Healing and our Brains

What were you expecting – The Spanish Inquisition?

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Those who are fans of the 70s British Monty Python comedy troupe will recognize the reference to the sudden, unexpected appearance of the Spanish Inquisition as mentioned in the title, although I have mangled the concept a tad to make a point.

Every day, we wake up and dust off our expectations, charge the batteries on them and set off to live our life, bringing them in tow behind us. We encounter a situation and expect it to match what we have encountered before. This can be anything from where the sun will rise to the effects of gravity to what happens when we push a door closed.

All is well with these sorts of expectations as they generally refer to situations which will evolve in essentially the same way each time. Scientists who study how our minds work consider this to be a form of mental shorthand, which saves us time and mental energy. This is related to how we can quickly figure out that this new object we see is a chair, because it matches the general profile and features of so many previous chairs that we have seen.

Problems can occur when we apply our expectations to new people and new situations, or when we do not allow for evolution in the actions and reactions of people we think we know.  And, to add just another bit of complexity to this discussion, our expectations can be conscious or not.

The man with the black hat

An example of a non-conscious expectation is when we expect someone who looks somewhat like someone we have encountered in the past to behave in the same manner. Therapists see this sort of thing all the time, as clients appear with issues which derive from associations with traumatic incidents from childhood. If you were 12 months old and a man wearing a black hat scared you badly, it is entirely possible, even as an adult 30 years later, that each time you see someone wearing a black hat, your internal survival system will trigger a response, typically some level of fear or anxiety. Your system has stored the memory of  “black hat = danger” and until you use something like AER to release that stored memory, it will remain with you. (I have witnessed people release stored feelings/traumatic memories that were more than 60 years old, so it is never too late to start releasing.)

Experiments have shown that our internal survival system is aware of things that we are not consciously able to notice. Just one example of this is when people who had a fear of spiders were shown a film with some embedded/subliminal  images of spiders – although they could not explain why they started to feel nervous, they certainly were noticing their physical and emotional response to the film. The researchers monitored these people for their heart rates and skin galvanic response, and it was easy to see the correlation between the timing of the  images and their levels of fear response. These sorts of experiments clearly show that any attempt to control ourselves by relying purely on mental processes are doomed to fail, as our state of being is not determined solely by our thoughts, and in times of distress, our thoughts follow our feelings, not the other way around. But, I digress.

Although there are many things for which we have non-conscious expectations and it is harder to deal with these as they fly under our radar screens, so to speak, we can be aware of our conscious expectations.

What value would we derive from noticing our expectations? Possibly the greatest value would be that of self-awareness and conscious decisions about how we approach the world. Having expectations which are more in alignment with what is actually around us makes for a much easier life as we are not resisting the world and hopefully not being constantly disappointed.

According to neuroscience, for the first part of our life (up until around age 20 or so) our brains are in intense learn and develop mode. Environmental cues provide much wanted clues to the world and how to interact with it, and our neural circuits wire themselves in response.We form an interpretation of the world and our internal map to navigate it.

The rest of our lives is often spent trying to make the outside world match up with our internal map. This gets more and more stressful as the years pass, as the world is in constant evolution (some might say devolution).  The internal map we carefully constructed about how the world works was never really all that accurate anyway, as it was so influenced by our perceptions. But it was the best map we had, and we made do with it as best we could. If the world was static, we could probably get away with keeping our original internal map without many problems. Ah, if only it was so easy.

Given that we live in an ever-changing world and that our expectations are guided by our map, it makes sense to update this map of ours regularly. The first step is to become aware of the existence of this map and its associated expectations. Notice what you are expecting to happen in the benign situations you encounter every day.  As you are reading this article, for example, you almost certainly have a few expectations:

– you expect the sentences to make some measure of sense
– you expect that the author will eventually stop writing
– you expect that when you look up from this text, the world around you will still be in basically the same state as when you turned your focus here.

