The Gupta Program - More Than Brain Re Training

I wanted to write this in case it helps people understand a little more about a difference between classic neural retraining/rewiring programs and The Gupta Program.

Ashok Gupta has named conditions like:

as ‘NICS’. This stands for neuro immune conditioned syndromes, rather than just a limbic system impairment.

The neural aspect of this term is because we are working with healing and rewiring the brain (with specific attention on our safety ‘checker’ the amygdala and our regulator/attunement part of the brain ‘the insula).

The ‘immune’ part of this terminology refers to these neurological pathways and patterns influencing our immune system and nervous system in profound ways that create and propagate these conditions.

I wanted to talk a little more about the ‘conditioned’ part of this terminology as it is actually very rich in terms of how The Gupta Program works with this.

Conditioning in the dictionary is: ‘the process of training or accustoming a person or animal to behave in a certain way or to accept certain circumstances.’

The Brain - Conditioned Pathways

We know that ‘what we fire together wires together’ in neuroscience. This means that the pathways that we use most become the widest rivers that our thoughts, messages, neurotransmitters flow along. The brain doesn’t care or know whether these are good or bad, it just strengthens with what we use most. Very often as we are unaware of how these pathways work, we unfortunately condition ourselves into using pathways that cause us discomfort both physically and mentally/emotionally. This is conditioning neurologically.

The Mind - Conditioned traits and strategies

Brain pathways are involved in how we think, feel, behave - but we are not just billions of neutrons creating biochemical pathways. We are heart, soul, and personality/mind. We are each of us unique beings comprising of biological, emotional, cognitive and energetic components.

It is the ‘mind’ aspect of conditioning that I feel The Gupta Program really excels in. My academic and professional training is in this crossover area of psychology and neuroscience, so it is also where I feel most passionate about helping people understand their ability to heal, grow and change.

Childhood Conditioning - The Brain

Our neural architecture and personality begins to be set (hardwired) when we are very young, in response to the nurture or lack of nurture from our caregivers and other factors in terms of how supported we are socially, how safe we feel in our environment etc.

Our core goal as a small human is to get care, attention, resources and love. Any perceived obstacles to these goals can create overwhelming experiences for a child in brain, mind, and body; in other words - pain.

*I feel it is important to note here that physical pain and emotional pain are processed in the same brain areas, which is incredibly important when we think about early life conditioning and later chronic conditions. The latest neuroscience also shows us that pain is ‘biopsychosocial’ in nature - meaning that the brain takes into account our emotions and feelings, and our wider social support system; when deciding how much pain/symptom to give us. In other words, the brain has an ‘opinion’ on how much it needs to activate pain/symptoms based on multiple different sensory inputs. Remember too - pain is protective as it mobilises a response in us to stay alive. Over time however - if the inputs remain stuck on high alert - the brain will over protect us with more and more pain and symptoms, which creates chronicity in conditions. It gets conditioned this way until we re-condition it. This is an amazing thing for us to know now as it means we can shift the old inputs and condition in new ones for a different outcome.

Childhood Conditioning - Beliefs and Personality

The child’s response in response to its environment do not only create pathways for safe/not safe in the brain at this age - this perception of safety and nurture also begins to condition the mind; the personality, into developing coping strategies for challenges and obstacles to getting the love, attention and nurture that are needed.

Core Beliefs And Coping Strategies

As I mentioned when we are young, our only goal is to get love and nurture as we are helpless and reliant on our caregivers.

In the earliest years of our lives, we have an inevitable tendency to draw negative conclusions about ourselves in response to when our parents are not skillfully there for us, or when our parents’ behaviour is scary. Since we do not have the resources to understand or analyze these behaviours, we instinctively conclude that they are somehow our fault and that there is something wrong with us. In some families, we do not have to draw such conclusions ourselves. Instead, we receive specific messages from our parents or other caretakers that there is something wrong with us.
The conclusions or messages that there is something wrong with us are stored deep in our brains, because we experience them amongst strong emotions of fear, confusion and/or overwhelm. The more powerful the emotions, the more deeply the conclusions or messages are embedded in our neural networks. We install negative conclusions very effectively, as our emotional brain (limbic system) uses these memories in order to keep us safe in the future from any situation, person, feeling or thought that might resemble a similar threat.
These conclusions are wholly inaccurate about who we truly are— or they are false messages arising from another’s conditioning and suffering. Nevertheless, once they are embedded in our brains, they are frequently triggered. We know that neurons that fire together, wire together! Every time the inaccurate conclusion or false message is triggered, it is reinforced and becomes more likely to be triggered again in the future.
Even though the conclusions are untrue, they become our subjective “truth,” reinforced through repetition. They become our core negative beliefs about ourselves. It is important to realize that our core negative beliefs become a filter or bias through which we interpret our ongoing experiences. They are essentially our emotional soundtrack, our filter through which we create our own version of reality that then seems to affirm these held beliefs.
5. As a result, even the slightest criticism or mistake, filtered through the bias of our core negative beliefs, can trigger powerful and harsh judgments about ourselves—and suddenly we are back in the cycle of reinforcement, further strengthening our core negative beliefs and the voice of our inner critic.
6. Because our core negative beliefs about ourselves are strongly embedded in our body/mind from our earliest years and then continue to be heavily reinforced, they do not easily change on their own, even when we have a lot of outward success in our lives.
7. We may or may not consciously recognise our core negative beliefs about ourselves, but they nevertheless actively distort how we see ourselves and how we react to our experiences throughout our lives. We ALL have blind spots around them.
8 These underlying distorted perspectives on ourselves create suffering and wasted energy through self-judgment, low self- esteem, self-doubt, self-aggression and endless worry.

