Your Brain Hasn't Caught Up Yet
Growth is rarely as clean as we want it to be. We make a decision, do the hard thing, and expect the feeling to follow. Sometimes it does. But sometimes we look up weeks or months later and realize that some part of us is still living in the old version of events, still bracing, still expecting the thing we thought we had already moved past.
A paper published this spring in Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience is creating ripples in the fields of psychology and neuroscience. The researchers, including scientists from the Flow Research Collective, are pushing back on the popular idea that trauma and pain get physically "stored" in the body. What they are proposing instead is that painful experiences cause the brain to build rigid prediction systems. In other words, the brain learns to expect a threat based on what happened before, and then it keeps running that same forecast even when the conditions have changed.
The stuck feeling is not a character flaw. It is not evidence that your forgiveness was fake. It is your brain's prediction system doing what brains do, which is try to keep you safe based on yesterday's data.
That reframe alone is worth considering.
Forgiveness is a good example of this. You make a real and costly decision to release someone from a debt they owe you. But that decision does not automatically update the deeper prediction patterns that formed in response to the pain. The brain is still running the old forecast. You have moved, but some part of your nervous system is still guarding the old address. That is not hypocrisy; it’s lag.
I heard our pastor, Shannon Greer of River Church, say something recently that has been sitting with me. He said this: Trust in God's character, not in His methods. The context was that God is always faithful, always good, always just, but He often moves in ways we do not see coming. He paves His way through surprising and new methods, and we should be prepared to be surprised by Him.
I have been thinking about how often a rigid prediction system, the very kind these researchers are describing, becomes spiritual resistance without us meaning for it to be. When our minds are locked into an old forecast of how things go, how people behave, what to expect next, we can miss what God is doing right now because it does not match the pattern we are braced for. The defensive wall does not only go up against people who have hurt us. Sometimes it goes up against what God is trying to do next.
Romans 12:2 is one of those scriptures that can start to feel like wallpaper if we are not careful. "Be transformed by the renewing of your mind." But what if that is not just a spiritual concept? What if Paul, writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, was describing something that is actually happening in us, a real process of updating how we predict, interpret, and respond to the world? Transformation requires flexibility. Growth asks us to let old forecasts go, even the ones that formed to protect us. Especially those.
This is not a how-to. But I do think there are some honest questions worth sitting with.
Where do you notice yourself bracing? Not just in relationships, but in life. Where is the first thing that comes to you with a feeling of here we go again?
What old forecast might be running underneath that? What has your brain decided to expect, based on something that happened before?
And here is the one I keep coming back to: what would it look like to invite God into that specific stuck place and ask Him, honestly, to help you update what you are anticipating? Not to pretend the past did not happen. Not to manufacture a feeling you do not have. But to hold out the rigid thing and ask Him to meet you there.
He is faithful. He is good. He is just. And He has never once been limited by what we thought He was going to do next.
