I believe the psychological/religious/spiritual ideologies and theories taught to us since birth cause us to become confused about what is personal and what is not personal. This is glaring in how characters in literature, film, and television interact.

We are taught we must strive to ‘intuit’ exactly what is going on inside the brains of other people as if we could actually think and feel with the personal brains of whoever we are with. And we learn to expect other people to be able to do the same for us.

For this reason, we rarely take people at face value. We learn to try and figure out what they are ‘really’ thinking. And others do the same for us.

If we could assume each brain has a language unto itself we would know nobody can know exactly how to respond to us and vice versa. If we don’t expect people to respond to us exactly as we expect them or want them to, we will not become so threatened when they do not and vice verse.

Articulating better how to understand the human nervous system will help all of us better learn how to use our anxiety as a valuable cueing system instead of a source of constant mental anguish and confusion.

Because of the confusing ways we are taught to understand self vs other, we spend no time simply making sense of information for how it makes sense to us personally, which is what our nervous system is supposed to be doing. Instead, our nervous systems are exhausted because they are processing every single person that comes in the room all day long as if all those people are inside our nervous system. I believe this kind of personality confusion is the main reason we humans develop unmanageable anxiety, depression, and aggression.

Each brain has a billion to the billionth power of interactions per second, so there is no way for me to know exactly what is going on in anyone else’s brain but my own. Understanding our own brain mechanics better can help us know how to protect ourselves from nervous system exhaustion and despair.

Instead, religion and psychology teach us to expect others to treat us exactly the way we expect them to treat us. And we are chastised when we don’t treat others the way they are expecting us to. These directives are the same as expecting us to know exactly when someone else is tired or hungry.

I believe we are taught about self vs other in ways that cause us to feel very obligated to understand other people in ways that are impossible for us to do so and in ways that violate their personal dignity and privacy. I also believe we are taught to expect others to understand us with a level of detail that is simply impossible, therefore we are constantly being hurt when nobody can fulfill our expectations.

It is my opinion that replacing outdated psychological theories with straightforward information about how our nervous system works will help us more than any form of therapy can.