Psychobabble

Notes from the book Psychobabble by Dr. Stephen Briers.

Myth 1: The root of all your problems is low self-esteem

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Contrary to popular belief, research suggests that most bullies are not secretly suffering from poor self-esteem – quite the opposite in fact. Dan Olweus, who has spent many years researching childhood bullying in Norway, claims that he could find no evidence that male playground bullies were particularly anxious or insecure.

What passes today as a virtue to be fostered would have been considered a sin or shortcoming to be abjured in ages past. A voice of contemporary concern, however, has been raised by the psychologist Professor Jean Twenge, who fears that narcissism and overpowering levels of entitlement are rapidly becoming a destructive cultural norm in the West.

Being able to accept yourself, warts and all, with some measure of compassion is psychologically healthy, but that’s not where most self-esteem gurus are setting the bar. As inspirational author Alan Cohen insists: ‘Wouldn’t it be powerful if you fell in love with yourself so deeply that you would do just about anything if you knew it would make you happy?’ Powerful perhaps. Desirable? I’m not so sure. It sounds as if this kind of self-love might be capable of justifying some pretty selfish and ruthless behaviour.

A value defended, a job well done, a skill mastered or an obstacle overcome – these we should welcome as legitimate sources of satisfaction and grounds for some measure of personal pride. However, to expect someone to feel good about themselves without having put in the work, in the way Psychobabble’s doctrine of self-esteem promotes, is like awarding someone a medal before they have even run the race. It’s meaningless. Popular psychology does anyone few favours pretending otherwise.

Myth 2: Let your feelings out!

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Arlie Hochschild, a Professor of Sociology at Berkeley, claims that the spontaneity of our feelings is often an illusion: she argues that whether we are aware of them or not, we tend to regulate our emotions according to implicit ‘feeling rules’ that tell us what to feel in a given situation, for how long and at what level of intensity. Thus in the United States the normal duration of grief after a bereavement is assumed to last between 18 and 24 months, after which you may find yourself being referred for treatment for an emotional state that starts to be considered pathological.

You can acknowledge your hon-ne while still preserving your tatemae.

The word catharsis originally comes from Greek tragedy, where Aristotle used it to refer to a purging of emotion to the end of restoring harmonious balance. The point is that in Greek drama this was a carefully orchestrated group experience conducted within a highly structured, ritualised setting.

Precisely because emotions are not just harmless, affective froth, we need to treat them with a greater degree of respect and care.

Our emotions would appear to well up from the most primitive and oldest parts of our brains, but let’s bear in mind that evolution has kindly given us a higher cortex so we don’t have to be at their mercy the whole time. There is a thin line between emotional expressivity and emotional incontinence. Let’s try not to confuse one with the other.

Myth 4: Let your goals power you towards success!

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Student Luo Lu, in a doctoral examination of Chinese folk psychology, summarises the Taoist position on happiness in a way that seems diametrically opposed to all our frantic goal-setting strategies. Lu explains:

‘Happiness in Taoism is the personal liberation from all human desires, through following the Natural force, not doing anything, accepting fate calmly, and facing life with a peaceful mind. In so doing, one may reach the ultimate happiness of merging with the universe, termed “tian ren he yi”. Happiness in Taoism, therefore, is not an emotional feeling of joy, rather, it is a cognitive insight and transcendence. Taoists practice a life style of withdrawal, isolation and quietness. The ultimate goal is to achieve anonymity, vanishing into the Nature, transcending the Nature, and merging with the Nature.’

Myth 5: No one can make you feel anything

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What we do with our bodies has a direct impact on the emotions we experience. Smile (even though your heart is breaking) and science suggests you will indeed feel better. Slump in your seat and your mood is more likely to become listless and despondent. In fact this feedback mechanism is so effective that researchers from the University of Cardiff found that women whose ability to frown was inhibited after receiving botox injections reported feeling much happier and less anxious – even though they believed the procedure hadn’t significantly improved their appearance!

Myth 6: Think positive and be a winner!

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The poet and novelist Anatole France once pointed out that ‘To accomplish great things we must dream as well as act’, but of course the opposite is equally true. Dreaming without action doesn’t usually accomplish too much.

