Louis Cozolino and Vanessa Davis
The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.
—Carl Rogers
SOMEONE ONCE ASKED me if I knew the difference between a rat and a human being.* I was curious, so I played along; here is what he told me. If you take a hungry rat and put it on a platform surrounded by five tunnels with cheese hidden down the third tunnel, the rat, smelling the cheese, will explore the tunnels until it finds the cheese. Rats have excellent spatial memory, so if you put the same rat in the same place the next day, it will immediately go down the third tunnel. If, in the meantime, you’ve moved the cheese to the fifth tunnel, the rat will still go down the third tunnel expecting to find the cheese where it was before. So what’s the difference between a rat and a human being?
Rats are realists and soon come to accept that the cheese is gone and move on to explore the other tunnels. Humans, on the other hand, will go down the third tunnel forever because they come to believe that’s where the cheese should be. Within a few generations, humans will develop rituals, philosophies, and religions focused on the third tunnel, invent gods to rule over it, and create demons to inhabit the other four. The rat’s simpler brain provides it with no reason to persevere in the face of failure, whereas humans are experts at persevering in the face of frustration. When our brains cause unnecessary suffering, we need our minds to come to our rescue.
Our brains are organs of adaptation and survival, designed to do things as fast as possible with the least amount of information. So once they get things right, like never expressing negative emotions during childhood, brains may become shaped to never express negative emotions again. Such a person might also adopt pacifist philosophies, get into relationships with violent people, and feel like a success because he or she didn’t express negative emotions. Brains excel in coming to unconscious conclusions and shaping our conscious experience to reinforce the beliefs we already hold.
Brains are inherently conservative and want to keep doing what’s worked in the past: Don’t take risks, do what your parents want you to do to, fit in, and contribute to the common good. For the lucky souls whose brains are well matched to their circumstances, life works pretty well. For the rest of us, being stuck between our programming, the expectations of our tribe, and our own needs for emotional health and actualization can make us physically and mentally ill.
When our life isn’t working and we are anxious, depressed, or engaging in self-destructive behaviors, we go to therapy seeking change. Often, we are unaware of what is causing our suffering and continue to employ the same unsuccessful strategies in our lives with continued negative results. As therapists, most of us have noticed that our smartest clients can be the most difficult to help change because they are often well rewarded for doing things their way. Successful accountants with obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD), paranoid policemen, and delusional fortunetellers will shower you with examples of how what you are calling a problem has made them successful.
In contrast to our brains, our minds emerged much farther down the evolutionary path. We still don’t understand the origins of the mind, but it probably had something to do with groups of brains coming together to form the superorganisms we call tribes. As attention and memory became stabilized by group process, our interactions grew into a culture, which became the template for mind and the eventual formation of individual identity. At this current point in evolution, our best guess is that the human brain is a social organ and the mind is a product of many interacting brains.
A Social Organ of Adaptation
We are afraid to care too much, for fear that the other person doesn’t care at all.
—Eleanor Roosevelt
Human brains are social organs of adaptation—meaning that their growth and organization are shaped and reshaped in the process of ongoing experience. At the same time, our ability to adapt to new situations is constrained by habit and prior aversive and traumatic learning. The dynamic tension between habit and the need for adaptation lies at the heart of psychotherapy. This is why our clients consciously enlist our help in changing suboptimal functioning: Their brains automatically work against our efforts. Although a client’s resistance may be seen as an impediment to change, it is actually the central focus of change in psychotherapy. Being a therapist means always skating the delicate edge between stability, flexibility, rigidity, and change.
Despite our natural resistance to it, change is a normal part of life. Sometimes we are forced to change, and sometimes we want to change because old patterns of behavior have become too painful or no longer fit who we’ve become. That’s when we go on a quest to discover something new. Some of us go to the desert, others find a guru, and still others go to therapy; all are learning environments engineered to create change. A brief glance at history reveals that people have been changing long before therapy arrived on the scene. The classic example is the heroic journey from adolescence to adulthood whereby the hero is able to break away from the constraints of his or her childhood in order to discover new ways of being. These kinds of life changes have historically been called redemption, transformation, or salvation.
