Blog
Wednesday 13th May, 2009
How do you know what you know?
We know that we all have a degree of genetic programming that runs our basic organ systems from the moment of birth. We also know that we have emotional programming that leads us to seek security and comfort. These things are innate. The process of learning begins as we come to terms, first with our body, as we learn to control our bladder and our bowels, get to grips with mobility and leading on to interactions with the environment. At every step we learn and as we learn we begin to build internal working models of life. We learn in several ways.
Physically, we act and learn from doing things and touching things, and experiencing success and failure. Cognitively, we observe and learn through examples or modelling, as we watch the other people around us, and either copy or reject their behaviour. We use our sense of hearing as a physical direction tool that tells us our location, but also tells us the location of other things. Hearing also tells us the subtle nuance of what other people are feeling. We learn emotionally, when we interpret what we do, see and hear, and use emotion to put a value on our experience. Things and people become attractive or repulsive, as we learn what is good and what is bad.
Long-term memory, your inner paradigm
Once we associate an emotion to an experience or event, once it has been tagged with its emotional value, it is put into storage in the long-term memory, where it will reside until another experience causes it to reactivate. The reactivation is mainly emotional, though there will be some pattern matching between current cognitive experience and past events. Mainly, the long term memory is affected by emotional response. This may be triggered by a smell, a taste, a single sound or a piece of music or, there may be a resonance with a news item or a scene or situation in a film or TV programme, and so on.
This long term memory store is what is referred to, in psychology, as the paradigm. Normally, this is considered to be outside our conscious awareness, located in the subconscious or unconscious part of the mind. Access to this long term store is both below awareness in instinctual response in the limbic system (emotional centre or the brain) or above cognition in the higher reaches of our intuitive faculty. Because these responses are outside of cognitive and perceptual awareness, they are little understood by Western science and psychology that has been dominated by the connection between thinking and doing, as is seen in cognitive behavioural therapy.
The basis of Karma
In the East, this apparent unconscious playing-out of emotional responses is known as karma. The growing acceptance, in the West, of the power and effect of the Law of Attraction, driven mainly by quantum physics, has give Western psychologists a glimpse into the relationship between mind and emotion, previously misunderstood. The basis of identity, experience and response is emotional. Cognition is a structure, or a framework that creates form but not meaning. The skeleton gives our body a structure that is vitally important. Without that structure our muscle and organs would be a pile of meat on the floor. However, it is the power and energy of the muscles and organs that gives meaning and purpose to the skeleton. Without the meat, the bones are merely a dry, fixed, immoveable structure. The relation in the mind between thinking and feeling is the same as the relationship in the body between meat and bones. Both are co-dependent and useless without the other.
The limitations of CBT
Cognitive therapy often seeks to move the mental skeleton from one state of immobility to another that is seen as more acceptable to the client. This is, to my mind, short-changing the client and working for a short term gain of temporary changed behaviour. Many therapists, outside of the cognitive restraint, will report taking on clients who experienced an immediate effect from previous cognitive therapy, only to find, that a year down the line here, they are again in front of another therapist working through the same problems. There is a message in this that my fellow psychotherapists and psychologists do not like to hear, and it is this. Cognitive therapy is really very good and very effective, though only for about one third of all people. The remainder need emotional therapy. Emotion in the West is, at best, misunderstood, and at worst, avoided.
Look it this way. The inner paradigm, long term memory, internal working model, life script, you choose what you wish to call it, is held in place by emotion. That emotion is often described as repressed because it is. When the long term memory is reactivated the client experiences this trapped emotion from the past, in real time, in their present experience.
Bullies play out their own paradigm and activate the victims
As an example, if I see someone, a victim, aged thirty-five, who is being bullied in the workplace there is a ninety-nine percent certainty that this person was bullied as a child. The childhood ‘emotional’ memory is repressed in the paradigm. The victim may, cognitively, be able to recall these events, but without the emotion. Let’s say the original event happened when the victim was seven years old. What we see in the workplace is that the victim’s response to the bully is to revert back to the emotional age of the original incident, as this is the last emotional reference point that they have. Therefore, the thirty-five year old acts out the emotions of being seven years old and is as helpless and as vulnerable as when they were a child.
Dealing with this cognitively by, perhaps, teaching the victim new behaviours, strategies or coping mechanisms, has the short term positive effect. However, this will be short lived as eventually the unresolved emotions will re-emerge, and the victim will feel all the negativity that they did before therapy. In some cases, the victim can feel even worse than they did before the therapy, because now they feel like a double failure. In this event, the therapy has actually reinforced problem and made their situation even worse than before.
Change happens from the inside out, never the outside in
Once we realise that what is inside the person, in the unconscious mind, is played out as their behaviour, it becomes fairly clear that their behaviour will not change, in any lasting sense, until the inner repressed emotion is resolved. Lasting change only happens from the inside out, not the outside in.
Because we are obsessed with thinking and doing, rather than feeling, people often attempt to change their behaviour, but eventually fail and then feel bad. There are many examples, such as yoyo dieting, those making many attempts to rid themselves of addictive substances, repeated broken relationships and so on. Whenever someone has a repeated problem, perhaps even many times, they are indicating that they are changing the outside, their behaviour, but not their inner self, their paradigm. Such changes will always fail. Good therapy deals with the inner unconscious/subconscious that is the real cause, and does not simply focus on the behaviour which is merely the effect.
Your emotions are important
Acknowledge your feelings and do not be afraid to feel. The ability to express and address emotions is a strength not, as is so often thought, a weakness.
Be happy
Sean x
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