Science + Social Programming

This week, I’m sharing another excerpt from the self-coaching course I’m developing for The Rexy Collective. It’s a robust resource designed to provide our membership community with tools for emotional processing, nervous system regulation, and what I call Personal Excavation - evaluating the pre-conscious beliefs handed to us throughout our lives that we took on without consent. Because we didn’t know we had a choice.?

The course provides you with that choice. So that you can strengthen the narratives that are helpful and you want to keep while liberating yourself from the bullshit that’s holding you back.?

Ultimately, what this leads to is dismantling internalized oppression. And when we do that as individuals, in community, we’ll be more well-equipped to dismantle oppressive systems on a larger scale.?

This course answers the HOW that so much of personal development leaves out when there are minimizing phrases like, “Just love yourself!” or toxic positivity and spiritual bypassing take place. And it’ll be made available to every member of The Rexy Collective - my low-cost self-coaching community built to provide access to tools, resources, *actual* live coaching, and community support - things that are commonly gate-kept behind a price tag that’s out of reach for many people who need it most.

Rexy is available now for just $10/month or $100/year. Sign up and join us on the inclusive inside at https://kelilynjewel.com/the-rexy-collective.

Let's talk a little science, shall we??

As humans, we share a portion of our brains with every other living creature on the planet. (And new research is coming out all the time about the intelligence and communication methods of trees, mushrooms, etc. So it’s possible this goes even further than what’s commonly accepted by the scientific community today!)

This portion of our brains controls our bodily functions. It produces our fight, flight, or freeze response. It’s the portion of our brains that has kept us in existence as the human species for so long.?

Given that, it’s often referred to as our ancient brain, lizard brain, monkey mind, or something similar. And when it comes to social programming (which we’ll get to next), the narratives we have running through our mind generated from this portion of our brains are often called something like ego, inner critic, or even inner mean girl. For our purposes in The Rexy Collective, we will call both concepts together our Dino Mind.?

The Dino Mind is VERY powerful. It has evolved over millennia with the sole purpose of keeping us alive and safe, and it has some incredibly strong pull. The Dino Mind is afraid of change because when humans were living in caves, change often meant death. The Dino mind is afraid of emotional pain because emotional pain often meant physical pain, abandonment from the tribe, or tremendous risk, which would likely lead to death. Basically, your Dino Mind just thinks everything will kill you; its whole job is to keep you alive!?

Your Dino Mind wants you to stay safe in your cave, even when that cave feels fucking terrible. Because fucking terrible is at least ALIVE.?

Your cave may be financial strife. It may be an unfulfilling career path. It may be an unhappy relationship. It may be a negative body image. And it may be a number of other things - likely even multiple things. And your Dino Mind will keep you from making any changes because it doesn’t understand the difference between the real threats we (as humans) may have experienced back in the day when leaving the cave meant being chased by an animal hungry for a snack, and current times when most of us capable of consuming digital content are generally pretty safe in our physical worlds.?

Since the Dino Mind doesn’t understand those differences, it’ll create neural pathways that produce emotions like anxiety, fear, dread, and shame when they’re entirely unnecessary and make you feel like you’re going to die when there’s absolutely no real threat of death.?

The prefrontal cortex is the biggest difference between us as humans and other animals on the planet. This is the front portion of our brains that gives us executive function. It allows us to make decisions, think things through, and have the capacity for abstract contemplation. (And it’s not fully developed until we’re in our 20s. So all that stupid shit you did as a teenager? That’s because you literally - biologically - did not yet have the brain capacity to think like an adult.)

In The Rexy Collective, it’s the prefrontal cortex that we spend most of our time working with. Because when we ensure our pre-frontal cortex is online, we can use it to quell the fear, anxiety, dread, and shame produced by the Dino Mind with comfort and compassion. Your prefrontal cortex becomes the adult, soothing the little toddler Dino Mind.?

And, fun fact, this imagery is where the concept of the Dino Mind came from. Not because it’s the most ancient part of our brains. But because I imagine this part of our brains as toddlers dressed up in dinosaur Halloween costumes. Which is a super helpful visual when we start battling ourselves in our brains. I mean, are you really going to take a toddler in a Halloween costume seriously when they tell you an absurd story? No, of course not. And are you really going to go to war with a toddler in a Halloween costume, telling the kid how terrible they are? No, of course not. So this visual imagery serves the specific purpose of helping YOU relate to YOUR OWN BRAIN in the softer, gentler way that you would relate to a toddler wearing a dinosaur Halloween costume. So, pick your Dino-clad toddler image and let’s be on our way.

