In learning how to teach young people with learning disorders how to read, I learned the importance of explaining how words work in the closest manner possible to the truth of how the human brain developed a writing system over thousands of years. It all came down to the brain’s attunement to speech sounds. Deviate from that and our writing system becomes confusing and incoherent. The same applies to our understanding of human psychological functioning.

Every theory and therapeutic modality is an attempt to put structure around what is observed. Unfortunately, some of the terms that are used take us away from the simplicity of how our psychological system operates.

All human experience and behaviour arises out of the firing of circuitry formed in the brain. There is no one location for the ‘ego’, or the ‘inner child’, or ‘parts’, or the ‘self’. Each of these constructs is simply what we observe about the types of thinking patterns that have been neurologically ‘wired in’.

Interestingly, we all have the potential to observe these neural pathways in action. However, our ability to do so varies. If that ability is blunted, neural wiring makes it so. Somewhere in our past, we have wired in a belief that paying attention to our internal reality is to be avoided – and the firing of that wiring makes it so.

When people say, ‘I don’t like conflict …’, or ‘I’m not the sort of person who ….’, what they are really saying is that this thinking that has been wired in. A more accurate use of language would be to say, ‘I am the sort of person who has some avoidant neural wiring around conflict’, or, ‘somewhere in life I learned to think ….’. The ‘I’ is doing the observing.

We all behave as if the thinking we do is truth. Most of the time it’s not. It’s just wiring. How different life can be if we hold our thinking lightly.

In recent months I have innocently taken my thinking about the meaning of being usefully employed seriously. Through writing, action, experience, and more reflective writing, a deeper thought has emerged, sculpting an inner peace not dependant on external validation. I am grounded the value of what I offer. I know the stability and energy it brings. I intuit it’s life giving value.

I don’t find the notion of an ‘inner child’ particularly useful. I know I have a raft of infantile and childhood thinking stored in the lump of jelly inside my skull. And I also know that some of it is so automatic and intrusive on my daily functioning that it needs reshaping. Not to erase it, that is impossible, but I can write to explore the internal and external context around it’s birth; read and write in the hope that an insight explodes like the birth of a star; and an even more powerful thought is established in the inner galaxy of my mind.

My brain can produce catastrophising thoughts, thoughts that separate me from reality, doubtful thoughts that destabilise me, thoughts about the danger of people, thoughts about anything. We are all an expression of thoughts and patterns of thoughts that are wired into our brains. And we are also the potential for more. The potential for something new and fresh. Liberating. Writing does that for me. Writing allows me to see my thoughts, to ask questions about their origins, their births, their instructors, and the context in which I picked them up. It also allows me to see their amazing inbuilt survival purpose and to feel compassion and admiration for the resilient heroes we all are.

Writing allows me to be awed by the emergence and source of insights and thoughts that liberate. Our unconscious is the repository of some of our most life limiting thoughts and is the source of thoughts that can craft heaven on earth. Both exist. Both sit side by side. Both are available. Write to know them. Write to capture their presence in your day. Befriend both.