Hi, I'm Emilia Isabelle

Rewiring the Reactive Brain: the Cycle of Unconscious Inheritance

Personal development often begins in a quiet moment—when you realise that the way you respond to stress, conflict, or intimacy isn’t entirely you or it isn’t aligned to the you you want it to.

Your reactions are a mirror, reflecting something deeper, all your wounds and experiences that have led you here. As I’ve come to learn through my own self-awareness and something I have come to understand through the deep felt words of Dr. Gabor Maté in Scattered Minds, much of what we refer to as “personality” is, in fact, adaptation to our external environment. And when we speak of much of “overreaction” this is actually our unhealed raw pain resurfacing through our nervous system.

Dr. Maté writes eloquently about the invisible wounds of childhood-how the nervous system, especially in the highly sensitive child, becomes shaped by a lack of attunement, by emotional absence, or by chronic stress in the environment. This doesn’t need to derive from abuse or financial struggles, this can experience can come from stress of the mental load we carry. It’s important to remember our ability to carry stress varies from person to person, and it is never comparable and nor should we punish ourselves. We carry this wiring into adulthood, often unknowingly. The brain, seeking to protect us, becomes reactive. Hyper-vigilant. Quick to be reactive by shouting, quick to shut down. Not because we’re broken, but because we learned to survive this way.

And then we become parents.

Suddenly, we’re face to face with the same triggers our parents faced-only now, we’re trying to do better without the emotional tools they didn’t give us. We might promise ourselves, I won’t raise my voice like they did, or I’ll be more present and aware. With the greatest will in the world, without conscious healing, we find ourselves repeating patterns with alarming accuracy. We become reactive, not because we want to hurt, but because we haven’t yet healed from our own childhood.

This is the generational echo of trauma.
What’s particularly difficult is coming to terms with the lack of self-awareness in our own parents. Many of them operated with emotional blindness- navigating life with little reflection, no therapy, and a cultural script that said, “This is just how things are.” When we begin to see the ways they failed to meet our emotional needs, we often crave an apology, a moment of accountability or acknowledgement, or even just recognition. But more often than not, that never comes. Sometimes, we need to bring ourselves back to Lisa Bilyeu’s Frame of Reference – what tools did our parents have? what were their experiences? Did they receive an apology?

Sometimes we have to allow ourselves to grieve- not only the childhood we didn’t get, but the childhood we wished our parents were able to provide. This isn’t coming from a place of blame, no one is the perfect parent and this isn’t a teenage tantrum saying “I hate you” but it is recognition that your parents may not of shown up how you needed them to. It becomes learning how to accept their limitations without letting those limitations become our own. It’s freeing ourselves from the lifelong hope that they will change or see what they couldn’t back then and understand the impact it has had.

Self-awareness can be a lonely path at times. While that is a heavy burden, it is also a sacred opportunity.

Rewiring the brain begins with noticing. With pausing before reacting. With asking, Is this about now, or about then? It begins with compassion- for the child we were, for the parent we are, and, to the extent we can muster, for the parents who never learned to look inward through no fault of their own.

Personal development isn’t linear. Some days you’ll do better. Some days you’ll regress. But each time you show up with curiosity instead of judgment, each time you choose reflection over reactivity, you are changing the course of your story-and your children’s.

Not by being perfect.
But by being present.