Wholistic Renewal and Rewiring the Mind

GrowWell© is a framework that creates programmes to help individuals to Understand, Review, Repair, and Restore their wholistic well being. The goal is to help individuals to function optimally – purposefully doing and being who they are made to be.

Whether you are feeling mildly stressed, overwhelmed, or being given a diagnosis of having a certain mental health disorder, you can be helped and may be restored to your ideal functioning again.

Wholistic? You may ask. Yes, wholistic because our mind consists of the conscious, pre-conscious, and the un-conscious dimensions.

A little background about myself before I go on. I see myself as an educator grounded with knowledge in the following areas - pedagogy, educational psychology, cognitive

science, developmental psychology, counselling psychology, psychotherapy, and neuroscience [BA (Education); PostGraduateDip (Psychology); MSc (Cognitive Science); PhD (Education – Psychology); MA (Counselling)].

Upon completing MA in counselling, I specialise in a counselling modality known as Brainspotting therapy. This is where I see all my knowledge from the past – from intellectual reasoning at the conscious dimension, the inferred mindsight at the pre-conscious dimension, as well as the felt sense of ‘don’t know where it came from’ of the un-conscious dimension of the mind – come together.

During my 20 years stint as an educator, I have no doubt that changing one’s thinking and reasoning will change one’s life. I have published a book entitled “Critical Thinking for Effective Teaching and Learning”. In the process of writing this book, I discovered that there is a psychological aspect to be an effective critical thinker. This is also the period of time where I parented three boys, and I was determined to put what I know into practice. What I discovered was – no matter how convinced about a certain parental approach, and thus techniques and strategies, it took a lot more to ensure that the recipients could and be willing to apply the principles in their lives. This cognitive and intellectual dissonance compelled me to look deeper into the internal structure of human being. And so, I dwelt deeper into neuroscience and neurobiological knowledge. What I discovered is astonishing. I was able to apply these knowledge in my therapy room and see many changed for the better, and being restored to their optimum potential – of which I call it the Glorious You!

Renewal of the mind

Let’s examine what wholistic renewal of mind looks like. From the educational point of view, one of my favourite learning theories is the idea by Jean Piaget, who postulated that our prior knowledge (which he referred to as schema) help us make sense of our new experiences. When we learn something new, we often use our existing understanding to make sense of the new thing that we are learning. It is also our tendency to find shortcuts and this often leads us to wrong understanding by applying our prior knowledge onto very similar (but may be different) new thing we are learning. This is a form of misconception or misperception. It is through careful examination that we can identify the differences between what we know and what is new before us, and we need to use critical thinking skills to engage in this process.

How the mind works

As you can see by now, we can only examine and identify our misconceptions and misperception if our prior knowledge is explicit and accessible to our conscious mind. With this awareness, we can then analyse through comparing and contrasting the prior knowledge and the new thing we are encountering. In counselling, the modality that uses such approach is the Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). Being a cognitive scientist, I was fully convinced that this is the way to go to effect changes in humanity, to improve living and performance. This is truly working at the conscious dimension of our mind.

However, as I delved deeper into the psyche of a human being, I began to notice that changing the conscious mind has two limitations. Firstly, it requires very intense effort to sustain the change as we need to constantly search, examine, and identify faulty thinking to know what is not working. But then again, no pain no gain. So working on challenging faulty thinking is an essential part of our life. Secondly, people also seem to often being caught off-guard and fall into the faulty thinking without realizing it. This made me think that there must probably be some underlying pattern in us, that we are wired in a certain way, and something else is needed in order to have more sustainable change.

This led me to diving deeper into developmental psychology. Erik Erikson provided a comprehensive psychosocial theory to help us understand how one’s personality develops from infancy to old age. For instance, if one fails to develop trust in the first year of life, the individual may develop personality with a sense of mistrust, which is also a form of attachment injury. You may have heard of people with various insecure attachment styles. This give us another level of understanding that how we behave as an adult, there is a consistent pattern and might be governed by how we were socialized, parented, and shaped from the infancy stage. Psychodynamic provides us a modality in counselling to look into these patterns.

