CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Discerning Wise Choices and Responding Flexibly

Autobiography in Five Short Chapters

I

I walk down the street.

There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.

I fall in.

I am lost . . . I am helpless

It isn’t my fault.

It takes me forever to find a way out.

II

I walk down the same street.

There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.

I pretend I don’t see it.

I fall in again.

I can’t believe I’m in the same place

But, it isn’t my fault.

It still takes a long time to get out.

III

I walk down the same street.

There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.

I see it is there.

I still fall in . . . it’s a habit.

My eyes are open,

I know where I am.

It is my fault.

I get out immediately.

IV

I walk down the same street

There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.

I walk around it.

V

I walk down another street.

— PORTIA NELSON

 

NEW PERSPECTIVES HOLD THE KEYS to our growth and freedom. Choosing to harness our brain’s neuroplasticity and rewire our conditioned responses and perspectives toward flexibility and resilience means we get to walk down another street. We don’t have to, but we can choose to. Now we have the neural capacity to perceive options where we saw none before, discern which options might be most productive, and choose wisely among them what course of action to take.

Skill 1: Creating Options, Discerning Choices, Choosing Wisely

Every moment brings a choice; every choice has an impact.

— JULIA BUTTERFLY HILL

We have already learned to refrain from shame and blame about resilience gone awry or about past decisions gone awry. Here we teach ourselves to refrain from self-critical faultfinding about that past. The acknowledging of fault in stanza 3 of “Autobiography in Five Short Chapters” entails taking responsibility. We take responsibility for past experiences to learn what options might make the most sense now, not to derail our resilience by judging ourselves harshly for them, or to unthinkingly continue them in order to avoid negative judgments about ourselves if we change course now.

Rather than beating ourselves up, as I began to do about my bicycle flying off the back of the car or blithely stepping into wet cement, we open up a reflective inquiry: “Well, why did this happen? What do I need to pay more attention to here?” Shifting the perspective from “How could I?” to “Well, actually, why did I?” allows us to come to a clear comprehension of what’s happening and what needs to change. In this sense, good judgment means forming an opinion objectively, based on learning from past experiences, and staying open to new experiences without shutting ourselves down by devaluing, criticism, or condemnation.

A couple of months after Darron demonstrated his response flexibility at the party by calmly realizing he could simply wash the beer out of his jeans, the bank notified him that he was two months behind on his mortgage payments and that it would begin proceedings to foreclose on his home if he didn’t send in the amount he owed within thirty days.

Darron had been laid off from his job as a foreman on a big condominium construction project six months before, when the downturn in the economy sent shock waves through the housing industry. He and his family had responded flexibly enough at first: they were getting by on savings, his wife’s income from working at the local deli, and Darron’s picking up small remodeling jobs here and there. When Darron’s mom needed emergency dental surgery a few months later and his parents couldn’t pay for it, to Darron the only choice seemed to be to foot the bill and figure out later how to keep up with the mortgage payments. By the time Darron came in to see me after he got the foreclosure notice, he realized he needed to walk down another street.

Darron and his wife looked over their finances for the past twelve months and projections for the next twelve months. Darron met with a mortgage broker at the bank and, with the help of a financial planner, began to educate himself about options. With me, he explored his own history of putting his parents’ needs above his own and the effect of that conditioning on his decision making.

Darron, his wife, and two brothers met one Saturday afternoon to brainstorm ways to come up with the mortgage payments in the next thirty days. Even impossible-seeming solutions, like giving up the house and moving in with Darron’s parents, were on the table. As more options were put forward than Darron could have come up with on his own, he began to have more confidence that the dilemma could be solved.

In sessions with me, Darron came to realize that he had developed a strategy of giving to his parents — in the forms of time, attention, work on their house, and money for bills when times were hard — in order to “earn” their time, attention, and love in return. When his mom asked for help in paying for her dental surgery, Darron agreed out of habit, without thinking through the effect on his own finances.

We had to dig deeper to find the root causes of his decision to skip two mortgage payments in a row. What became clear was Darron’s deeply implicit expectation that, after all he had done for his parents, they should know when he needed help without his having to ask for it. Darron’s unconscious hope that his parents would pay back the money for the dental surgery without his having to ask overrode his own common sense about asking for repayment so that he could pay his own debts.

We examined Darron’s core values, the moral compass that had helped guide him to these choices and actions. Darron told me that among his core values were being kind to other people, being helpful, and being generous. He came to see that there was no need to change those values, but he needed to refocus those values more on himself and his own family, not exclusively on his parents. We also framed his reluctance to assert himself and let his parents know when he needed help as an old, conditioned survival strategy — if I don’t bother you, I’ll get to stay on your good side — masquerading as a core value. Darron began to realize that taking care of his own family was also a core value and that he could begin to act accordingly.

I asked Darron to review the various options he had generated in his family brainstorming, while keeping in mind his value of taking better care of his family and breaking his old habit of not asking for help. When we came to the possibility of asking his parents to repay the money he had given them for the dental surgery within thirty days so that he could square up his mortgage payments, he burst into such a spontaneous grin that we both laughed at the suddenness and the sureness of it.

Darron later told me that he had felt so sure of this decision that he went to his parents’ house the next afternoon, taking along both of his brothers for moral support, and made his request for repayment politely but assertively. To his surprise, his parents actually seemed relieved and anxious to help. Darron had not only changed his own behaviors; his certainty that he was doing the right thing catalyzed change in his parents, too.