People change when new experiences disrupt old stimulus–response patterns (habits). Because we depend on the repetitive execution of habits to feel safe and in control, disrupting these patterns makes us anxious. This is where the emotional support of a therapist is most important. The reflexive response to change is either to return to old patterns or grasp onto some new habit or belief system to escape the anxiety of uncertainty. If we can tolerate the anxiety of uncertainty and stay on our journey, change is inevitable. This is why radically different forms of therapy can be successful. We can leverage many aspects of experience in our quest, and the more neural networks we are able to tap in to, the more leverage we will have in service of changing our brains. Because our brains consist of complex and interwoven neural networks, there are many possible avenues of change.
Habits and Flexibility
When I let go of who I am, I become what I might be.
—Lao Tsu
Robots and humans share the fact that our actions are based on past programming. The actions of robots are organized in algorithms embedded in lines of code; a robot’s coding is a long list of “if this, then that” statements that allow it to react to all of the contingencies that the programmer had the foresight to anticipate. This is how Siri is able to know if we should wear a sweater or if the Cubs are playing at home this weekend.
In contrast to a robot’s computer code, human habits are maintained by memories stored in ensembles of neural networks. When triggered by internal or external cues, the associated memories activate our behaviors, thoughts, and emotions. The unconscious activation of old programming keeps us doing the “same old same old,” which is why every psychology student is told that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.
Psychotherapists generally believe in three levers of change: feelings, behaviors, and thoughts. Most traditional forms of psychotherapy use either one or some combination of the three to promote change. For behaviorists, changes in behavior are believed to lead to changes in emotions and thoughts. This is why B. F. Skinner believed that modifying reinforcers within the environment would lead to changes in how we think and feel. For psychodynamic therapists, the primary lever of change is emotions, which will then lead to changes in thoughts and behaviors. In contrast, cognitive therapists believe that thoughts drive feelings and behaviors; change someone’s thoughts and changes in feelings and behaviors will follow. More innovative forms of therapy have also discovered the power of movement, body work, art, and meditation to promote change. The underlying theory that guides each therapeutic school assumes that its particular target of intervention is the primary driver of change. Over the years I’ve seen people have great success in therapies that would fall into all of these categories.
When presented as dogma, each perspective of psychotherapy is simultaneously right and wrong. Each works, or doesn’t, depending on the client and the quality of the therapeutic relationship. For many therapists, seeing this reality is a challenge because most of us choose an orientation to therapy based on our own experiences, needs, and defenses. This unconscious egocentric bias leads most of us to believe that our view of therapeutic change is correct to the exclusion of others. This assumption makes us vulnerable to all kinds of biases in judgment. The tendency toward dogma also places us at risk of interpreting treatment failures as problems in our clients instead of in ourselves.
Although my personal bias is in the direction of psychodynamic forms of therapy, if I look closely at what I actually do, I’m also using behavioral and cognitive interventions. As I create experiments in living with my clients, I challenge them to engage in new behaviors and ways of thinking. I work with them to alter the reward contingencies in their lives and challenge dysfunctional patterns of thinking. I encourage clients to consider meditation, yoga, dance, or any other way they can simultaneously sooth their anxiety and explore all corners of their minds and bodies.
The best cognitive therapists I know invest time in forming solid relationships with their clients and include discussions of emotions and behaviors as part of treatment. Behavioral therapists often educate and emotionally connect with clients and their families as they establish the intellectual and interpersonal contexts for their work. So perhaps most well-trained therapists leverage all three neural avenues to some degree, regardless of their orientation.
What we have learned from neuroscience hasn’t supported any one of these perspectives over the other. In fact, understanding the interwoven nature of neural networks has challenged us to engage in a higher level of integrative thinking. All three schools, with the addition of systems therapy and other adjunctive techniques such as eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), can be synthesized into more efficacious interventions.
The Power of Connection
Experience is a biochemical intervention.
—Jason Seidel
The implications of having a social brain are widespread, including the fact that many things we think of as being objectively true—knowledge, memory, identity, and reality—are largely social constructions. One of the reasons why things seem more real when we experience them with others is because our experience of reality is primarily social. Children show us this in a very straightforward way as they implore us to “Watch this, watch this!” as they do cartwheels or perform a magic trick.
Our social brains allow us to link to those around us, connect with the group mind, and regulate one another’s states of mind. In order to tolerate the anxiety of change, we need to feel safe—which is why the quality of the therapeutic relationship is so vital to the success of any form of therapy. Secure attachment to the therapist also activates key drivers of neuroplasticity, such as decreases in cortisol, which inhibits hippocampal functioning, protein synthesis, and new learning.