Bringing the patterns to one’s awareness can help clients to have another shift in becoming more functional. Such awareness and understanding of one’s dynamic within is akin to uncovering the pre-conscious dimension of renewal of our mind.

I have a few clients that I worked with who experienced CBT, and then received intervention from psychodynamic approach in psychotherapy. By the time they are aware of the source of their distress, they have often reached about 70% of their mental health recovery.

So far so good. If we know what we are going to face, we stand firm to confront our negative thinking, and understand where the negative thinking might have come from, we are pretty cool in handling about almost everything. We refer to these individuals as being regulated and coping well with life.

My quest continues as I am wondering what if the un-conscious dimension of our mind is the culprit for our knee jerk reactions when we are confronted with an unexpected situation. We often hear people are ‘triggered big time’. For some people, they take longer to recover depending on the intensity of their trigger.

What about the un-conscious (sub-cortical) mind?

I discover the un-conscious dimension of the mind through a personal experience. I had an adverse childhood experience (one can refer to this as psychological trauma) which still brought up chills in my bones (literally felt in the spine when triggered).

At the conscious dimension – I challenge my negative thinking, e.g., I am an adult now, no one can hurt me the way that experience would. I am overthinking. At the pre-conscious dimension – When I was pursuing my Master of Counselling course, about 40 years after the adverse experience, I made sense of my related fear through psychodynamic understanding. I must say that it became much better. However, I could still find myself caught off guard and feel the fears surging up my spine when triggered. Such trigger indicates the unprocessed trauma material at the sub-cortical brain or the un-conscious dimension. In 2020, I encountered Brainspotting – a neuroexperiential processing targeted to reprocess the trauma materials scored in the body. And I did the reprocessing! I still remember the experience – it felt like a miracle whereby I was very fearful when remembering the trigger, but after 15 minutes of Brainspotting processing, the trigger did not seem to bother me anymore.

What does neuroscience teach us? From the field of neuroscience, we now know that ‘the body keeps the score’ (Bassel van de kolk) and our nervous system will go into a state of fight, flight or freeze when triggered.

Reprocess experiences, rewire the mind

So, renewing the whole mind is crucial for a person to be able to function effectively again. Using the framework of conscious, pre-conscious, and un-conscious dimensions of the mind, we can clearly see that often time we reach the pre-conscious dimension. This happen when we make connection and distinction between the current state (behaviour, feeling, tendency) with patterns from the past. The realisation brings to our awareness and consciousness that the current situation is different from the past and we should be dealing with the here and now differently. However, the un-conscious is the dimension that we are not even aware that the traumatic or adverse experience is still affecting us. Many psychological and counselling methods do bring us to this level of awareness, but actual dealing with the root of the problem is still inconsistent.

And so, we need to use methods of psychotherapy that could reach down to this deep recess of our being (un-conscious mind) to reprocess and be relieved from the influence and negative effects of the experiences. Once the trauma is reprocessed, our system will be brought back to the homeostasis stage and our mind is freed up for capacity to function logically and effectively. For most of my clients, all their coping strategies could be applied in their life without too much of a struggle after the reprocessing of the adverse implicit memories.

Finally, integrating the past experiences (after reprocessing) can make the individual to be even more empowered because the past experiences serve as invaluable learning points. The restoration of the individual looks like the golden glue that pieces the broken pieces together as in the Kintsugi art, and the restored product looks even more glorious than before. That is how we can GrowWell© effectively and be sustainable in the process that will lead us to a life of purpose and excellence. Get in touch and you will see it for yourself!

Kong, S. L. G. (2025b). Wholistic renewal and rewiring the mind. Glorious Ruin. https://glorious-ruin.com/growwell

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