What makes us ‘feel good’ is not necessarily good for us. The ‘feel-good factor’ can prove a pretty flaky criteria for deciding on the value of many things, especially what we choose to fill our minds with. By this kind of reckoning heroin could be seen as a very ‘positive’ drug, but that doesn’t mean I want to start taking it.

A commitment to unrelenting positivity can not only make us quite irritating to be with, it can also make us rather selfish and narrow-minded.

Most positive affirmations are about the self: I challenge you to find one that focuses on the needs or rights of others.

Myth 8: Whatever your problem, CBT is the answer

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The central premise of CBT, that by changing the way we think we can also change the way we feel, is a powerful one and the techniques of CBT have undoubtedly helped a lot of people dig themselves out of some pretty deep holes.

While the kingdom of the mind thus described may look like a democratic polity in which the wards of thought, sensation, feeling and action all enjoy equal status and influence, when it comes down to the nitty-gritty of actually doing the therapeutic work, you will find that most attention is concentrated on one particular area: your thought life. The mutterings of that critical voice in your head, those unwanted thoughts that pop unbidden into your mind – these are the primary targets of CBT and get the lion’s share of its attention. In the realm of CBT, to misquote George Orwell’s Animal Farm, while all the factors involved are supposedly equal, some appear to be more equal than others.

A fascinating and well-known finding by Benjamin Libet, replicated over many successive investigations, indicates that what goes on in our conscious minds may turn out to be far less important than we assume. There have been reliable but counterintuitive studies that indicate that our brains start to initiate movements by booting up the motor cortex 300 milliseconds before we are even aware of making the decision to move. Psychologist and broadcaster Susan Blackmore believes that these experiments indicate that ‘conscious experience takes time to build up and is much too slow to be responsible for making things happen’.

It may come as a surprise to learn that every human being has not just one brain but two. Most of us are familiar with the brain resident in our skull, but in fact your gut also has a ‘mind of its own’. Its lining is embedded with some 100 million neurones, which work together to coordinate the surprisingly complex task of digesting food and expelling waste. The enteric brain has its own reflexes and senses, and although it is connected to the central nervous system through the vagus nerve, it can also operate completely independently of it. The enteric brain employs more than 30 neurotransmitters to coordinate signals and impulses across the system and 95 per cent of the body’s serotonin (the hormone that the most widely-used antidepressants attempt to keep at optimal levels in your brain proper) is to be found in your bowels.

Emotion is often a visceral business, and it may be no coincidence that the ancient Taoists associated anger, anxiety, fear, worry and sadness with different regions of the soft organs that are all linked parasympathetically by the vagus nerve and sympathetically by the splanchnic nerves. The most crucial point for the current discussion is that, due to the way the vagus nerve is constructed, 90 per cent of the nerve fibres are dedicated to transmitting information up towards the main brain, leaving only 10 per cent committed to sending information down in the other direction. This may suggest that while the enteric brain may have significant input into what we experience mentally, our conscious thought life may have relatively little leverage when it comes to controlling what our guts are already screaming at us.

One thing that has always slightly irritated me about CBT is its tendency to define any thought that makes us feel uncomfortable as ‘irrational’. This is tantamount to saying that if I don’t like it then it can’t be true.

Freud argued that the so-called ‘primary process’ thinking that occurs in the unconscious is marked by its complete disregard for conventional logic or the laws of causality. In the world of the id anything is possible. It doesn’t have to make sense.

Jung also believed that when the contents of the unconscious mind do percolate through they can often take the form of images rather than words. This begs the question: how do you argue orreason with a picture? If the unconscious doesn’t even speak the language of its more reasonable conscious counterpart, we might be on a hiding to nothing trying to reason with it.

When we feel threatened we are designed to stop thinking and let our instincts take over. The primitive reptilian brain pulls rank and does the job it has been doing successfully for over two million years: that of helping you survive. What this means though is that various unpleasant feelings, the sort we associate with danger and threat, are more likely to switch off the higher centres you need to reason with your crazed, fear-filled mind. Not only will certain negative emotions stand less chance of emerging as clear thoughts but, once in the grip of them, your rational mind may not even be fully online to address them.