In addition to the biological consequences of positive relationships, our minds are also more apt to change when linked to other minds. Having a witness activates mirror neurons and theory-of-mind circuitry, making us more aware of others and ourselves while reinforcing our identity. The importance of our brains linking across the social synapse for therapeutic success is probably why the quality of the client–therapist relationship (as perceived by the client) has the stronger positive correlation with treatment success than any other variable studied.
So how do we maximize the therapeutic relationship as an agent of change? The therapeutic stance suggested by Carl Rogers (1951) over a half century ago is likely the best interpersonal environment for neural plasticity and social–emotional learning. His focus on warmth, acceptance, and unconditional positive regard minimizes the need for defensiveness while maximizing expressiveness, exploration, and risk-taking. His orientation to therapy was not to try and solve specific problems, but to help clients gain the broadest possible awareness of their thoughts and emotions. It is not surprising that these same characteristics have emerged as beneficial for positive child development.
What might be going on in the brain and body of a client who is receiving warmth, acceptance, and positive regard? We know that social interactions early in life result in the stimulation of both neurotransmitters and neural growth hormones that participate in the active building of the brain. It is likely that oxytocin and dopamine become activated in states of attunement, enhancing a client’s ability to benefit from treatment by stimulating neuroplasticity. A strong therapeutic bond also increases metabolic functioning, which drives blood flow, oxygen availability, and glucose consumption supportive of new learning.
A Rogerian interpersonal context would allow a client to experience the widest range of emotions within the dyadic scaffolding of an empathic other. The trust generated in the context of attunement appears to allow our minds to be open to what we might otherwise reflexively reject. This openness would increase receptiveness to interventions such as supportive rephrasing, clarifications, and interpretations to gain access to conscious consideration. Clients can then link minds with their therapists to co-create new narratives that contain blueprints for more adaptive thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
It is obvious that we can model the outward behaviors of others and imitate their physical actions. What is less obvious is that the mechanisms of our social brains allow us to attune to the mental activities of those around us. Whereas this attunement is inhibited with those we fear, trust makes it more likely that we will spontaneously imitate the actions, thoughts, and feelings of those we like. A therapist who isn’t liked will be unable to leverage the powerful forces of imitation and emotional resonance to drive positive change.
Those who are nurtured best survive best during childhood and more easily benefit from therapy later in life. Unfortunately, the social isolation created by many psychological defenses can separate us from the positive emotional connectedness that drives healing. One of the goals of therapy is to generate trust and connection so that our clients can rejoin the group mind and benefit from its natural healing properties.
Healing Trauma
Never be afraid to sit a while and think.
—Lorraine Hansberry
Fear and terror change our brains in ways that disrupt the continuity of experience and can lead us to disconnect from the group mind. I have had clients from Baghdad, Beirut, and London, separated by culture, language, and generations, who shared the experience of being in buildings as they were destroyed by bombs. These victims of war describe similar experiences: hearing the whistling growing louder, then the explosion, the violent movements of the floor and walls, followed by long periods of silence and struggling to breathe through the clouds of dust. The aftermath involves digging their way out, climbing over the bodies of relatives and neighbors, and then enduring prolonged shock that can last for decades.
One client, fleeing on foot from Eastern Europe to escape the Holocaust, was crossing a field with his older brother. A Nazi plane spotted them and dropped a bomb that landed within feet of where they had taken cover. They stared at the unexploded bomb for what seemed like an eternity before they continued to run. A young woman I worked with was driven to the desert by her sadistic husband and forced to dig her own grave as he sat and sharpened a butcher knife. These are all experiences that terrify us to the point where we can lose our words and disconnect from reality. Meanwhile, the trauma can get locked within us and can become the soundtrack of the rest of our lives.
The value of someone who is willing to go with us to the ground zero of our pain, a witness to our horror, should never be underestimated. Communicating our story to another encourages us to articulate a traumatic experience that may only be represented in our brains as a fragmented collection of images, bodily sensations, and emotions. Once we have a conscious and articulated story, we gain the possibility of integrating the many aspects of what has happened to us in order to find a way to heal. Seeing the reactions of the other to our experiences helps us to grasp their meaning, and having to make them comprehensible to another helps make them comprehensible to us. In addition, telling the story to others provides us with a new memory of the story that now includes a witness, making it a public experience, and making it available to editorial changes. All aspects of this co-creation of our experience support the idea that both reality and memory are social constructs.
