When we are born, our brain is like a sponge. Wide-eyed, we take in everything around us. This is how we learn language, how to function within society, and how to interact with others and the world around us. It's remarkable just how much information we're constantly absorbing as we grow! At birth, we are fully dependent on the most important people in our lives: our parent-figures. They're responsible for meeting our needs: feeding us, loving us, and keeping us safe. They make up our earliest environments and home. Within these relational environments are beliefs, ways of communicating, ways of expressing or coping with emotions, and other habits that we witness throughout our childhood. Our parent-figures (and the other close relationships we have) shape our world through modeling. We begin to embody the similiar thoughts, patterns, and behaviors that we saw in others around us. This is called our conditioning. As adults, many of us remain unaware that a majority of our current beliefs or habits may come from these early experiences and may not actually be the result of conscious choice. Conditioning happens at the subconscious level. As babies and children, we don't consciously decide to store this information; our brain does it for us. Our subconscious mind (meaning below consciousness) stores the neural pathways that formed over time from the repetition of thoughts, behaviors, and other habits. It's not just our minds that store our conditioning, our body does, too. Our nervous system begins to form around 6 weeks in utero and continues to develop until the age of 25. Our home environment and the relationships we experience within that environment actually influence the way our nervous system develops. If our first relationships were safe, secure, and predictable, our nervous system is typically resilient and able to recover from stressful experiences. If our first relationships were not safe, our nervous system becomes hypervigilant, always anticipating danger. Over time, a dysregulated nervous system can pave the way for dysfunctional coping mechanisms (substance use, reactivity, self-sabotage, excessive working), insecurity (or an inability to trust ourselves and others), and disconnection. When this happens, we don't feel safe in our own bodies, so we find ways to leave that threatening terrain. The most common way people leave their bodies is through a process called dissociation, where our bodies are physically present but we are ment…

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