Dr. Caroline Leaf

So wherever you are, whatever you're in, how does this work?

And how can we use our mind to help us cope?

With all these different circumstances.

So in terms of identity, absolutely.

What you experience in your nurturing and in the environment that you grow up in is definitely going to affect how you see yourself.

Because every experience is converted through think, feel, choose into brain.

So you can imagine a massive forest, which is your non-conscious mind, N-O-N.

And that massive forest is filled with all different shapes and sizes of trees.

And in between the green trees, you've got these little black trees and maybe there's a big clump and maybe there's a little one and some trees are little and some little black trees from a recent experience and some very big ones from long established experience.

So something like racism would be a very strong

very dominant cluster of dark black trees using the warning signal of all the anxiety and the stress and the terrible things that come from something as evil as racism, which is pervasive and affecting ability to actually how you see yourself.

And so every bit of nurturing is built into your brain.

Every experience is built into your brain.

So this forest is influencing in the middle of the forest, just to give a visual example,

we have this wide field of optimism bias.

So I always explain it like a strip of trees that are perfect.

In the middle of the forest, there's this untouched area that's just perfect.

And that's where we want to really access that.

So if you're flying your helicopter, which is you in life, you're flying your helicopter and you kind of, as you develop self-regulation, you don't just fly your helicopter and bash into a tree and crash, which is what we do a lot of.

That's messy.