Transforming Your Self: Chapter 9: Building a New Quality of Self-concept pt 3

Member of the Feldenkrais
Guild® of North America.

Chapter 9: Building a New Quality of Self-concept (cont.)

Discusson (cont.)

Another way to check is to imagine someone else saying to you, "You're a very _____ person," and notice your response. If it's "No, I'm not," that likely indicates that you already have a negative database. But if you respond, "Huh?" or ‘What?" or some other "does not compute" response, that probably means that this would be an appropriate quality to build. I have always thought of myself as being very unreligious, and sometimes even anti-religious. Years ago when a friend said to me, "You're a very spiritual person," I had no idea what she was talking about; it just didn't compute. For weeks afterward I kept wondering what on earth she meant by that. Now I have a much broader meaning for the word "spiritual," but at the time I was totally puzzled. That's the kind of experience that indicates an absence of a database.

There are a couple of other situations in which this process can be very useful. One is where you do have a sense of having a quality, but it is very weak because you don't have a very extensive database. Then you need to add more examples to the database you already have. Or you might need to adjust the form of your existing database to be sure that it is in the form of your positive template.

Another possibility is to create a new quality that is intermediate between two extremes. Let's say that sometimes you are very social, and get so caught up in enjoying the situation and responding to others that you lose your sense of yourself, and later find yourself exhausted, or regretting some things that you did. At other times you really enjoy solitude, because you can fully acknowledge all your internal experience, but at those times you find it difficult to respond to others and be social.

You might consider building a new quality that is a balanced integration of the valuable aspects of both these extremes. To do this, you need to examine both extremes carefully, and then find or create examples of balance. In this example, you would think of times in your life when you could respond fully to others, while at the same time fully experiencing your own internal responses at the time, and then assemble these into a new quality.

An example of opposing extremes is bulimia. The typical pattern in bulimia is to alternate between rigid conscious control of eating, and total unconscious control of bingeing, followed by conscious disgust and induced vomiting. Someone in that kind of situation desperately needs to have a balanced quality that respects both the conscious social need to be slim, with the less conscious biological need to eat, and create a balanced way of eating moderately.

Given all this discussion, I want you to take a little time to consider what you might like to build. . . .

Do you have any questions?

Sue: I'd like to be "scintillating," and for me that means that I could talk fluently about a lot of different abstract topics. But I don't have a lot of information about many things.

Well, it sounds like you might need to adjust your criteria for being "scintillating," so that it fits for you. I can think of several people whom I'd call scintillating, and for them it is based much more on listening to other people than talking intelligently about abstract things--asking little questions to draw the other person out, making them feel noticed and appreciated. and responding attentively and enthusiastically. In exploring different meanings for "scintillating" it will probably also be useful to ask yourself what your positive outcome is for being scintillating, and to explore different ways of being scintillating to get that outcome.

Melissa: I got a number of objections to having the new quality that I selected. I was able to satisfy some of them, but there was still one big one left--that if I show this quality in certain contexts, it could get me into trouble with some people who don't value it.

Ask that part if it would be all right for you to know that quality about yourself solidly in those contexts, as long as you were careful not to show it. In other words, you know that you have that quality, and you also know that you have the choice whether to behave in that way or not, depending on the situation.

If you know how to drive a car, you can still know that, even when you're not actually behind the wheel driving. You can know what your name is, even in situations where you'd rather not tell someone else what it is. Remember that we are dealing with qualities and capacities that you know are inherent in you as part of your identity. But you always have the choice whether or not to express that to others.

Ben: I either had a "yes" or a "no," or "I don't think I want it," so I decided that it wasn't appropriate for me to do this.

OK. It might be useful to reexamine some of the things that you think you don't want. If you have a lot of experience of a quality, you probably have good reasons not to want it. But if you don't have much experience of it, then you may not have a very good basis for knowing whether you'd enjoy it or not--like a sport that you have never tried--and it might be worth a second look. Have you ever seen an unfamiliar food that looked pretty awful, but when you tasted it, you liked it?

Another thing that you can do is to try crossing some identity boundary in your mind, such as gender or age. You might consider a quality that you think of as a feminine, or one that only children or older people have. But perhaps you could be comfortable having that quality, as long as you did it in a way that was appropriate to who you are.

