if I don’t reach my goal. Thank you for checking it out!