The feeling of being “never good enough” will typically come in four distinct flavours:

Competence

The feeling that I am “never good enough” at some skill or ability, like making money, being “perfect” or something else I “should” be good at.

Body

The feeling that my body is not good enough — I am not thin enough, strong enough, tall enough or pretty enough.

Identity

The feeling that I am somehow the “wrong kind” of person — it could be my gender, my race, my sexual orientation or even my personality.

Relationship

The feeling that “I will be loved only if I am _____.” This “_____” could be based on my career success (competence), my body appearance (body), my willingness to “change who I am” (identity) or something else, where I feel I will ONLY get love, IF a separate condition is also met.

If you feel any of these four or some combination, it is usually the result of inner emotional wounds that were suffered in early life — through no fault of your own.

Our psyche’s primary job is to protect us from pain. To help us manage these painful beliefs, we mobilise parts of our personality to develop strategies to feel more loved, safer, or to get more resources. These strategies become conditioned in brain, behaviour, and emotion. They become attitudes, and over time - are known as personality (personal reality) traits.

Some of these strategies can be:

People-pleasing - ‘if I please people and avoid conflict, people will love me more’
Helping - ‘If I help people all the time and don’t attend to my needs, I can prove I am worthy of love’
Achieving -’ If I achieve all the time and always do more and better, I prove I am worthy of love and I can avoid failure’
An inner critic - (often learnt from parental experiences) The inner critic has a strategy to warn you ahead of time of potentially how you can get things ‘wrong’ so you can do them ‘right’ to be good and worthy of love
Perfectionism - ‘If I get everything ‘right’ I will be worth of love and will avoid the shame of failure’
Victim mentality - ‘I am helpless, other people are too blame and the situation I am in is to blame for how I feel, so I will get sympathy and love
Safety Seeking - ‘Something bad is going to happen, do not take risks, I won’t be able to cope with uncertainty it isn’t safe’

These personality parts/traits are well known to be prevalent in chronic pain/illness (Schubiner).

High ACE scale scores (adverse childhood events) are also highly correlated with chronic illness; showing that obstacles faced to getting our core needs met as a child have a big impact on how we process our sensory information, how our body holds these experiences, and how we grow and organise our personality into adult life. We have been gifted by the fields of neuroscience and interpersonal neurobiology in recent year with a large amount of evidence-based research on trauma/emotions and the bodily (somatic) and brain ramifications of this being unprocessed (references at the end of this article), so we know that healing this can be deeply transformative.

There is also evidence-based research on how working with personality parts can help physical illness (See Internal Family Systems - please ask me anything you like about this as I am trained in it)

There is a great deal of conditioning in brain, heart, personality and body holding patterns that are linked with this early life perception and fear of failure and/or rejection.

Your Own Holistic Healing Process

It is so important we honour this when we are healing our brains and bodies. The body often tells the story of the pain that has come before. We were not able when we were younger to process that and heal it. This is not about attributing blame to parents or caregivers. Most likely they learnt their behaviours from their own parents. As adults now it is our opportunity to learn about why and how we developed as we did, honour those survival strategies, and learn to give ourselves the love, validation and care we so richly deserve in order to condition in new ways of being.

There is no shame at all in these coping strategies that were once needed for our survival and growth. All parts of us have a positive intention. Some are now just stuck in a role they took on a long time ago - and do not know that we are able to access new inner resources, growth, self-compassion. They also do not know that we are capable now of processing grief, sadness, and all emotions that once we were unable to. By accessing what is still held contracted within us is how we begin to update and integrate these parts and heal our brain.

The Gupta Program uses timeline therapy as a part of how it re-conditions brain, mind and body, in order to help people integrate their conditioned experience of what has come before, and teach not just the brain new pathways, but compassionately update any hurt parts of us with new information that they are worthy, safe, and loved.

This, in turn, brings about changes in the limbic system as it is the fulcrum of our emotional memory and our stress response.

On a personal note, as someone that healed trauma as part of my own recovery, this work was very transformational for me in my healing. Learning about the parts of me that were conditioned in reactivity, fear, survival strategies etc gave me language and deep understanding of an experience that was formerly very overwhelming and that I judged myself harshly on. To understand that I was just like a diamond, with multiple personality facets that all worked for me; allowed me to begin to accept all parts of myself one by one and get a growing sense of my true self underneath those strategies. From there I could gently learn new ways of being that came out of survival and into thrival.

The Source Of Self Compassion

We all have a Self that is the most loving part of us. Our higher self, future self, loving Self, divine self. We each have a different access point to this deeper sense of who we really are. It is our true seat of consciousness. In that state of being we have access to a deep resource of compassion, courage, clarity, creativity, calmness, connection, confidence and curiosity (Dick Schwartz - IFS qualities of Self). This Self is in turn connected to a higher intelligence. This can be the universe, god, Mother Earth, angels, the quantum field - whatever is true for each individual.

I mention this as we are often unsure how we find any source of care within us when some people do not have an experience of that in our lifetime. If you have difficulty with this, it is the job of a coach or mentor to help you access this sense of deeper trust and self in order to help you tap into the infinite power and healing that you are.

I am very blessed to see people healing and updating their core beliefs every day in my work. I see the neurological, physical and emotional shifts that accompany the homecoming of people to their hearts and a true sense of Self. I am a passionate advocate of self-empowered healing and if anyone is not sure whether they are capable of this work, I encourage you to take a baby step by learning a little more. I have resources here, or you can sign up for a free trial of the Gupta Program here with $50 dollars off with the code NADIA. As ever, I am so happy to hear from you so please contact me with any questions you may have or if you feel ready to take a leap of faith in yourself and begin this work. I would be honoured to hold your hand as you walk home to your health.

Nadia GeorgiouMay 16, 2020