Imprinting (learned patterns)

Imprinting denotes how early experiences, role models and adopted worldviews become fixed inner patterns that later often steer thinking and action unnoticed. This entry explains the term neutrally – from the view of sociology and psychology – and separately from individual methods or offers.

The contents presented here are education and a worldview perspective, not a medical or therapeutic statement. In the case of distressing complaints, medical or psychotherapeutic professionals are the right point of contact.

What is imprinting?

In psychology and sociology, imprinting describes how a person is shaped from the very beginning by their surroundings – by the parents, the closer environment and the conceptions they adopt there. Patterns of feeling and behaviour thus arise very early. Tobias O. R. Alke has described this early beginning in his work on the emotional foundation of the child and in doing so has taken in prenatal socialisation – the imprinting already before birth. Related is the thought of epigenetics: dispositions are not rigid fate, but are co-determined by the environment.

When does an imprinting become a restricting pattern?

Not every imprinting is a hindrance – much of it gives support. A pattern only becomes a problem when it runs automatically and blocks one’s own way. An example: whoever as a child adopted the money-fear of a parent perhaps chases after money a whole life long – and notices late that this was not at all their own way of living. At the Kyborg Institute such a draining pattern working through the intellect is also called, figuratively, a succubus: something that attaches itself to one’s own life force as long as one does not recognise it.

Closely bound up is the theme of fear: many restricting patterns are founded on adopted fears, not on one’s own experience. A particularly widespread such pattern is the consciousness of lack – the basic conviction that there is always too little.

Are imprintings fate?

According to this view, no. The first and most important step is to recognise a pattern as a pattern – to see that it is adopted and not one’s own truth. With that nothing is yet solved, but a beginning is made: what one sees through loses its self-evidence. This trust in one’s own way also touches the terms responsibility and the question of the good in the human being (see altruism).

How does one deal with old patterns?

It is helpful to regard problems from a new perspective and in doing so to bypass the habitual, quick judgment of the intellect – for instance through calm self-reflection. Such paths are described in the methods of the Kyborg Institute. Whoever seeks a protected setting in which such patterns can be regarded in peace finds it in personal counselling – as accompaniment towards self-clarification, not as a healing treatment.

How imprinting passes on across generations and how parents can deal with it consciously is deepened in the standpoint Your child is a child of the light.

Autor: Tobias O. R. Alke