Keep in mind that the ability to heal psychic pain through storytelling has been woven into our brains over eons of cultural evolution. When young therapists begin to hear their clients’ stories, they usually feel that they have to do something with the information in order to earn their keep. Over time, we come to appreciate the fact that simply bearing witness is an important part of our job. Sometimes the best thing to do, especially at first, is to do nothing. As we weigh in with some of our thoughts and feelings, our clients gradually weave them into stories.
Turning Your Mind Into an Ally
The body benefits from movement, and the mind benefits from stillness.
—Sakyong Mipham
Being in control of your mind first requires remembering that you have a mind, which is not as easy as it sounds. Whereas our bowels and bladders remind us of their existence, our minds are silent and prefer to go unnoticed. There is no reflex to orient us to the mind’s existence, no pressure exerted or guilt employed if we ignore it. Remembering we have a mind involves effort and discipline. This is why many people go through life having never noticed they have one, let alone knowing they can use it to their advantage.
If and when we do remember that we have a mind, what do we do with it? One of the first things we may notice about our minds is that they keep generating thoughts all on their own. There may be a momentary interruption in the flow at first glance, but soon enough, your mind will go back to creating an incessant stream of words, thoughts, and images. What you don’t want to do is get washed downstream. What you do want to do is to cultivate the ability to observe these thoughts as they flow by without identifying with them or reacting to them. The goal is to learn to let them go by, to be replaced by the next, and the next, and the next. This river of thoughts will go on without effort or intention until you come to realize that the thoughts are not you; you’re the one watching.
By gaining distance from this stream of thoughts and feelings, you are in a position to make some choices that you couldn’t make before. You can evaluate how accurate and useful they are, and whether or not you choose to believe them. You will soon come to realize that although the brain evolved to help us deal with potential danger, the speed, intensity, and negative bias of all the thoughts it generates have gone too far. In many ways, the cortex has grown too smart for our own well-being. The good news is that although brains evolve over eons, we can change our minds in an instant. It may take decades for that instant to happen, but when it happens, our minds are capable of discovering new ways of being.
Junk Food Junkie
A change in bad habits leads to a change in life.
—Jenny Craig
Years ago, I was telling my therapist that I wanted to get into better shape, but despite all my efforts, I always seemed to fall short. “If only I could eat better,” I told her. In good therapeutic form, she replied, “Tell me more.” “I exercise every day and eat lots of healthy food. On most days, I eat well all day until the evening, when I become a junk food junkie.” I suppose you could call it binge eating, but because I was in such good shape and not overweight, I never labeled it that way. But it was clear that the number and especially the kind of calories I was eating most evenings were not good.
The more I spoke of my evening binges, the more I became aware of how automatic and unconscious the behavior was and how out of control I felt. As the session ended, she suggested that I think about it more, which of course, I promptly forgot until a few days later. One morning, as I lay in bed in that middle state between sleeping and waking, a memory that felt like a daydream began to play in my mind.
I was a young boy, perhaps 7 or 8, walking into the kitchen where my grandmother was cleaning up after dinner. I was telling her that I was sad about something or other. Instead of saying anything, she turned to the right, opened the refrigerator, reached into the freezer, and pulled out a half-gallon box of spumoni ice cream. As she turned back in my direction, she pulled off the paper zippers, grabbed a spoon, and pushed it into the ice cream. I put out my arms, and she placed the box of ice cream in my hands. I turned around in silence and walked into the living room, where I laid down on the sofa, placed the box of ice cream on my chest, and ate until I could eat no more.
An important thing to know about my family is that the direct expression of negative feelings was rare, and discussions about emotions were nonexistent. There was a special injunction against sadness, something I only realized later in life. There had been enough tragedy, loss, and heartbreak already, and I, as the first child of a new generation, was to be saved from sadness. This meant that expressing sadness needed to be staved off at all costs. Everyone used food to distance themselves from emotions, and I learned this lesson well. The downside was that it left all of us without a way to understand or language to communicate the painful aspects of our inner worlds.
So the next question is, how do we use our minds to disrupt the negative patterns stored in our brains? We need to find a tool the mind can use to interrupt the automatic stimulus–response chains in the brain. One that I’ve found valuable, called HALT, comes from Alcoholics Anonymous. When you feel like having a drink or engaging in any compulsive behavior, say the word HALT and ask yourself whether you are Hungry, Angry, Lonely, or Tired. The idea is that if you are going for a drink, there is probably some emotional trigger. Of course, there are other emotions that you should consider—but they wouldn’t spell HALT, which is quite useful.
