Today I had an interesting conversation with my therapist (well, all our conversations are interesting, but this one pertains to this topic). I'll write down the gist of it in case it is helpful.
I have a pattern that plays out in my life over and over that could well be called a program. It's around attachment. It feels as if I have next to no power to choose differently or make it go any other way. Thought of this analogy the other day, which I went into in more detail in my diary. It's like someone presses a button on a CD player and the same theme song starts playing. It's a theme with variations, but the same theme nonetheless. There is absolutely nothing I can do to stop it playing. I am like a snowball that starts rolling downhill, gathering momentum, with no ability to stop. This is so huge and so painful and so reinforced by much repetition that even thinking about it too much makes my hypervigilance shoot through the roof. People trying to talk me out of it hit a wall and I freeze from too much internal conflict. There is very little upper brain activity possible when it is activated. I absolutely hate what this has done to my life. Out of all my symptoms, this is the strongest.
He nodded as I described this, then said what I was describing is a neural cluster. It's an actual wiring in the brain that keeps adding any experiences having anything in common with the original trauma so the neurons become like a lot of electrical wires joined together.
Hurray for neuroplasticity. We didn't attack the cluster head on, probably because I described how bad it gets when I try to. Instead, he said the trick is in finding the weak points in the bundle and forming a new pathway leading off from there (I think I've got that right, but I wasn't taking notes). We started to sort of come at it from the side by working on related clusters. Some of it gets a bit esoteric in my case, but my point is there are solid evidence-based reasons why a much-enforced pattern could feel like a program, AND that there is something that can be done about it.
