Experiencing through the past (#14)

Posted by on November 17, 2014 in Uncategorized | 4 Comments

“Human emotional responses are just echoes of our own history being brought into the present by the current context. If our reactions are rooted in our history and our reactions are our enemies, then our own history has become our enemy. There are no good technologies for removing a person’s history, at least not selectively.” (Hayes, S.C., Strosahl, K.D., & Wilson, K.G., (2012), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Second Edition. Kindle Book, p.77)

“[…] we experience ourselves through thick veils of ideas, ideals, beliefs, images, reactions, memories, desires, hopes, prejudices, attitudes, assumptions, positions, identifications, ego structures, labels and accumulated knowledge — in other words, through the influence of all of our past experiences. We literally experience through the past, through the totality of our personal past[1], instead of freshly, in the present moment.” (Almaas, A.H., (1996), The Point of Existence, Kindle Book, p. 20)

Perceiving reality through the echoes of our personal history is a powerful image, but it doesn’t cover the whole picture. There are also echoes from our phylogenetic history.

Our story started long before our personal birth (and even before the appearance of homo sapiens) since our genes constitute memories of life evolution. Basic affective responses like fear, anger, sadness and joy are memories of species’ adaptations. They promoted self-preservation (fear, anger, sadness) and self-enhancement (joy). Panksepp and Damasio give strong arguments and many examples in support to this perspective.

Most of the time, people consult psychotherapists when their experiences of the world and/or themselves trigger sufferance. Psychotherapy is an opportunity to review the pertinence of echoes from our past and clarify our rapports to echoes issued from our phylogenetic descendance. Most people don’t perceive their experiences as echoes from the past; they rather equate it to plain contact with reality as it is (that is how I understand the concept of ‘‘emotional truth’’ from Ecker).

For example, a person who invariably expects rejection from significant others doesn’t experience it as an echo from the past (Abandonment schema: memory of precocious experiences of abandonment or instability), but as an actual peril. The panicky feeling that accompanies this perception reinforces that impression of reality of an actual danger.

So, what can be done with this Plato cavern’s dilemma? The first thing I personally choose to do is very simple, that is accepting the reality of our species and personal stories. In this, I am following the advices of wise guides from human history (Buddha, Lao Tzu, Spinoza and a few others being parts of my selected list).

Our capacity for reasoning was an extraordinary addition to our animal condition, but it has come with drawbacks. One of these is to believe that we could overcome our animal foundations if we reasoned well[2]. Human species wouldn’t have make it to the present century if its survival depended solely on wise reasoning[3]. A good example of this is the CARE affective system (Panksepp) that underlies children’ parenting; without it children would be in danger when they wake up their parents for the fifth time of the night!

A wise way to reason is to respectfully take into account our species history (no necessity to be an anthropologist – your actual basic emotional reactions are testimony to that impact) and our personal history.

The initial chapter of our personal history, which researches on attachment have proven crucial, doesn’t take place under a conscious mind and many of its adaptive solutions are purely automatic (implicit processing of information). Moreover, we develop very early (around 4-6 years old) a capacity for autobiographical memory, the story we will create about ourselves. The term ‘story’ really means what it says, that is a story. A story is never an exact reflection of reality: it keeps some aspects of it, and doesn’t consider or bluntly rejects others. But most human beings interpret that story as a truthful reflection of who they are. That’s the meaning of the echoes’ metaphor – we react to actual reality through echoes from the past (most of them being non-conscious). This isn’t by itself a problem; in fact it is an evolutionary advancement since we take account of our experience when we face new situations. But often the drawback is that we don’t even notice that we are actually facing new situations (‘‘I am convinced that this person I meet for the first time wants to take advantage on me’’).

Schema Therapy, which is my basic psychotherapeutic model, has identified some of the most frequent patterns of reactions issued from a person’s history. For example anticipation of abandonment (Abandonment schema) when a relationship becomes significant may have been associated to an automatic reaction of avoidance. The person may or may be not conscious of that pattern – for these automatic reactions to happen consciousness isn’t a necessary condition. But realizing such a pattern and using reason to fight the emotional conviction underpinning it won’t make it, even if the analysis is right on the target. Remember my ghost story (Post # 13) – I am convinced ghosts don’t exist, but I still fear them in certain contexts. I even understand very well that they are memories from my cultural background, that I may have felt alone and unprotected as a child, but I still fear ghosts when I sleep alone in a 400 years old French house in ‘‘Les Cévennes’’. That’s what Bruce Ecker calls an emotional truth – our marvellous prefrontal brain (wonderful gift from evolution) can understand how this emotional memory functions, but can’t change it willfully.

But our prefrontal brain has another astonishing capacity. It could help us to become a ‘’witness’’ to our experience. I can develop full awareness of the triggering of my Abandonment schema and develop tolerance to its activation. I can observe where I feel it in my body (emotions and feelings are brain maps of my body reactions – see Damasio) and learn to enlace them. Living with my emotions and feelings instead of automatically reacting to them opens the door to conscious choice of responses: instead of automatic avoidance, I may choose to tolerate my scary anticipations and then explore actual reality with more curiosity and openness.

The witness position may even bring me further. I may notice that whatever my subjective experiences, my witness position doesn’t change – the stillness in myself. Some of us (us = human beings) see that stillness position as being more fundamental than the reactions and the stories with which we identify ourselves. Almaas sometimes uses the term soul when referring to that dimension of ourselves. On a more secular field, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy refers to the self-in-context. In my understanding it means that definitions of the self as we know them (for example ‘‘I am OK’’or ‘‘I am not OK’’) are always linked to some context (for example my father liked what I did or didn’t like what I did). They don’t exist as real entities, even if for most people they are perceived as so. May be then my ghost story isn’t that far from the mark, we live most of our lives through shadows of our past!

So next time you define yourself as being this or that… devote some thoughts to this.

pcousineau

[1] Bold in the quotations are from me.

[2] Antonio Damasio, (1994), Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, Kindle Book.

[3] It doesn’t mean that it couldn’t help – actual ecological issues would profit from wise reasoning!