People often come into therapy not because they are plagued by illogical thoughts but because they instinctively feel that the stories they have sought to live by are unravelling. Something has happened that threatens to undermine the integrity of their personal narrative, or they suddenly find themselves cast by events into roles they never intended or chose for themselves. For others, the opposite is true. These clients are locked into stories and roles from which they feel powerless to escape. The stories we tell ourselves are powerful organising forces. They exercise an inexorable pull over our actions, feelings and choices, rather like a magnetic field draws scattered iron filings into alignment with its own invisible lines of influence.

When dealing with the steady undertow of someone’s implicit narrative, reason and logic often prove feeble instruments. If an action, a feeling or a belief ‘fits’ within the dynamic of the tale being told it will be embraced, however illogical or absurd it may be. Recasting and rescripting such stories is always destined to be an art as much as a science. Therapy can be about so many things, but at its heart it is often an attempt by two people to forge a new narrative together that both therapist and client can sign up to, hopefully one that reinterprets the past or opens up new possibilities for the future. These stories certainly have to make sense, but the sense that they make is often of a very different order to the ‘sense’ that CBT trades in.

Myth 11: Your inner child needs a hug

I respect and value many of the qualities we quite rightly associate with early childhood: their spontaneity, curiosity and creativity, their emotional directness and capacity for playfulness. However, I do think that people who like to focus on the inner child also cling on to a beatific and saccharine view of what a child actually is.

the inner child can become the focus of a victim mentality that can be highly unhelpful for the person concerned. One of the salient features of an actual child is that they often lack power to determine what happens to them, so when bad things dohappen to them it is very clear that this is someone else’s fault. Encouraging people to see themselves, or even part of themselves, in this light can subtly discourage them from taking responsibility for their own lives, or holding themselves accountable for some of the things that may have gone wrong.

Maybe there is indeed a child lurking in all of us: in fact I’m sure of it. I for one am capable of behaving in thoroughly childish ways at times and I know I’m not alone. However, I suspect this is often not because we necessarily carry a fully formed psychic child about with us like a live echo of our past, but rather because we have never properly grown up in the first place. This may be no bad thing: children can have a lot of fun. However, they are clearly ill equipped to cope with every aspect of life in an adult’s world. Perhaps that’s the real source of our fascination with our inner child. It’s not just that we want to believe that all aspects of who we are continue to exist and that nothing is ever truly lost. It’s that we all secretly would like to turn the clock back to a time when we had fewer responsibilities and anything still seemed possible.

If you want to give your inner child a hug, by all means go ahead. But be aware that any unmet needs you have now, whenever they originated, are now part of who you are in the present and must be dealt with as such. We can’t go back, what’s done is done, but our future is still unformed andunblemished

Myth 13: You’d better get yourself sorted

Picasso insisted that ‘Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.’

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is one of the most destructive manifestations of the need for order and control and it is on the increase. Sufferers develop an unrealistic sense of personal responsibility that can lead them to become hyper-vigilant, either continually checking or creating magical control rituals to help them manage the unmanageable.

Before we rush to the shelves to pick up our copy of the latest productivity blockbuster (the one that’s reallygoing to help us get our act together) let’s just consider whether we might not be adding our own momentum to what Marx and Engels chillingly described as ‘icy waves of egotistical calculation’. Failing that, let’s at least try and live by the compromise suggested by David Freedman to Penelope Green, a journalist from the New York Times: ‘Almost anything looks pretty neat,’ he told her, ‘if it’s shuffled into a pile.’

Myth 14: You are stronger than you know

If the state of flow is an energised joyride on a sunlit country road, but mentally we find ourselves continually stuck in a traffic jam on the M25, it makes sense to start looking for the next available exit rather than just keep trudging along. Of course we sometimes need to keep working at things, but we mustn’t fool ourselves that chronic distress, even at a low level, is a necessary down payment on a better life ahead. It’s a warning sign we should heed, even if the prospect of change makes us nervous. Sadly, many of us choose to keep plugging away at our impossible dreams, thankless careers or doomed relationships rather than admit to ourselves that we no longer have it in us to keep trying. In its efforts to force us to acknowledge our potential, Psychobabble has made giving up very hard to do. After all, quitting or throwing in the towel are not the behaviours of invincible people.

Neither accepting our limits nor calling a halt are easy options in today’s world. But sometimes our psychological health may depend upon our ability to do precisely that.

Myth 15: You are a master of the universe!