Exercise 9-1 Building a New Quality (pairs, 15-20 minutes each)

This time I want you to get into pairs, and use this process to build a new quality for yourself, using the outline below. Since all of you have already explored how you experience a positive quality in yourself, you already know what your positive template is, so this shouldn't take very long, perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes. Work by yourself, assisting each other as necessary.

Building a New Quality Outline

1. Content. Identify what quality you would like to have as a stable part of your identity. This pattern will work best with a capability or quality of intermediate chunk size: tenacity, loyalty, dependability, intelligence, etc.

If you want a more specific behavioral ability (such as the ability to drive a car or fly a plane) that requires learning specific behavioral skills, that's not appropriate, since it's not useful for you to believe that you can do something that you have not learned to do. However, if you already know how to drive a car and want to be able to do it with a particular quality, such as smoothness, or alert attentiveness to the surroundings, etc., that is appropriate.

2. Congruence check. Do you have any objection to having this quality? Check carefully in all modalities, and satisfy any objections carefully, usually by modifying your definition of the quality.

3. Testing. Be very sure that you don't already have a database for having this quality. Proceed only when you are sure that you don't already have a negative or ambivalent self-concept that would conflict with the positive quality that you would like to have.

4. Positive template. Elicit the structure that you use to represent a strong positive quality that you like. This will include both a summary representation that serves as quick reference, and also the database of specific examples that support the generalization. The database will most often be primarily in the visual system, but may include any (or all) of the other systems. If the database is primarily kinesthetic, be sure that it is composed of the tactile and proprioceptive kinesthetics, and not just the evaluative kinesthetic emotions and feelings. (This is what you have already been doing.)

5. Tune-up. Use all that you have learned to improve what you already do, to make your representation of this quality even better, by adding future examples, other perceptual positions, integrating or processing counterexamples, etc. (Again, you have already been doing this.)

6. Build the new quality. Using the positive template as a model, find appropriate memories to use as examples in a database for the desired new quality, and assemble them into the form of the positive template. When you are done, create a summary representation of the quality. Be sure that the new quality has all the "tune-up" elements we have been working with, such as future examples, etc.

7. Testing. Imagine someone asking you, "Are you___?" and notice your response, with particular attention to the nonverbal. If your response is ambivalent or ambiguous, back up a few steps, and gather information. The most likely difficulty is that your testing in step 2 did not detect a preexisting negative or ambiguous representation. While there are effective ways to deal with this situation, you haven't yet learned the skills you need for this.

8. Congruence check. Do you have any objection to having this new quality? Again, check carefully to be sure that this new quality fits with all your other qualities. Satisfy any objections.

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Further Discussion

Now that you have all had an experience of doing this, do you have any questions or comments?

Sam: I'm feeling something similar to what Peter described. It's like having a whole new focus that I didn't have before, looking at myself in a whole different way, a quiet knowing where there was just a kind of vacuum before.

Al: What I noticed most was the change in how my physical body felt. My new quality is one that is particularly evident in posture and movement, and my body feels longer and straighter, more flowing and soft.

Fred: I did it with something that I was mildly ambiguous about at first, but it worked fine anyway. There weren't many counterexamples, and they weren't very intense, so they didn't get in the way.

Melissa: I created a new balanced quality, and I love it. I used to be on the end of a teeter-totter, always up or down. Now I have a wonderful feeling of standing right on the pivot point, where I can shift a little from one side to the other, yet still stay in that stable middle zone of balance.

Ann: Even though we thought we had tested really well to make sure that there was no negative belief already there, when I started to build a new quality I had a feeling of being torn between the new quality and its opposite. So we backed up and dismantled what we had done. Then I picked another quality to build, and that went smoothly.

Good. When an ambiguous or negative structure is already there, it's a little more complicated, because you have to deal with a significant number of counterexamples to the new quality. Soon you'll have the skills to deal with that situation too.

Summary

Everything that you have learned so far can be used to build an entirely new quality for yourself, by selecting and collecting examples into a new database. As long as you build this new quality in the same form as your unique positive template, it will function in the same way, providing a solid and unconscious basis for knowing that you have this quality, and being who you want to be. Next we'll explore how to make a similar kind of change when someone has an uncertain self-concept because they have roughly equal numbers of examples and counterexamples.

This is an excerpt from Real People Press' new title "Transforming Your Self: becoming who you want to be" available to order in November 2002.