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Six Blind Elephants:
Volume II
Understanding Ourselves and Each Other
by Steve Andreas
Recursion (excerpt from chapter 5, Self-reference)
Whenever we plan to do something, we imagine a future scenario, and then evaluate
it. If our evaluation is positive, we stop planning because we feel prepared.
“If I leave work and go down Main St., I can turn right at 6th and get there on
time.” However, sometimes our evaluation of the scenario is unsatisfactory. “Darn!
If I do that, I’ll get caught in rush-hour traffic, and I’ll be late.” Then we
make a new scenario, usually using the previous scenario as a starting point,
modifying it until we find one that is satisfactory. “If I leave work a half-hour
early, and take the River road, I can get there on time.” If this second scenario
is still unsatisfactory, we use the same planning process to think of a third
scenario.
If we call the process of planning the operation, we repeatedly perform the operation
on the output of the previous operation, until we are satisfied with our evaluation
of the result, a process that mathematicians call “recursion.” We do this kind
of planning hundreds of times a day, and much of it occurs outside of our awareness.
If we repeat this process many times, and keep finding that the last scenario
is still unsatisfactory, we may find ourselves in an endless loop of planning,
which is what most people call “worry.” Worrying is simply planning that can’t
arrive at a satisfactory conclusion.
When this occurs, it is useful to exit the planning process, and examine it to
determine what is needed to allow it to come to completion. Many different factors
can prevent planning from coming to a satisfactory conclusion. Often worrying
occurs because we just don’t have the information that we need in order to make
a satisfactory scenario. At that point it makes sense to change the content of
planning to a new operation, finding the information or skill that we need in
order to go back to completing the original planning.
If someone has very demanding and perfectionistic criteria that can never be satisfied,
that will also make it impossible to come to a satisfactory endpoint. For instance,
some people attempt to plan so thoroughly that nothing could possibly go wrong,
and that is not possible. Nobody can think of everything that could possibly go
wrong, and even if we could, we would not be able to cope with some of them. With
an impossible digital perfectionistic criterion, every scenario will be unsatisfactory,
so the planning can never end.
Sometimes we may find that we feel inadequate to cope with the expected future
event. Since we don’t have the skills required for the challenge ahead, we may
find ourselves repeatedly making up unsatisfactory scenarios, and feeling bad
or scared in response. One possibility would be to go into a new operation in
which the appropriate skills can be learned. If I feel socially awkward, I can
learn how to make “small talk,” or learn to inquire about someone else’s interests,
so that they will do most of the talking. I might be able to find this information
in a book, or I might have to find someone else who could teach me those skills.
At other times, you literally have no control over the situation you would like
to plan for. Even if you know exactly what to do, and have the skills to do it,
you can’t do anything about what your teenager will do when s/he is gone for an
evening activity because you aren’t there. When your child is out at night much
later than expected, and you don’t know where they are, you have almost no information,
making it especially easy to imagine an infinite series of car crashes and other
unpleasant scenarios. You have no control over the outcome of these scenarios,
because no matter how skilled you are, there is nothing you can do. As a friend
of mine said once, “It’s not that there is nothing to worry about; it’s just that
there is no point in worrying about it.”
When you realize that there is nothing you can do, you can categorize the meaning
of your worrying about your kids—it means that you love them a lot. Thinking about
how much you love them is much more enjoyable than worrying about their safety.
And then you can utilize your ability to plan to think about how you can show
them how much you love them when they return. That will probably be much more
useful than yelling at them for staying out late, or blaming them for scaring
you!
Anxiety In worrying, the process may continue to occupy your mind for some time,
as you recursively think of one possible scenario after another. However, if you
find yourself in an unsatisfactory loop, and the results of the future event are
very important to you, you may find that the loop escalates at every step, creating
what has often been called a “vicious circle” of increasing anxiety.
When someone feels anxious, they usually begin by imagining a future scenario
that is threatening. Then they notice their feelings of fear, and these feelings
elicit the threatening scenario. Often this spiraling loop has only two elements,
for instance, an image of the future, and a feeling of fear. Since our kinesthetic
feelings tend to last, when they go on to make the next scenario, it includes
these feelings of fear (and perhaps images of other scary events) making it even
more fearful. If they cycle very fast, the feelings will rapidly become very intense.
