Some of life’s problems are self-correcting.  You catch a cold , and the body’s immune system learns to recognize the pathogen and defeat it.  A child learning to ride a bicycle may fall a few times but will eventually get it. People who have fallen into a recursive trap never get it, because their distorted interpretation provokes them to respond in a way that confirms the pathogenic bias.

Negative emotional states are not necessarily pathological.  Fear, for example, is an adaptive  reaction to threat.  The emotional reaction that results from an encounter with an objective threat, a poisonous snake for example, is adaptive in that it prepares one for reality-based action, and tends to dissipate after the threat has passed.

The fear evoked by worrying about some catastrophe that may or may not occur in the future is different. Here the emotional state was evoked not by an objective threat, but by the worrier’s predictions about a potential threat.  The fearful emotional state does not dissipate with time because there are always potential threats in the future.  Rather than energizing adaptive behavior, the emotional state evoked by using the mind this way has the sole function of sapping the resources required to deal with objective threats.  

So worrying is maladaptive in that it taxes the body’s resources without protecting the body from any actual threats. Even though many people understand that their worries are neither helpful nor related to objective threats, their anxiety gets worse with time rather than better.  Generalized Anxiety Disorder (the technical term for chronic worrying) provides a good example of a recursive structure. Many psychological disorders share this structure, including depressive and addictive disorders, and it explains why some people continually act counter to their interests and principals. 

Recursive Structures:

None of us see objective truth; our perception is always biased by our beliefs.  Suicide bombers and corporate executives are built of the same biological material, but they are biased by different beliefs and hence experience a different reality. There are many ways to misperceive the world, and people make all sorts of errors.  But some distortions are special:  They have a recursive structure and so can maintain themselves indefinitely.  Once established, these pathogenic structures tend to be permanent, even though they are built of nothing more substantial than beliefs and expectations.  A primary focus of this kit is to expose pathogenic structures and help the user replace them with cognitive structures that are more advantageous to the self. 

Blushing is an example of a recursive structure.  If blushing is embarrassing for me, then any feedback that I am blushing enhances the physiological reaction.  The more obvious the blush , the more embarrassed I feel, and the more embarrassed I feel, the more I blush, and so on.

Consider how a self-sabotaging recursive structure can influence a biography: Barry has low self-efficacy regarding his social skills, and worries about making a fool of himself at the Friday office party.  The more he thinks about it, the more anxious he becomes and the more he suffers. 

(From his therapist’s perspective: Barry can be very funny and quick-witted when he is in the right state of mind.  The only function served by the gratuitous suffering that results from his worrying is to impair his social performance.  Sadly, when a co-worker made a joke at his expense at the office party he was inarticulate.  He would have loved to respond with a clever comeback.  Sadly, his expectation of humiliation rather than his intention to perform cleverly determined which state -dependent talents and abilities were available to him at the critical moment. 

Self-Confirmatory Bias

Barry’s story illustrates the structure of a self-confirmatory bias, a common cognitive structure that promotes neurotic traps.  Barry’s belief that he is socially inept impairs his social performance, which confirms his handicapping belief.  His social life is continually influenced by his expectation of social failure, and this expectation is continually validated by the objective evidence that Barry does, in fact, perform incompetently in social situations. Because it has a recursive structure it can persist indefinitely and continue to have a negative impact on Barry’s actions and how his life unfolds.  Happily Barry has the intellectual gifts to appreciate how this trap works and to change the cognitive structure that maintains it.

Self-Reference and Reciprocal Feedback

Recursion, in mathematics and computer science, is a method of defining functions in which the function being defined is applied within its own definition. The term is more generally used to describe a process of reciprocal feedback; for example, when two mirrors face each other a recurring sequence of nested images appears in each. 

A Circular Chain has the structure of a snake swallowing its own tail; it has no end and so may repeat indefinitely.  Self-sabotaging sequences that have this structure are particularly destructive because they can continue indefinitely.  Low self-efficacy and dependence on external agency have a reciprocal relationship of this kind, for example:

Mr. H is dependent on alcohol; he says he needs it to cope with the difficulties of his life.  He participated in a 6-week intensive outpatient program.  During the program he was ‘psyched up’ by the intensive content and the social support he received from program staff and the other participants.  He discovered that it was surprisingly easy to stay sober during this period.  Nevertheless, like most participants, once the program’s support system faded away he relapsed.  He then went to an inpatient program and had no trouble staying sober while there, but soon after his discharge he relapsed again.  These demoralizing relapses diminish his belief in his ability to succeed at this challenge (self-efficacy), not to mention the esteem in which he holds himself.  The natural response to this conclusion is to turn responsibility over to an external agent such as a treatment provider or support group, because clearly he does not have the ability to handle this on his own.  But delegating this responsibility makes it more difficult to develop the full range of skills required to direct the course of his life. The absence of skill development at this level prevents the enhancement of self-efficacy.  The very ability to perform well when confronted with physical discomforts or setbacks requires the development of the heroic responsibility to respond to unforeseen circumstances.  Without robust self-efficacy strengthened by practice, Mr. H will likely give in without much of a fight when confronted with a crisis for which he is not prepared to cope.  This failure will further diminish his self-efficacy , causing him to seek a more potent external agent to cure him of his problem of dependence on an external agent. 