HALT not only reminds you to interrupt the impulse to drink (or in my case, eat), but also to remember that you have a mind, to be self-reflective, and to engage in a caring relationship with yourself. You are doing what my grandmother was unable to do by asking, “I can see something is wrong; lets talk—tell me what you are experiencing.” The added awareness momentarily interrupts the stimulus–response chain and provides the opportunity to reflect, reconsider, and take a healthy detour from your usual route. This is where a well-established and mature relationship with your inner world really comes in handy.
Using the HALT technique is one way to use your mind to change your brain. Asking yourself what you are feeling instead of engaging in reflexive behavior allows your mind to reconnect with and learn to retrain the habits of your primitive brain. In a sense, you are giving yourself what you needed as a child—to be seen, to feel felt, and to be helped to grasp and articulate your experience. This corrective internal reparenting—what we strive for in therapy—will eventually create new neural circuitry that allows you to replace symptoms with functional adaptations. In my case, it meant taking better care of myself, investing more in relationships, and being more willing to directly confront emotional pain.
Constructive Introspection
Loneliness is the poverty of the self; solitude is the richness of self.
—May Sarton, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, 1965
During the early years of life, we experience ourselves as embedded within the group mind of our families, unaware that we are separate from those around us. For some, especially those in more collectivist cultures, this frame of mind may last a lifetime. For others, there is a dawning awareness of our separateness. What we do with this discovery depends on the quality of our relationships, our personalities, and our life experiences. For some, the awareness of separateness drives us to fear, terror, and despair. For others, solitude and self-reflection become a cherished retreat from the demands and chaos of the outer world.
Learning to look inward to explore the landscape of our internal worlds isn’t something with which we are born. It requires time, discipline, and more than a little courage. Fortunately, traditions of meditation and prayer from around the world give us a place to begin. Upon turning inward, we soon discover that our minds are erratic and unsteady instruments. We become aware that our minds shift among different perspectives, emotional states, and modes of language. In fact, there are at least three kinds of inner language that arise during different states of mind: a reflexive social language, an internal narrator, and a language of self-reflection.
Like the river of thought, reflexive social language (RSL) is a stream of words that appears to exist to grease the social wheels. It consists of verbal reflexes, clichés, and acceptable reactions in social situations that establish a web of pleasantries with those around us. The best example is the obligatory “How are you?” “Fine, how are you?” “Fine.” Most of us also experience this level of language whenever we automatically say something positive to avoid conflict, or when we tell people we are “doing great” regardless of what’s troubling us. The clichés of RSL are automatic reflexes, not expressions of our true thoughts or feelings. As our abilities for self-reflection expand, we begin to see that we are able to simultaneously engage in reflexive talk while witnessing ourselves doing it.
When we look within, we also discover an internal narrator that is quite different from what we express to others. While RSL connects us to others and has a positive bias, the narrator is a private language we experience as a single voice or inner conversation. The narrator is primarily negative in tone and driven by self-doubt, anticipatory anxiety, fear, and shame. “Did I lock the back door?” “Do I look fat in these pants?” and “I’m so stupid! I should just end it all” are common statements of this inner voice. The inner narrator also turns against others in the form of critical and hostile thoughts. RSL and the internal narrator are reflexive mechanisms that serve to maintain preexisting attitudes, behaviors, and feelings. Whereas RSL is an expression of how we have been taught to interact with other people, our inner narrator reflects our sense of our own lovability, value, and our place in the social world.
Although much of our time is spent alternating between RSL and the internal narrator, we are capable of attainting a state of mind that allows us to be self-reflective and to think about our thinking. This third level, self-reflective language, emerges when we attain a more objective view of our experience. As the language of self-awareness expands through practice and experience, we learn that we are capable of choosing whether or not to follow the mandates of the programming that drives RSL and the internal narrator. Realizing that these reflexive forms of language are not “us,” but primitive mechanisms of memory and social control, is a vital first step in being able to use our minds in the service of change.
Shaun’s Voices
Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle.
—Lewis Carroll
Well into our therapeutic relationship, “Shaun” sat across from me looking exasperated and hopeless. “Why am I still haunted by these voices? My life is great, I’ve made it, so why can’t I just enjoy it? When the voices aren’t criticizing me, they are second-guessing everything I do.”