Our brains also come equipped with the Reticular Activating System (RAS), which acts like a tiny little matchmaker inside our heads, ensuring that what we experience matches our inner beliefs and expectations. This is the basis for things like cognitive bias and the bizarre phenomenon where you purchase a new car, and suddenly every third car on the street seems to be the same as yours!?

It’s quite literally impossible to take in everything around us. We all have unconscious blinders to what our Dino Minds allow us to consciously notice. But we absorb thoughts offered to us from external sources throughout our lives, and the RAS sifts through them, taking notes on what feels most familiar to our caves, keeping our experiences matched up with our (often non-consensual) beliefs and expectations.?

In addition to the ways we’re kinda fucked by evolutionary biology, we’re also kinda fucked by socialization with unhelpful narratives handed to us that become our beliefs and expectations. The thing is, we generally don’t consent to these narratives because WE DON’T KNOW THAT WE HAVE AN OPTION. But that option? That’s the key to the great un-fucking! That’s what we’re working on in The Rexy Collective. Because we ALWAYS have an option. It just may not be easy to see, which is why we do Excavation. And it may not always be easy to claim our preferred option, which is why the group exists - for community support. Because doing this work alone? That’s just not effective. Our social programming wasn’t created alone. And changing it alone isn’t really a thing because we don’t live in isolation.?

Excavation leads to awareness, which allows us to consent to or revoke consent from the narratives handed to us along the way. And this is what provides us with the strength and resilience for personal liberation from our own internalized oppression. Which, by the way, is absolutely necessary for systemic liberation and the dismantling of oppressive systems. We can’t dismantle the systems we’re weaponizing against ourselves. So this work allows us to notice when “the call is coming from inside the house” so we can get the fuck out and decide if we even want that house anymore. (House = cave = preconscious narratives. You get it.)

So what is our social programming? If we think of the mind similarly to any piece of technology, some programs are built in from evolution (like, “stay safe in the cave!”), and some programs are built in from our upbringing. These come from well-meaning parents, teachers, and friends; society at large; the media; and all other aspects of our communities - churches, workplaces, athletic teams, academic clubs, and every other individual and group of people we’ve been around for our entire lives.?

When we’re young, we accept the narratives about what’s right and wrong, good and bad, etc., from the people around us as if they’re universally true. But they’re not. There’s basically nothing that’s universally true across time and place. What’s deemed true in one culture is not in another. And what’s good in one time period is bad in another.

As we grow up, these narratives become the foundational belief systems upon which our conscious thoughts are built. They become the lens through which we see the world. They become the context we use to develop our identities and relationships. And many of them don’t serve us. Some of them may even be harmful. For example, alllllll of the ways we internalize what it means to perform our gender - from not taking up space in work meetings to manipulating our bodies in an attempt to meet impossibly unrealistic expectations to staying in unhealthy (or even potentially abusive) relationships.?

We’ve all been handed narratives from outside sources and kept them even when they’re unhelpful because we didn’t know we could revoke consent. The work in The Rexy Collective is designed to help you shed light on those narratives - what we’ll call “preconsciousness” because you DO have access to them. You can become aware of them and make them conscious so that you can decide for yourself which beliefs you want to keep and which you want to shift. And so that you can consent to keep what you want and revoke consent for what’s not yours and is no longer serving you.?

This work will strengthen your relationship to your prefrontal cortex, allowing you to make more intentional decisions rather than living by way of the Dino Mind - unconsciously going through life completely unaware of how the ways in which you experience your life are created.

Life - and everything in it - does not just happen TO you. And this work is designed to show you how you create your own experience of your life’s events.?

This is not manifestation or law of attraction - though if that’s your jam, it’ll solidify your belief in it.?

This is your human power, authority, and autonomy that’s available to us all at an individual level. And you’re here to reclaim that power - in community.

Will this be easy? No.?

Will it be comfortable? Also no.?

Remember, your Dino Mind wants you to stay safe in your shitty cave because even though it’s shitty in there, it’s deathly scary outside the cave.?

I’m going to ask you to explore.?

And you will not die from it.?

It’ll certainly be challenging. At times it will be wildly uncomfortable. And you’ll often find yourself having fallen into what we’ll lovingly refer to as the Pit of Despair - where you recognize what’s happening, but you’re not yet sure how to change it.?

But if you do the work, stick with it, and allow yourself the opportunity to grow, I can promise you that it will be worth it.