If you wanted, you could take a moment and notice what expectations you have right now. You could even take as long as you like, and I promise that I’ll hardly notice and will be right here when you return. 🙂

You could also take a fresh look at what you expect from those who interact with you and how you react when you do not get what you expected. You might even ask yourself if you had clearly communicated this expectation and had a clear agreement with the other party on this. It is possible to change our expectations to be more in line with the world and what we can realistically count on happening, and this starts by noticing.

Noticing your expectations, without judging them, is a form of self-awareness that can lead to opportunities to discover hidden treasures.

Instead of expecting the world to be a certain way, take a closer look and notice it. Who knows what you might find, hidden in plain sight.

Copyright 2009 Robert S. Vibert, all rights reserved

Healing and our Brains

I Feel That … I am Really Thinking…

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The title pretty much gives it away, if you get what I am talking about. You know, all those times when someone says “I feel” and then describes what they are thinking, not what they are actually feeling. When they use an expression along the lines of  “I feel that the world is full of silly people.”  This is an opinion, which is a thought, not a feeling. Feelings include fear, anger, sadness, etc. Hardly a day goes by that I do not hear someone say “I feel” when they are describing their thoughts and opinions.

Hair-splitting? Perhaps… and perhaps not. You see, in my world, thoughts and feelings are really not the same thing, even though they often arrive together on the scene. It is normal that we feel a feeling/emotion (I’ll use both terms interchangeably here, for the sake of convenience), and have a thought or two about it at the same time. And vice versa – we can have a thought and then a feeling arises. Thoughts and feelings are usually linked together, so we tend to have them pretty much simultaneously in our inner world. And, as I’ll explain in a bit, being aware of the difference between thoughts and feelings can be quite important to our happiness.


Think, think, think

The interesting thing these days is that in most situations we are discouraged from feeling and encouraged to think instead. One of the earliest examples of this was when IBM put up “THINK”  signs in their offices starting in the 1930s. The intent was good – IBM wanted people to act consciously, not just go charging ahead without a thought for outcomes. This is a wise approach, and it certainly worked well for IBM for years.

The psychoanalytical community has contributed to this thinking bias as well, successfully convincing many of us that we need to think about everything, analyze it ad infinitum and if we happen to notice that we are having a feeling, that we should think about that feeling, determine why we feel that way, and think real hard about when was the first time we felt it, and finally, analyze it all, in the hope that we’ll discover some way to better manage whatever is bothering us. One of the ways this thought bias works against us in this particular realm is in suicide prevention, where a lot of attention is placed on suicidal thoughts and little on suicidal feelings. There is a big and potentially fatal difference between thinking about suicide and having the desire (feeling) to act upon those thoughts.

TV and films are full of examples of people going to see counselors as soon as they have some issue, and counseling/talk therapy has become a standard remedy prescribed by almost every advice “guru” out there. What is funny and sad at the same time is that while people are constantly pointed at talk therapy as the solution to their issues, rarely is there a pause for reflection on what is actually the appropriate course of action for the situation. Alternatives to going to see a talk therapist are rarely contemplated, so well has the campaign to instill the belief that talk therapy/counseling is the best approach succeeded. Be aware that I am not trashing talk therapy here, but merely pointing out that people often jump on that bus without actually giving it much…err… thought.

In addition, those who use their minds as their primary means of relating to the world, otherwise known as intellectuals, are revered in modern society. If you do not have a PhD, then you’d better be a rock star or TV/film celebrity if you intend to write a book and expect it to succeed or want to comment publicly on anything and be taken seriously. Yes, those prized letters after your name give you instant credibility, regardless of what your actual knowledge on a subject might be. Those who work in specialized fields such as anti-virus/anti-malware research bristle when the general computer security PhDs start to talk about the subject, as the generalists often get malware protection wrong, and assume that their academic degree was sufficient to allow them to draw conclusions about something they had not actually studied in depth.