I knew Shaun well and these voices weren’t a sign of psychosis. “I know, they suck, don’t they!” I replied.
“You hear them too?” he asked.
I responded, “Absolutely, never remember a time without them.”
“Well, where do they come from and where do I go for an exorcism?” he asked.
I smiled and said, “I have a theory,” I said. “The human brain has a long and complex evolutionary history and works in mysterious ways. It also doesn’t come with an owner’s manual, so we are still in the process of figuring it out. I’ve come to believe that these voices are a kind of archeological artifact. What I mean is that they may have once served a survival purpose at some stage of our evolution but have now become a nuisance. Each of us has two brains, one on the left and one on the right. Long ago, primates had brains that were largely the same on both sides, but as brains became larger and more complicated, each hemisphere began to specialize in different skills and abilities. The right hemisphere is in control of very high and very low levels of emotion (terror and shame) and is likely a model for what both hemispheres were once like. It also has an early developmental spurt in the first 18 months of life and connects with caretakers for the purposes of attachment, emotional regulation, and acculturation into our family and tribe.
“The left hemisphere was the experiment that created modern humans. It veered off from this path, in order to specialize in later-evolving abilities such as language, rational thought, social interactions, and self-awareness. Both hemispheres have language; the left hemisphere has the language we use to think through problems and to communicate with others. The right has a language that is usually fearful and negative in tone and programmed very early in our lives. It is the worrier, the critic, and the one designed to keep you in line.”
“Well, that does suck!” Shaun said, “but why are they so negative?”
“Well, we know that the right hemisphere is biased toward negativity, and people with more activation in the right than the left prefrontal cortex tend to be depressed. This negative bias was probably shaped because worrying about what others in the tribe were thinking about you most likely correlated with sustained connection and survival. The right hemisphere is concerned with survival, the way both of our hemispheres once were. My best guess is that the voices in our heads are the right-hemisphere remnants of voices of parents and tribal leaders that supported group coordination, cooperation, and cohesion—what Freud called the superego—an inner supervisor of the self that echoes early conditioning.
“Remember that the purpose of the brain is to enhance survival through the prediction and control of future outcomes. In a social context, the right hemisphere leverages our fear of being shamed to keep us in line and obedient to the alphas: Am I acceptable to others? Am I going to get fired? And so on. Concerns about being accepted by the group appear to have been woven into our genes, brains, and minds. Some of us have especially harsh and critical inner voices that never let up. This may be because we had critical parents, have a bias toward depression, or lack self-confidence and feel ashamed of who we are for other reasons.
“Because these voices seem to come from deep inside of us, we don’t experience them as memories but rather as part of ourselves—a very painful and unfortunate misunderstanding of how our brains work. A central aspect of becoming the CEO of our lives is to see the voices as primitive memory programming and learn how to interpret, manage, and mitigate their negative effects. I’m not sure they ever go away. This may be because we may still need them in some instances where their input is actually helpful. But we all need to discern which of these voices are counterproductive and learn to tell the destructive ones to get lost. This is one way that understanding how your brain evolved and developed can help to turn your mind into an ally.”
I’m sure that Shaun had heard the message of not paying attention to these thoughts many times before. But reasoning with the voices doesn’t seem to work—they are deeper, more primitive, and stronger than conscious ideas. Whether or not the explanation I presented to him is correct, this way of thinking about his inner voices captured his imagination. This scientific narrative created a way for him to objectify his enemy—these shaming and critical right-hemisphere voices—and develop a range of strategies to fight them. I’m not telling Shaun that he is being irrational. I am saying that the voices in his head are about his parents and tribe and need to be separated from his sense of self. He now has an enemy to tackle, not just with his mind, but with his body and soul.
Reframing Shame
Nothing you have done is wrong, and nothing you can do can make up for it.
—Gershen Kaufman
Over the last half-century, shame has emerged as the most prevalent and powerful emotion shaping our clients’ personal narratives. Jung’s shadow, Freud’s neurosis, and Beck’s depression can all be traced to the origins of shame: Abandonment, exploitation, criticism, and a myriad of other early experiences make us doubt our value and legitimacy as a person. In recent decades, a range of disciplines have revealed the importance of core shame and explored its neurobiological, cognitive, and behavioral dimensions. Shame has come out of the closet and into the spotlight as a topic of TED talks, best sellers, and new therapies.