The alleged power of mind over matter is a common enough theme in the self-help genre. In its ‘weak’ form it appears as techniques like positive thinking, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, and the use of confidencebuilding affirmations. All of the above are premised on the understanding that mental shifts translate into effects in the real world, but they are always mediated through changes in your behaviour: in other words shifts in attitude alter what you do and how you respond and it is your actions that ultimately change your life for the better.

But there is a second, far more challenging ‘strong position’ of mind over matter that recurs in a surprising number of self-help books, courses and presentations. According to this genre, the mind has innate metaphysical powers to manipulate reality in ways that lie far beyond any current, orthodox understanding of the way the physical world works

It would appear that even if we do have latent psychic powers they are very far from formidable. What influence we supposedly have seems only to very faintly bias processes that are going on all around us anyway – plants growing, diodes switching on and off in random number generators, rival political factions grappling for supremacy. And that’s with lots of us all simultaneously bending our attention towards the same object.

Myth 16: There is no failure, only feedback

Rather than distancing yourself from moral failure or treating it as an exercise in data collection or an opportunity to figure out what does or doesn’t work too well in life, it is crucial for our well-being as individualsand as a species that we own these sorts of failures. Rather than rationalising them, we need to let ourselves inhabit them, feel their sting, and allow them to connect us to the pain we have caused. Only when we acknowledge and submit to them can these failures change us and allow us to grow.

NLP wants a world without shame. This may sound appealing, but unpleasant though shame can be, we probably all need a good dose from time to time. It’s definitely okay to make mistakes and mess up and there is always a possibility of redemption. The wise Canadian actress Mary Pickford knew this, and I warm to her definition of true failure as ‘not the falling down but the staying down’. Just as the human tongue has receptors to detect both sweet and sour tastes, we need to learn how to savour both success and failure in their turn. Failure is not just something to be managed away and transmuted into the down payment of ultimate success. Failure is not just feedback, because we are not mere machines. Failure is part of a process that makes us human. As James Barrie, the children’s author, said: ‘We are all failures … at least the best of us are.’

Myth 17: It’s all your parents’ fault

As Professor Pat Crittenden explains, attachment behaviours are primarily activated only under conditions of threat, since that’s what evolution designed them for. It’s quite possible that even if these powerful internal programs do exist, providing things are ticking along okay and we are on a relatively even keel, they may well leave us alone. Crittenden’s Dynamic-Maturational Model is thankfully sufficiently flexible to accommodate the possibility of different ways of relating in different contexts.

The point is that as adults we should be taking personal responsibility for allour beliefs – even those that might underlie our so-called attachment style. Babies may not be able to articulate their beliefs clearly but adults can. If they are of a mind to, they can even work on changing them. Since it is clearly far more adaptive to hold the attitudes associated with ‘secure’ attachment styles, we might want to think about challenging and re-scripting any unhelpful attributions linked with an ‘insecure’ attachment status.

Moreover, before you call your parents to account for what they did to you, take a moment to consider what you may have done to them. The type of child you were (by nature) may well have helped condition the sorts of responses you were met with. Temperamentally tricky infants do put pressures on parents who sometimes find themselves hard-pushed to cope and it doesn’t necessarily get easier with older children either

There comes a cut-off point when it no longer makes much sense to keep blaming someone else. We have to face the fact that our current circumstances are likely to be largely of our own making. It is definitely true that we are the only ones who have any realistic chance of shaping our future.

The nature–nurture debate is certainly not resolved yet to anyone’s satisfaction, but what is now clear is that the whole picture is far more complex than it appears. It doesn’t allow for any knee-jerk apportioning of blame. Whatever sins of commission or omission committed against us, let’s try and keep in mind that the majority of our parents were doing their best.

Sometimes the things that should affect us don’t, and the things that shouldn’t matter send shockwaves rippling through the rest of our lives. The truth is we can’t always tell which is which. Judith Rich Harris makes a good point that the revolution in childcare practices and attitudes towards children that has taken place in the last 50 years doesn’t appear to have translated into measurable global differences between the personalities of those born in the first and second halves of the twentieth century. Even in cases where parents have palpably let their children down very badly, I have encountered several truly remarkable people in my work who have still defied the odds.

Myth 18: You can heal your body