Everything Has Changed. Nothing Has Changed.
Thoughts on how we flexibly respond to difficulty.
Uncertainty is at the heart of our mental health concerns. Our brains operate in a guessed-at world that hasn’t happened yet, based on how the past is reinterpreted through the lens of the present. In the most simplistic of examples, if you’ve ever stubbed your toe on an object in your house that you swear had been moved and found yourself really upset, this is the baseline for human experience. If we were truly taking in the world as it is in real time, we’d never have such an experience because we’d see it. Instead, our brains project or even hallucinate the future for our movements based on the best guess provided by the past, and will actively, if unconsciously, select or not select the data points that reinforce that best guess. Stubbing your toe is not some Machiavellian scheme of the universe out to get you; it’s a predictive error.
Notice, though, in our example, what else was going on. You likely had an emotional experience, anger of some degree, and a story that immediately sprang to mind to help make sense of the situation. If you’re in an intimate relationship, you may, unfortunately, have blamed that person. If you have kids, you may have blamed them. If you’re particularly prone to self-flagellation, you may have blamed yourself. In any of those scenarios, anger and/or depression is the result; a story was made to explain it, and behavior resulted. A note on what that behavior is concerned in a moment.
I work with patients/clients all the time about this process, learning to identify the nature of the emotional judgment, slowing down enough to recognize the Value or set of Values that is felt to have been violated, and being more flexibly responsive in the behavior that comes out of the whole soupy mess. Now we get to behavior, because this is eminently a practical enterprise we’re engaged in here, and one that I take pains to make very pragmatic for my clients. Behavior is not about proving you’re right. Let me say that again.
Behavior is not about proving you’re right. You already think you are, or else you wouldn’t be doing it.
What outward, socially embedded behavior is, is to serve two possibilities: to get approval from others that you share a similar sense of what the world should be by acting in such a way that the group recognizes and sees as appropriate, and/or to attempt reshaping the next iteration of the world in the future to be in line with what you think it should be.
Voting, for example. It is a time-sensitive and multiple context-embedded behavior that joins you with others in a shared sense of what the world should be and is a means of influencing that world's future towards a version you want.
Influence. Here’s the difficulty concerning both the predictive brain that we possess and the hubris we all engage in to some degree. The greater the emotional weight attached to the world we want and/or the greater degree of influence we believe we possess, the more pronounced our reaction will be to whether we end up being right or wrong about the outcome.
As Lisa Feldman-Barrett notes in “7 1/2 Lessons about the Brain”:
“When your predicting brain is right, it creates your reality. When it’s wrong, it still creates your reality, and hopefully it learns from its mistakes.”
Nothing Has Changed
Recently, there was an election in the United States. Far better politically attuned minds than I have offered critical feedback as to what happened, and I’m not here to delve into that. For many, the results were perceived as catastrophic for the future of their loved ones, themselves, and the country as a whole. While I certainly have thoughts as to the veracity of those judgments and concerns, my career as a mental health therapist and consultant leads me to focus on the personal turmoil that has come up.
It may strike some as ridiculous to have “Nothing Has Changed” as the heading for this section, but I hope you hear me out because in all the ways that ultimately matter, nothing has changed.
We are still living in a world that doesn’t always align with our desires.
We are still living in a world that doesn’t always acquiesce to the predictions our brain supplies.
We are still living in a world where what we believe to be so is not always as accurate as we thought.
We are still living in a world that demands humility concerning our judgments.
That last sentence may be one of the hardest to really take in. Not only do we hate, as a species, being wrong, but our brains are actively, through all sorts of heuristics or cognitive shortcuts that often boil down to confirmation bias, constructing a perception of the world that reinforces those judgments.
As Jonah Goldberg noted recently:
I find the tendency of people—smart and dumb ones alike—to think that “smart” and “right” and “dumb” and “wrong” are interchangeable terms to be one of the most exhausting analytical errors out there.
It is painfully easy and pathologically reinforcing to find examples in various online experiences to support our judgments about ourselves and, more problematically, about others. There are times it may even seem that the very existence of some people, or more likely bots, is to act in such a way as to help feel righteous anger every moment of every day.
What we’re doing when we give in to that psychological proclivity is to put our emotions above our behavior, our feelings above our Values. Anger is a legitimate emotional assessment to make. It is a reminder that something has happened that we find awful, wrong, or horrific. It is the mind’s immediately visceral recognition that the projective guess it supplied was inaccurate. The world is not what we want it to be.
What are we supposed to do about this? Remember that behavior is about highlighting the connection with others, the shared solidarity of one’s rightness in ideas, and an attempt to influence the world towards what you would like. Anger is a road sign toward what we want; it is not a destination unless we let it be. We can, instead, use anger to remind us of what and who matters to us and have it serve as an impetus to influence the world towards what we want it to be.
Things To Do:
Love who you love. Spend time with them. Ask what they need and engage creatively together in ways that can meet those needs.
Give back. Community is a communal creation. We disengage from it at our peril and to the disadvantage of those who come after us. Voting is not the only influence you have on the direction of a country. Volunteer.
Engage in humility. Understanding all too often gets conflated with agreement. How a person constructs their perception of the world is not fully under their control, and is influenced by a host of factors of which only some are capable of being changed. Seeing people through a monocausal lens feels great for righteous judgment, but it’s terrible for an understanding that leads to dialogue and change.
You may be unable to engage in these things to the same degree as another person. That’s ok. Also, being self-critical of one’s perspective and why, therefore, the projection of the future was wrong, without delving into nihilism or depression, requires training and often a group to support the process. This isn’t available to everyone. That’s ok.
What all of us can do is choose not to let our emotions be the end place we wallow in. We need not give ourselves over to despair, self-destructive rage, or societal isolation. We can, instead, let what we Value become a directional focus for what we are going to constructively give our lives over to support. That’s how we build better relationships. That’s how we build better communities. That’s how we build a better country.