Positive Feedback: When mirrors are parallel the nested reflections do not go on forever because real mirrors are not perfectly reflective.  Pathogenic structures have no such limitation.  In fact some produce positive feedback – analogous to a microphone that has gotten too close to a speaker causing a rapid and relentless magnification of the sound to the extreme. Positive feedback causes panic attacks: Rapid heartbeat is perceived as threatening, which results in the secretion of more fight-or-flight hormones, which further increases heart rate, and so on. 

Positive feedback can produce bingeing in much the same way. In the example below, the incentive, escape into mindless eating, is used as an emotion focused coping device.  Using a substance or an activity to cope with suffering produces dependence on that substance or activity.

Winnie hates being fat and is ashamed of herself for overeating.  She has also discovered that she can escape her self-critical monologue, feelings of shame, as well as other unpleasant feelings by becoming absorbed in the pleasurable experience of mindless eating. The self-loathing caused by her failure to restrain her eating amplifies the bad feelings she has for herself, which increases her motivation to escape into the warm comfort of mindless eating.  In this case, her emotional reaction to the failure is the amplification mechanism:  The worse she feels, the more she is driven to eat, and the more she eats, the worse she feels.  In practice, most addictive disorders are complex and include several recursive traps. Winnie in fact had more to deal with than the recursive relationship between the emotional effects of lapsing and her  desire to escape her self-awareness; she also has to cope with the positive feedback that results from other sources.  She reported that as she became demoralized and gave up her attempts to control herself, “My weight gain really took off and I became really fat.”  The fatter she got the greater were the objective consequences of her obesity: The prospects for a normal weight became more distant; people, “including friends and store clerks,” treated her differently; her desires for romance were frustrated; clothing selection became distasteful in a variety of ways.  Each of these sources of feedback triggered its own pathogenic loops.

Ruminative Self-Focus

The core structure of neurotic disorders - depression and anxiety - is ruminative self-focus.  It results from co-occurrence of two traits: The tendency to become attached to outcomes and the tendency to evaluate the self in a critical way. When the focus is on the past, the recursive structure results in depression; when the focus is on the future, the rumination is called worrying, and the recursive structure shows up as generalized anxiety.  Because of its recursive structure, ruminative self-focus can persist for a long time and can have a major influence on the course of one’s biography.

Julius Kuhl’s research on conditioned helplessness¹ shows that when people fail, their focus shifts from figuring out how to be successful (problem solving) to perseverating thoughts about themselves, how they feel, why they feel this way, why they failed, etc. (ruminative self-focus).  The latter turns out to be a poor strategy, because the rumination gobbles up huge quantities of cognitive resources that are then not available for problem solving. Conditioned helplessness appears to be maintained by the reciprocal relationship between failure and ruminative self focus: Failure leads to ruminative self-focus and ruminative self-focus increases the likelihood of failure.

Recent research on depression and the quality of social perfomance² shows that negative mood leads to self-reflective rumination and self-reflective rumination leads to negative mood. Moreover, the ruminative self-focus and the depressed emotional state it engenders is found to impair subjects’ social problem-solving abilities and to decrease their self-efficacy regarding their social skills, both of which impair social performance. Poor social performance, in turn, may result in loneliness and other negative consequences, which set up higher level recursive structures.

As you may have guessed, any attempt to improve the self contains a trap that is especially debilitating to individuals who become emotionally attached to outcomes or who are judgmental toward themselves.  Attachment to outcomes is implied by the intention to work toward positive outcomes and to avoid the negative ones.  Alas, some individuals have a strong emotional reaction to the outcomes they encounter, especially when they don’t get what they want.  Self-evaluation is implied by the intention to learn the lessons of cause-and-effect by observing the consequences of your actions.  Alas, some individuals interpret failure as a measure of their self-worth rather than as feedback to do something differently. Either of these emotional reactions can trigger ruminative self-focus and the neurotic reactions it evokes.

Understand this: You are about to begin a long, complex challenge and you are bound to make errors of all kinds, some of which will look particularly stupid or heinous if evaluated from a judgmental perspective.  You will have to develop the skill to manage your primitive emotional reactions so that you do not fall into any of the recursive traps that increase your chances of relapse.  By the time you complete the next section you will appreciate the ancient solution to this set of traps.

Footnotes:

1. Volitional Mediators of Cognition-behavior consistency:  self-regulatory processes and action versus state orientation, Julius Kuhl Chapt 6. In: The Psychology of Action. 1996 The Guilford Press: New York - P. Gollwitzer and J Bargh Eds.

2. Distinct Modes of Ruminative Self-Focus: Impact of Abstract Versus Concrete Rumination on Problem Solving in Depression Ed Watkins & Michelle Moulds -Emotion © 2005 by the American Psychological Association September 2005 Vol. 5, No. 3, 319-328