Reflections: Do we as humans change?

I was pondering this a lot lately. Do we change as human beings? Fundamentally, we are all born to be good. Never has a baby been born to cause harm to this world. Social and moral learning, and personal experiences, are what shape us to do good, bad, correct, or wrong in this world.

Many of the ways we act, behave, pretend, live, and so on are based on fear; we can often notice that these come from times in our life when we experienced fear directly or indirectly through the stories of other people—family members, society, religion, and so on.

So, can we free ourselves from the fear rooted in these sources? I believe we can. This may sometimes take a while to work through. Some of these are more long-term processes, as some of the fears we live with become a part of us—the way we are, who we are—encoded in our minds, much like a grain stuck in the earth. Some we are aware of; others, we are not. It also dawned on me that it is a sad life when fears manage our existence. Fear drives our bus, and we are living in the shackles of these fears, like prisoners of a lifetime sentence.

Internal Family Systems therapy is a profoundly transformative way to work through these fears, whether they stem from our direct personal experiences of life or from societal messages, family influences, religious teachings, and the influence of authority figures. These messages that are encoded with fear as a child, our system holds sensitive parts that easily lead us to believe others, or do so to keep us feeling belonging, connected, and safe in the world. However, these very fears, over time, keep us disconnected, unsafe, and make us feel as though we don’t know who we are.

Dr. Millia is a Psychiatrist and a Level 3 IFS Therapist. She has used trauma-informed psychotherapy for 23 years and currently is based at the First Psychiatry Clinic, Dubai.