The Unacknowledged Creation of Reality
The human brain contains approximately one hundred billion neurons. This is about the same number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy. These neurons are connected by trillions of connections, or synapses. (Dent. Neurologic Institute)
The result of all this wiring is the ability to recognize and categorize the constituents of the physical world. What’s even more amazing is that it is able to recognize the contextual world as well. It can judge the nature of the relationships exiting between and among objects in the physical world. One of the qualities of the contextual world that the brain is especially sensitive to is whether it is in a safe or in some degree of danger.
When the brain judges itself to be safe, it performs at it’s best. We’re not anxious or tense. We are creative and generous. We are friendly and vulnerable. Generally speaking, these traits are absent when we lack the feeling of safety. The absence of safety almost always brings fear, and anxiety. In these moments the brain starts searching for a reason to explain why things have happened to us. The brain doesn’t do well when it feels in the dark about something. It equates that with being out of control.
In fact, at least two important characteristics of the brain become evident. One is that it needs to feel in control of its environment. We will see the expression of that in a moment.
It’s also true that the absence of that felt control can, paradoxically, provide feelings of excitement and joy. This is true when, for example, we go on a scary ride at the amusement park. I believe that, deep down, we are trusting the ride to be safe. That gives us the courage to face the fear as if it was real. We get to defy “death”.
When the brain decides it now knows why this fear is present, it proceeds to recover the experience of safety, of being in control. *We may decide that I’m not worthy of good things which is why I always fail. Or I may decide that my spouse is selfish and devaluing of my contributions to the family. As you can imagine, we can spin whatever tale we want. The problem with this is that, in a moment, we forget that we made this reason up, but rather, we simply discovered it by thinking it over.
We then approach this person or ourselves informed by that “understanding”.
What’s going on that we are not aware of, is that we quickly come to believe that we had just discovered the reason rather than what actually happened; we made it up!
Let me give you an example. Mr. A was a man in his mid ‘40s. He was married with two children. His wife urged him to seek therapy because of his verbal abusive response to her whenever she acquiesced to her father’s requests. Requests, her husband felt, which were excessive and underserved. His responses were excessive verbal attacks delivered in a relentless, bossy way.
As we learned more about his history, it became clear that he felt terribly unsafe growing up in a home in which his parents, and his siblings, were at war with each other. He believed it was his job to be a good child. He rarely asked for a gift, or any help with his homework. He believes that his considerable success in business is based on his willingness to go out of his way for his clients.
It was only after exploring his history as a young boy that he became aware that he had felt terribly alone, sad, and angry. He began to appreciate that the father he was angry at wasn’t his father-in-law, but his own father. He became empathic and compassionate with his wife. That allowed her to find her own courage to stand up to her father when she felt it necessary. He continues to look for the wherewithal to access his deeply buried affect.
You can see from this case that there comes a time when we no longer feel safe. We also feel sad, angry and/or alone. Sometimes it feels like we’re drowning. Just as when we actually are drowning, we go into survival mode. At those times we are struggling for physical survival. In the case of experiencing emotional drowning, we look to escape the fear, loneliness, and/or rage. When the physical pain is too great, our body responds by feinting in order to escape the pain. In the face of emotional pain we execute a version of psychological death. We use the process of disassociation. When we disassociate, we literally dis-associate. We break the connection between two different states of mind. The memory of one experience is severed from other states of mind. We often disassociate when we’re driving. All of a sudden we realize we’ve travelled past 3 or 4 exits without realizing it. It’s as if we were sleeping even though we paid attention to the road and didn’t hit any car.
Similarly, we severe the link between the experience of loss, fear, or rage and what has created it, i.e., a failure, a parents rejection or passing, for example. When we try to account for the unsafe feeling, the thoughts are disconnected from what actually happened and are replaced by “facts” we’ve made up in order to avoid feeling unsafe. I don’t think, “I’m not with a safe and trusting mother who scares me”. Rather, “I must deserve this because I am a bad son.”
One of the pivotal moments in treatment results from the patient recognizing, for the first time, that he was, in fact, making things up, or unquestionably living out what someone else had told him.
A 45 year old woman, Ms. C, came to treatment because she never had a boyfriend and because her mother virtually never complimented her. She would often put my patient in a double-bind situation. Her mother, after complaining that her daughter didn’t have a social life, would ask her why she was going out on a given night, given that men only want one thing. In the back of my mind, I categorized her as the cruelest mother I had ever heard about!
Even though my patient had become a member of the medical profession, she could never appreciate the high level of achievement that represents. For her, these beliefs about her lack of value were not based on anything she had created. Rather, they represented the version of herself acceptable to her mother. Any deviation in her feeing resulting in a good self feeling, resulted in strong feeling of guilt, thinking she was killing her mother.
So, of course, the question becomes, how do we help our patients abandon their created stories, and replace them with the truth. Avoiding the pain was, of course, the impetus to disassociate in the first place. Therefore, as the therapist, we must help our patients to slowly allow for the pain to surface, and become conscious. We need to be empathic, compassionate, and accepting. There is nothing we can “do”. Rather, help will be conveyed in the atmosphere we create by “how” we are.