IOW, your prediction of trauma comes from a past trauma—our brains don’t come with a built-in prior probability distribution for what beliefs will cause people to like or not like us. ;-) If you want to switch off the fear, you have to change the prediction, which means changing the probability data in your memory… which means accessing and reinterpreting the original sensory experience data.
Btw, the Iowa Gambling Task is an example of a related kind of unconscious learning that I’m talking about here. In it, people learn to feel fear about choosing cards from a certain deck, long before their conscious mind notices or accounts for the numerical probabilities involved. Then, their conscious minds often make up explanations which have little if any connection to the “irrational” (but accurate) feeling of fear.
So if you seem to irrationally fear something, it’s an indication that your subconscious picked up on raw probability data. And this raw probability data can’t be overrided by reasoning unless you integrate the reasoning with the specific experiences, so that a different interpretation is applied.
For example, suppose there’s someone who always looks away from you and leaves the room when you enter. You begin to think that person doesn’t like you… and then you hear they actually have a crush on you. You have the same sensory data, but a different interpretation, and your felt-response to the same thoughts is now different. Voila… memory reconsolidation, and your thoughts are now biased in a different, happier way. ;-)
Btw, the Iowa Gambling Task is an example of a related kind of unconscious learning that I’m talking about here. In it, people learn to feel fear about choosing cards from a certain deck, long before their conscious mind notices or accounts for the numerical probabilities involved. Then, their conscious minds often make up explanations which have little if any connection to the “irrational” (but accurate) feeling of fear.
So if you seem to irrationally fear something, it’s an indication that your subconscious picked up on raw probability data. And this raw probability data can’t be overrided by reasoning unless you integrate the reasoning with the specific experiences, so that a different interpretation is applied.
For example, suppose there’s someone who always looks away from you and leaves the room when you enter. You begin to think that person doesn’t like you… and then you hear they actually have a crush on you. You have the same sensory data, but a different interpretation, and your felt-response to the same thoughts is now different. Voila… memory reconsolidation, and your thoughts are now biased in a different, happier way. ;-)