Where the few who engage in heinous crimes appear to have little or no shame, many who have done nothing wrong are crushed by it. This incongruity makes us question the evolutionary origins and survival value of shame. One would think that any human phenomenon so prevalent and so powerful must have some survival value to counterbalance all of the pain it causes. Although we experience shame as a private and deeply personal emotion, its survival value may be the result of natural selection at the group level. Let me explain.
As we evolved into social animals, larger and larger groups of individuals needed to cooperate, coordinate their behavior, and follow a leader. But how is this accomplished by a group of prehumans without culture, language, or rational thought? How about making most everyone feel anxious and avoidant of the “spotlight” so they pay close attention to the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of an alpha? The value of shame may be to make us focus on what others are thinking about us in order to maintain cohesive and well-organized groups. By making us uncertain about ourselves, shame leads us to look to others to make sure we are acceptable and doing the right thing. This explanation could account not only for how groups are able to organize behind a leader but also for the power of celebrity, cult leaders, and dictators. The fact that we feel badly about ourselves as a result of shame may be an accidental byproduct of this method of social organization.
If you were going to design a mechanism of social control that would keep betas in line behind alphas, you couldn’t do better than to instill a sense of shame in betas. Those who are psychologically organized around shame are always worried about what others think of them, try to be perfect in the eyes of others, and only feel safe and confident when they are following someone else’s orders. What Freud called superego and I call the inner narrator—the voices in our heads that remind us of our shortcomings—reinforces the same type of societal hierarchies that we witness in all mammals.
Understanding and reframing shame is important for change because it is such a powerful agent of the status quo. We can spend years in therapy trying to discover the origins of our shame: what we have done wrong and what wrongs have been done to us. Sometimes we can find the smoking gun, and sometimes we can’t—either way, it doesn’t really make a difference. We have to root out the manifestations of shame in our day-to-day lives and slowly and systematically alter them, one by one. The manifestations of shame—perfectionism, low self-esteem, powerlessness, and overvaluing the opinions of others— need to be addressed and combated with energy, assertiveness, and courage. Those of us programmed as betas have to learn that core shame is a primitive form of social organization and not take it personally. Core shame is not about us as individuals; it is a negative side effect of being a social mammal.
An excellent first step to managing shame is to let go of perfectionism and understand that ignorance is a high state of consciousness. When the oracle at Delphi told Socrates that he was the wisest of men, he assumed that the oracle was having a bad day because Socrates was certain of his own ignorance. Later, while watching the folly of those convinced of their knowledge, Socrates realized that the oracle saw his awareness of his own ignorance as wisdom. This same insight is a core teaching of Buddhism in its focus on seeing past the illusions generated by the mind.
People with core shame spend a great deal of energy avoiding risks that might result in failure, and not taking risks ensures that change won’t happen. Like many other human struggles, what we resist, persists, and our fear control us from the shadows. For change to happen, those with core shame have to convert mistakes and imperfection from evidence of their lack of value as a person into opportunities for new learning. It is always amazing to me how many students have to tell me what they know because they are too frightened to learn something new from me. This is especially poignant given the price of tuition.
Buddhism contains many valuable life lessons, and one of the most important is the difference between pain and suffering. Pain is woven into nature and is an inevitable part of life. To be alive and to love naturally leads to aging, loss, and death. By contrast, suffering is the anguish we experience from worrying about the future and regretting what has or hasn’t happened in the past. Shame is a primary cause of suffering. It is relentless; the inner narrator never runs out of material. Coming to grips with past trauma, taking on the risk of connecting with others, and turning our minds into our allies are the levers of change we all need to master in order to alleviate suffering.
Conclusion
We are simultaneously social and isolated creatures, embedded in our groups and in our minds. Because we are social creatures, we become afraid when we feel isolated, making our shame feel all the more overwhelming. The presence of another, like a therapist, allows us to feel safe enough to activate neural plasticity and change our brains and minds. Feeling safe requires that we become familiar with our inner world, root out and battle our demons, and learn to domesticate our minds and turn them into allies. How do people change? We change by connecting with others while cultivating a deeper relationship with ourselves.
Reference
Rogers, C. R. (1951). Client-centered therapy, its current practice, implications, and theory. (The Houghton Mifflin psychological series)
* Throughout this chapter, “I” refers to Louis Cozolino.