In some of my other website entries, I have described the psychological trauma “mechanism”, and how it overrides just about all of the other brain circuitry. This is because psychological traumas are perceived by the brain as strongly related to survival. Survival brain wiring usually “trumps” other brain wiring. When we are young and the “thinking” part of the brain is still immature, we can misinterpret many, many things as dangerous to us that are not. Unfortunately, once these incidences or perceptions are sent to the “survival/threat” part of our brain, the experience or perception becomes encoded as a “fight/flight/ or freeze” experience. Once they are encoded that way, whenever we are reminded of these past experiences, we again get “triggered” into the old fight/flight/freeze (FFF) response.
So what does all of this have to do with your Authentic Self? The human brain is actually three brains, i.e., your conscious brain, where your personality and thought processes are located; and two more ancient brains that are unconscious, where psychological trauma is stored in the survival circuitry. So we each have three brains, but only ONE mind. The ancient brain tends to override the conscious brain, which means your fight/flight/freeze reactivity that is triggered probably several times a day, overrides the REAL you! But you generally won’t notice this, because these ancient aspects of our brain SEAMLESSLY override your real self. When we were growing up, our personalities developed and grew around these trauma FFF reactions.