Exercise 1: Creating Options, Discerning Choices, and Choosing Wisely

1.   Assess what is happening as clearly as you can. This includes getting all the facts about the situation you are being asked to cope with; getting expert opinions and perspectives from competent, resilient others; seeing clearly the circumstances and past decisions that contributed to the situation; and assessing your own patterns of resilience to see what’s helpful and unhelpful to you now — where you are open to new learning and where you might be defended against new information or in denial.

Assessment requires resources — of time, help from other people, open-mindedness. Assessment is essential to cultivating response flexibility; without it, we have no options except to react as we have reacted before.

2.   Identify options. Brainstorming is a useful tool of deconditioning that can free our brains temporarily from old rules and preconceptions. Creating neural receptivity within the brain allows new associations or linkages to form spontaneously and come to consciousness. Here’s one approach:

(a) Ask a small group of friends to meet with you to identify options. The open-minded exchange of ideas, and the associations they lead to, will spark more ideas than brainstorming by yourself or with just one other person.

(b) All of you generate as many ideas as you can as quickly as you can, without any judgments or evaluations allowed. You may notice that the intuitive side of your brain can generate ideas as quickly as the analytical side. Let your brain generate new ideas by association with what has already been suggested.

(c) Once your group runs out of steam for generating new ideas, categorize the ideas by topic, still without judgment or evaluation.

3.   Identify holes in the sidewalk and walk around them. Identify any self-limiting beliefs or automatic patterns of response (see exercises 2 and 3 in chapter 16) that might have contributed to the situation you find yourself in or that might be derailing your ability to generate and choose among options now. When you can clearly see these habits of belief, these inner saboteurs, take the clarity as a cue to walk down another street — to adopt new perspectives, especially the perspective of your wiser self, that can approach the situation with optimism and courage.

4.   Identify the core values that will guide you in choosing among the options. We all live by a moral compass, conscious or unconscious, that guides our choices of behavior. It is part of the conditioning we get from our parents, peers, teachers, coaches, role models, and culture and society at large about what’s right or wrong. Your wiser self, for now, embodies the highest values of that moral compass.

5.   Consult your wiser self. Find a time and place where you can come into a sense of presence and have a heart-to-heart talk with your wiser self. State your dilemma and the options you have generated by yourself or with your friends. Simply listen to the deep wisdom of your wiser self speaking to you — not necessarily yet about which options to choose, but about which values matter to you most in choosing. It’s this “truth sense” that will guide you in choosing options. Bring your awareness back to the present moment; register this guidance from your wiser self in your awareness as you make your choices.

6.   Discern which options best serve your values. With a clear understanding of your core values to guide your choices, you can begin to discern which of the options you’ve generated best fit those values: which ones feel right and which feel “off,” are a less ideal match, or don’t fit at all. As strange as it may sound after this long, mindful process, sometimes you can help your brain figure out which option is best by tossing a coin. It’s not that the coin toss makes the decision for you, but in the split second when you realize which way up the coin is landing, you can experience a quick gut reaction: “Uh-oh; this isn’t what I wanted,” or “Phew! I’m glad it turned out this way.” That is the voice of your intuitive wisdom.

7.   Choose wisely. This is the natural culmination of the steps above. There’s always the possibility that you would choose differently if you had more information or if circumstances changed and opened up more options. You are aiming for the wisest choice possible in the current circumstances.

Whatever choice you make and whatever the consequences, you have created more response flexibility in your brain. That is the neurobiological platform of resilience that will allow you to make wiser and wiser choices in the future.

The Neuroscience of Creating Options, Discerning Choices, and Choosing Wisely

The prefrontal cortex makes its decisions by integrating input from many parts of the brain. It uses both the processing of the focusing network, which can focus on facts and details, and the processing of the defocusing network, which can link old ideas together in new ways. The prefrontal cortex has to weigh input from the rational left hemisphere of the brain with input from the emotional and intuitive right. The prefrontal cortex draws on many different explicit memories encoded by the hippocampus with the intuitive wisdom or gut sense of the wiser self. It may even use social support to activate the release of oxytocin to create enough safety and trust in the brain to make a decision possible. The stronger the functioning of the prefrontal cortex, the more thoroughly we can assess all the elements of what is happening, understand what needs to happen, identify options and blocks to those options, identify the values that we want to shape our decision, and then decide what is the best thing to do.

Pulling It All Together

You have now completed a series of exercises that train your brain to respond more flexibly to life events. The new neural flexibility allows you to:

•     reflect with awareness on habitual behavior patterns and perspectives;

•     use the three processes of brain change to monitor and modify those perspectives; shift or rewire them for more resilient responses;

•     assess what is happening, identify options, identify and shift blocking beliefs (that is, to walk around the holes in the sidewalk), identify core values you want to inform your choices, decide which options best serve those core values, and then choose among your options wisely.

This new response flexibility in your neural circuitry is the neurobiological platform of resilience. When you learn that you can be flexible, you move steadily toward the five Cs of coping: remaining calm in a crisis, as I learned to do with my bent-out-of-shape bike; seeing clearly, as Mary learned to see her pattern of anger in response to threat; staying connected to resources to create options, as Darron did with me, his family, with experts; becoming competent, as Shirley did when she took getting caught in an old mind-set as a cue to practice; and deepening courage, as Karen did to give up an old identity and grow into a new one.

Having developed your capacities for response flexibility and strengthened this neurobiological platform of resilience, you have just one more step to take on the journey to rewire your brain for more resilience. In the next chapter, you will learn tools to integrate the entire brain more fully, creating an enduring, stable platform for lifelong resilience.