The Illusion of Choice

Are your opinions truly your own — or the result of a toddler's understanding of the world? A taco with transpersonal counsellor Vianney McAllister.

Vanilla or chocolate?

We warmed up with easy ones. Boarding school or home school. Chicken or vegetarian. David Bowie or the Rolling Stones. Vanilla or chocolate — hands up. Nearly everyone had an answer instantly. Then the harder set: Greens, ALP or NLP. Harris or Trump. And the question underneath all of it: did you choose those answers — or did they arrive pre-installed?

Consider the recent local elections. Do people choose a political party because it aligns with their personal beliefs, or are they continuing the voting traditions of their family and social circles?

The toddler who runs your life

Vianney's field is exactly this territory. From birth to around age seven, our world is shaped by whoever cares for us — family, community, the influential people in the room. Those years lay the foundation of belief, and the brain's filtering system — the Reticular Activating System — spends the rest of our lives reinforcing it, quietly rejecting whatever conflicts.

Layer on the primitive brain's oldest instruction — fit in, avoid rejection, stay safe with the group — and you get groupthink not as a character flaw but as a survival feature. We seek connection because, as a certain Texan researcher puts it, connection is why we're here. (Yes, I mentioned Brené. Drink.)

We operate on autopilot 87–92% of the time — reacting from ingrained habits and old routines, not conscious decisions.

A midwife's evidence

Vianney brought four decades of nursing to the point — including a story from her midwifery years about a mother who had been told she wouldn't be able to breastfeed, and what happened when that installed belief met patient, personalised support. Beliefs about what we can't do arrive from outside us too — and sometimes the kindest thing an expert can do is help un-install one. I shared my own version: how a Calm Birth course rewired what I believed my body could do.

She also offered perspectives from her transpersonal practice that sent me down a research rabbit hole afterwards — including work on the heart's own network of neurons and what she calls intelligence living in our whole field, not just the brain. Make of it what you will; the room certainly did, which is rather the point of these nights.

Stepping off autopilot

So can we unlearn a toddler's conditioning? The night's honest answer: partly, and only on purpose. It starts with noticing — how do you respond when your beliefs are challenged? (One of the gentler examples raised: Schitt's Creek, and how a comedy quietly re-conditioned how a generation talks about love.) It continues with knowing yourself — because the less threatened we feel, the less we need an "us and them."

Take-home questions, as always: Do you think most of your opinions are shaped by society or by your true self? Can you recall a time you felt pressure to conform — and how did you handle it? And the big one: as adults, do we have the power to reshape the beliefs we adopted as children?

Vianney McAllister has been a registered nurse for over 40 years, a midwife for 38, and a child and family health nurse for 25. For more than a decade she has practised as a transpersonal counsellor — an approach that works with the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual aspects of a person, healing the splits caused by social and cultural conditioning. About Let's Taco'Bout It.