In a somewhat related example, until recently many couple therapists in America could earn their doctorates without actually working with couples for more than a few hours. Their courses focused on theory and research, not working with live people. PhD or Masters in hand, they could pen works that talked about the theory of couples, relationships, personal growth, etc., and have the entire work based upon theoretical knowledge. Given how humans are a tad complex, it may make more sense to actually interact with them before writing something purporting to contain some valuable insight. When these ivory tower therapists started seeing clients, they often had to learn the hard way how to properly deal with a real human sitting in front of them, feeling upset over their relationship. I wonder if the clients got a discounted rate while the real world learning was taking place…

But I digress in my thinking about thinking.

I’m sure that if you take a moment, you’ll find plenty of examples in your life where you are encouraged to think about things, not have feelings about them. Thoughts are nice and neat, and feelings are messy and often out of control or overwhelming. At least, that is what we are told. Obviously, I’m not against thinking. I used it to prepare and write this. In fact, I use thinking all the time, regardless of what some people might say… 🙂

But, there is a need both for thinking and for feeling, at the the appropriate time. Living in our thoughts constantly is no better than living constantly in our feelings. Each can inform the other and we can achieve a level of balance when we pay attention to all aspects of ourselves. We’re not our thoughts and we’re not our feelings, even though they happen to us in such a way that we could be easily led to believe that they are.

Why do they say I feel when they mean I think?

In pondering why people might so often use the expression “I feel” when really they mean “I think”, I concluded that this is because there is a pent-up desire to express their feelings, and so it is a sort of warped Freudian slip. They really do want to express their feelings, but society has us managing them, or regulating them, or suppressing feelings to such an extent that when they do pop out, it is with a large POP. In the meantime, there is a tension just beneath the surface that creates situations in which someone wants to express a feeling, but knows that thoughts are more acceptable, and we get mixed up expressions. Of course, hearing others use incorrect expressions all the time trains us to use them as well, part of our mechanism to fit it. Using the expression “I feel” to express thoughts is a way to stay safe in the tribe and yet still suggest that one has feelings, albeit ones that are well managed to the point that they are hardly distinguishable from thoughts.

Why do we need to be more precise?

When people are encouraged to think instead of  feel or not express their feelings, there is a danger that those feelings will come out in some other way that is destructive. Men, who are constantly constrained in terms of feeling expression, suffer more heart attacks and die years younger than women, who are given a little more lea-way in terms of expressing feeling. This lea-way is not so great however, as no woman wants to be seen as hysterical, and so they too stuff down a lot of their feelings.

Allowing feelings to arise naturally and flow through and out is one of the key aspects of having a healthy relationship with them. Releasing old feelings which were stored inside is a necessary part of achieving a balance between healthy emotional expression and over-the-top emotional reactions. When one releases the stored feelings, the new ones that arise are not burdened with the excess charge of the past combined with the present response.

Becoming aware of this little mind game we play with ourselves is important, as it allows us to be more present in the moment and more congruent with our thoughts, feelings and actions.

The next time you say “I feel”, finish that sentence with a mention of a  feeling, not a thought or opinion.

Copyright 2010 Robert S. Vibert, all rights reserved

Healing and our Brains

Jumping can cause you stress!

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This morning I came across a common source of stress – jumping. Well, not the type of jumping that you do when you are participating in athletics, although I suppose that would be a potential source of stress as well. That could be a topic for another day.

The jumping I am talking about is jumping to conclusions.

You know, when you get a tiny bit of data and then reach a conclusion which is often wrong. And then thinking about that conclusion starts to trigger all sorts of reactions in you, many of which can be stressful.