After a few experiences of becoming very anxious, people may begin by feeling
anxious about being anxious (a higher logical level) and leap quickly from the
first fearful scenario to the endpoint of intense anxiety. This is even more efficient,
speeding up the process in what psychiatry has sometimes called “anticipatory
anxiety.”
Usually people also try to inhibit their physiological expression of fear. But
since a negated representation of a fearful situation is just as fearful, it elicits
more fear. For example, in stage fright, someone wants to not be nervous when
giving a presentation. As they think about what they don’t want to happen, they
make images of their voice quavering, rapid breathing, losing track of what they
want to say, etc., which produces some fear. The feeling of fear makes the person
try harder to not worry, which produces images of more detailed and extreme symptoms,
which produces more fear, etc., in a “runaway” feedback loop.
They may go on to fear that in the future situation they will completely lose
control of their trembling and stuttering, etc., adding another fearful element
to the next scenario, making the situation worse. This process can eventually
reach the physiological limits of the body, in which it is not possible to feel
more fear, what is called “panic disorder.” The intent to inhibit or negate the
fear makes the situation worse because the physiological symptoms accumulate,
rather than flowing into expression.
This kind of problem often yields quickly to a method called “paradoxical intention,”
asking someone to deliberately do what has been categorized as a spontaneous symptom.
For instance, if someone begins to tremble and shake involuntarily when anticipating
a fearful situation, you can ask them to voluntarily exaggerate the trembling
and shaking, which is the opposite of what they have been doing.
As they try to make themselves anxious, and tremble even more, this will typically
reduce the symptoms, because it reverses the direction of the escalating loop.
Before, they got anxious automatically, and tried to consciously control it; now
they are consciously trying to get anxious, and automatically becoming calmer.
It’s very important to realize that expressing the sensory-based physical symptoms
of a response is different from catharsis, which is expressing the evaluative
feeling/emotion of fear, which is at a higher logical level. Trembling and shaking
are physical behaviors, which are evaluated as fearful. Trembling and shaking
also occur in situations of eager anticipation and excitement, but there they
are evaluated, categorized, and responded to quite differently.
This approach is called “paradoxical” for two reasons. One is that it is “contrary
to common opinion.” The idea of trying to increase an unwanted response would
not occur to most people. The other is that the unwanted response is experienced
as involuntary, out of the person’s control. Voluntarily trying to increase an
involuntary symptom seems to be contradictory, invoking two opposite categories
of experience simultaneously. How can you voluntarily increase an involuntary
symptom?
This is yet another example of the failure of categorical opposites to accurately
represent our world of experience. Right now, I assume that you are not particularly
fearful while reading this book. I would like you to pause, and voluntarily exaggerate
the way you have trembled in the past when you have been scared, starting with
your hands, and then allowing that to spread throughout your body. . . .
This little experiment shows that you do have some voluntary motor control over
your “involuntary” symptoms. When I do this, I even feel the hair on the back
of my neck stand up and my skin tingles, events that are usually understood to
be involuntary responses of the sympathetic nervous system. Now pause to back
up a few seconds to think about how you created your feelings of fear. . . .
You may have just recalled your trembling movements, and then experienced whatever
followed that trembling. But more likely you remembered an image of the event
that originally created the trembling and fear. That is the same process that
people use when becoming anxious; they make an image of something fearful, and
then feel their fearful response. The only difference is that anxiety is usually
about a future image, rather than a past one. Of course a past image can be imagined
happening again in the future.
By deliberately creating fear, you can find out exactly how you do it—what kind
of images you make, what you say to yourself, etc.—and this can transform what
you previously experienced as involuntary into something voluntary. If you can
do something voluntarily, that presupposes that you can voluntarily do something
different, giving you the ability to change your experience.
Depression often has the same kind of escalating two-point loop. Someone has a
bad experience, or remembers or anticipates one, and feels hopeless or helpless.
Then they use that feeling to think of another scope of experience that they feel
helpless about, looping back to the beginning. Each time around the loop, the
feelings accumulate, and the number of examples of events to be depressed about
increases, creating a very large category.
When someone is depressed, they usually go into a physical position with shoulders
and head down, in which breathing is shallow, physical energy is low, and they
can’t notice much of anything except their internal images or words, and the unpleasant
feelings that result from them. This makes it unlikely that they will notice any
event that could introduce some change into their mental looping.
