Sharing – Growth Requires Unlearning as Much as Learning

This is something I spend a lot of time thinking about professionally. I work in training and constantly find myself telling people that technology changes constantly so you must change with it. That includes changing your mind when it’s appropriate.

I also talk about this when it comes to being an abuse survivor.

“But growth and aliveness also require a commitment to unlearning. To occasionally letting go of behaviors, assumptions, mindsets, worldviews, and ways of thinking and acting that used to work but no longer do, no longer fit the changing circumstances of your life, or start bringing you diminishing returns, whether at the individual, organizational, or cultural level. “

As children in an abusive situation, we may have learned a lot of things that helped us survive that situation. Outside of that situation, as adults, however, it may be time to unlearn some of those things.

For example, we can’t learn to trust a person as an adult until we first unlearn that “fact” we took from childhood that no one was to be trusted. We can’t learn to love ourselves until we unlearn the blame and shame we took upon ourselves due to the abuse.

It might turn out that we have a lot to unlearn. I had to unlearn shutting down in the face of stress, running away from my emotions, and many other habits and beliefs about myself and the world around me. It wasn’t easy. It was necessary, though. Some things can’t be learned until we unlearn the opposites. This is progress one step at a time.

This is how healing works.

Read more about unlearning below.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/passion/202212/growth-requires-unlearning-much-learning