Here’s an example that came to me this morning, teaching me again a good lesson in the need to investigate before concluding. I was at the kitchen sink, washing some dishes. The flow of water out of the faucet was only about 60% of what it normally is. Now I’ve seen this happen before and each time, I had to spend time figuring out what was causing the lowered flow of water. Some times, it was a toilet that had been flushed and was refilling. Other times, it was someone else in the house taking a shower or using water in a bathroom. Some times it was the clothes washer running in the laundry room. And at times it was a faucet that that had been left open inadvertently, somewhere in the house or outside to water the garden. The final common reason was that the sediment filters on the main water line were clogged and needed replacing.  Each of these possibilities could lead me to spend anywhere between 2 minutes to 20 determining and then taking care of the problem if need be.

Now, at that time of the morning, I was not looking forward to going around the house listening for flowing water to see if it was just a poorly closed faucet at some location or to changing the main sediment filters. Naturally, some stress about this potential time drain started to poke its head up. I could imagine myself spending time I would have preferred using to do other things and that thought was not agreeable.

At this moment, with stress bubbling just beneath the surface, about to erupt I had a flash of insight. Instead of thinking about all those previous times I had spent time chasing the cause of reduced water flow, I decided to pause and see if there might be some other explanation that I had not thought of yet. I took off my “let’s get stressed now because I think I already know the answer” hat and put on my “let’s see if we have all the data before concluding” hat.

As I stood there, thinking about the events of the past few minutes (the water was flowing at a reduced rate, I was in front of the kitchen sink, I had filled a glass with water before starting to wash the dishes), the answer came to me. In fact, it was staring me in the face, looking at me rather sheepishly. The answer to why there was less water flow coming out the faucet was strikingly simple and yet I had to actually pay attention to what was going on to notice it. And, it was not any of the possible answers I had come up when I thought I knew what it must be because this reduced water situation looked quite similar to so many times before.

The Buddhists talk about beginner’s mind, where one looks at a situation as if seeing it for the first time. Doing so, one is encouraged to gather all the data possible before reaching any conclusion. Professional trackers who look for lost people and follow animals do the same thing. Instead of looking at a track on the ground and assuming that it is a dog’s footprint, they look at all the data about it they can find – size, markings of nails, spacing, etc..  Only after noticing many of the track’s characteristics do they start to draw conclusions on what it might be.  In fact, without actually seeing the animal that made the track, they can only speculate based on the evidence before them and their experiences with previous similar-looking tracks. They get better and better at this determination, and the best trackers know that jumping to conclusions often leads them to wrong conclusions and a lot of wasted time and effort.

So, what was the reason for my reduced water flow? The answer, right in front of me, was the little water filter on the faucet. It is one that when you swing it one way, it allows normal flow of water bypassing the filter and when you swing the other way, it diverts the water through a simple carbon filter to improve the water’s taste. It also has an interesting design characteristic, which might even be a flaw. When one swings the filter over to the bypass the filter flow position, there is no indicator mark to say that it is all the way over into that position. It is easy to swing it most of the way and think that it is all the way. If it is not swung all the way water only flows at a reduced rate, out of one hole.  You don’t get some water coming out the filter and some out the bypass hole- you only get reduced water coming out the bypass hole.

All I had to do was swing the filter unit over a little more, perhaps a centimeter (half inch) or so, and the water happily gurgled out at full force. In hindsight, the answer was simple as could be and I went about my dish-washing with nary a further problem.  Of course, hindsight is usually best anyway.

What saved me from spending up to 20 minutes searching about the house and perhaps even prematurely replacing the main sediment filters? Not jumping to the conclusion that I knew what the problem was and examining the environment again to ensure that I had all the data before drawing any conclusions. And my stress over potentially wasting time on an undesired and unplanned activity faded to nothing seconds after it started to pop up. (Of course, if I had started to get truly stressed, I could always use AER to release it.)

I encourage you to try this next time you face a situation – ensure that you have all the data before you do anything. You may be surprised at what you discover and how your stress load diminishes. 🙂

I wish you well on your journey.

Copyright 2009 Robert S. Vibert, all rights reserved

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