|
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
|