Someone who is depressed is likely to either ignore, dismiss, or even recategorize
and incorporate any pleasant events that occur. Usually any counterexamples to
this category—pleasant events, jokes, a satisfying meal, etc.—are dismissed as
irrelevant, because they really “don’t count” when compared with the enormous
number of more significant examples of helplessness and hopelessness in their
category. This kind of thinking is particularly difficult to change when the experiences
are labeled as being about the “self,” because most people presuppose that the
self can’t be changed, increasing the feeling of helplessness.
Often other people try to cheer up a depressed person, which is a very poor match
for their experience! Usually they will not only dismiss this attempt, they will
use your unsuccessful and misguided attempt as additional evidence for how hopeless
things are, incorporating that into their loop.
Since depression is a closed recursive system, anything introduced into the loop
has a chance of changing the recursion into something more useful. However, as
anyone who has worked with depressed people can verify, it is often difficult
to enter it in any way that could lead to change. As in anxiety, one way to do
this is through “paradoxical intention,” asking them to deliberately do, and even
exaggerate what they are already doing. When they discover how they do it, it
can gradually become a conscious and voluntary process, something that they can
choose to do or not do.
If the client remains silent after your request to deliberately depress themselves,
you can say, “Good, that’s a good way to stay depressed; don’t do anything. Thanks
for being so cooperative. Slumping your shoulders like that is also pretty effective.
Now you can either just keep doing that, or think of some other ways to feel depressed.”
Since you have asked them to deliberately depress themselves, anything that they
do—or don’t do—can be described as a cooperative response belonging in that category.
If they say, “I can’t do that,” you can respond, “Great, tell yourself that you
can’t do anything. That’s a good one; now tell me what else you can’t do.” Whatever
they do can be utilized, and you can keep doing that until they actually do something
different, or make a firm and congruent commitment to doing it. Anything short
of congruence should be understood as further evidence that they are still showing
you how they depress themselves. For instance, if they say, half-heartedly, “Maybe
I could get up in the morning at 8:00,” the best response is to say, “That’s another
good one; make a plan that you don’t expect to follow through with, and then when
you don’t, that will be even more evidence for how incapable you are.”
It can be even more useful to ask them to do their internal process out loud,
and depress you, trying to convince you how terrible everything is. “I failed
that exam, so now my life is over,” etc. When they do this out loud, deliberately,
and they are depressing you, rather than themselves, that causes several changes
in scope, introducing new information. For instance, they will be hearing themselves
speak, and will probably be observing your responses. All those differences will
introduce change into the process, and at least some of them will be useful. Fritz
Perls often told clients who were doing anything to themselves, “Do it to me;
I can fight back,” in order to enlarge the scope, and reengage them with the world
outside their small and impoverished internal mental loops.
As they try to depress you, you can also act as a “cheering section” and critic
to improve the effectiveness of how they depress themselves. “Hey, that’s a good
one; do that some more. How about slowing your voice down, and make it softer,
to make it sound even sadder and more depressing. That’s pretty weak; surely you
can do better than that.” Sooner or later the depressed person is likely to run
out of depressing things to say, and break into a smile, and then you can tell
them not to, “No, don’t smile, that ruins the effect; the corners of your mouth
have to be down to be convincing.” Besides being a negative command (one that
works almost as well with adults as it does with small children) it is an additional
invitation to view what they are doing from the point of view of an outside observer,
a different scope, which is a good vantage point for categorizing what they are
doing in a different way.
Utilizing recursion to exit a loop One of Virginia Satir’s methods was to ask
someone who was depressed, “How do you feel about feeling depressed?” Since they
are already attending to their feelings, this is a good match for their experience,
but it asks them to categorize their feeling response at a more general logical
level, instead of cycling back to their depressing thoughts, changing the loop.
Whatever the client replies, it will be a feeling about a feeling, instead of
a feeling about some content.
Although occasionally a client might reply, “I feel depressed about being depressed,”
usually they will respond with a different feeling. “Well, I feel sad about feeling
depressed,” or “I’m sick of feeling this way all the time.” These new feelings
will take them out of the old loop, and they can be utilized as a starting point
for making further changes. If you get stuck, you can always ask the recursive
feeling question again at any time. “How do you feel about feeling depressed about
feeling depressed?” “How do you feel about feeling sad?” “How do you feel about
feeling sick of feeling this way all the time?”
Read Exerpts from Several Chapters
Contingent Implication (excerpt
from chapter 1, Implication)
Hidden Negation (excerpt
from chapter 2, Negation)
What others have said about Six Blind
Elephants . . .
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