A Note from Wayne

Some time ago, I wrote a blog post on Body Cleans­ing — giv­ing a few recommendations.

Recently, Dar and I read The Ultra­Mind Solu­tion, by Mark Hyman, M.D., and have started this pro­gram. This, in turn, has led me to add a sec­tion to the web­site, on healthy liv­ing. I’m try­ing to decide about blog­ging these entries. For the moment, here’s a link to the new arti­cle, as well as links to sug­gested pro­grams and tools.

If you are feel­ing bloated, slug­gish, or over­weight, I’d encour­age you to read the page.

One of my friends wrote, and was con­fused by the sign below from last week’s blog post.

Noth­ing like a good shia­tus on a cold night

In case you missed it, “shia­tus” has the last two let­ters reversed.

Warmly, Wayne

Many moons ago, I wrote a list of 12 Prin­ci­ples that were the basis of my under­stand­ing, both of my life and of my coun­selling prac­tice. I’ve been think­ing about pulling them together into a small book that I could give to new clients.

I’ve decided that I’d, at least for now, tackle each of the top­ics here, in the blog. We’ll see how it goes.

6. We have the poten­tial, in dia­log, to exam­ine and re-examine both our beliefs and the sto­ries of our life. We can lis­ten to what we tell our­selves, how we describe our sit­u­a­tion, and we can begin to under­stand that, far from being “true,” our sto­ries are sim­ply sub­jec­tive inter­pre­ta­tions of neu­tral expe­ri­ences. Once we accept and enact this, we are able to drop the sto­ries, and choose to live in This End­less Moment.

Let me say a word or two about dia­log, and then move on to exam­ine the sto­ries we tell ourselves.

It is essen­tial that each per­son has a cou­ple of peo­ple he or she can be in dia­log with.

The rea­son for this is sim­ple. As we’ll talk about in a moment, one of the essen­tial, and yet very hard tasks is to get a han­dle on how we inter­pret our sit­u­a­tion. And by sit­u­a­tion I mean all of the cir­cum­stances of our lives, includ­ing the drama of our inter­nal theatre.

We all have blind spots.

No mat­ter how far we come along the path to self-understanding and self-actualization, there will always be cer­tain trig­ger issues that occur, and we go into brain freeze. For exam­ple, I spent decades of my life react­ing quite neg­a­tively to what I per­ceived as the bad dri­ving habits of oth­ers. I’d yell, I’d pound the steer­ing wheel, and would occa­sion­ally wave at the offender with only one finger.

My remem­brance of those moments was that I clicked over into an instan­ta­neous rage, and I then needed to vent. Now, I have no prob­lem vent­ing, and I absolutely believe that get­ting some of my anger out through steer­ing wheel pound­ing was likely help­ful. After I calmed myself down, I’d remem­ber that Dar­bella got into sim­i­lar sit­u­a­tions, and did so with­out the histrionics.

I decided a while back to dis­cuss my reac­tion with Dar, (as opposed to defend it,) and to see if I could thwart its “instan­ta­neous­ness.” With a bit of effort, I have succeeded—I have changed both my belief and my behav­iour while driving.

Our blind spots are a demon­stra­tion of an
unex­plored or off lim­its mind connection.

As detail emerges
from the grid…

All of our behav­iours are designed and ini­ti­ated in the neural net­works of our mind. Every­thing starts as a trig­ger, which, through our inter­pre­ta­tions, builds from there into a thought and/or an action.

There is some sup­port for the idea that both mem­ory and brain func­tion are non-localized holo­grams. A holo­gram is a wave-interference pat­tern that appears to the naked eye as ran­dom bits of data. It’s like look­ing at the grooves on a record, or the mir­ror side of a CD. The music is right there, but impos­si­ble to “see,” in its stored state. How­ever, given the right play­back device, the image is restored.

Not only that, but dis­crete “bits” of the holo­gram con­tain the entire “picture.”

Accord­ing to Wikipedia,

“Since each point in the holo­gram con­tains light from the whole of the orig­i­nal scene, the whole scene can, in prin­ci­ple, be re-constructed from an arbi­trar­ily small part of the holo­gram. To demon­strate this con­cept, the holo­gram can be bro­ken into small pieces and the entire object can still be seen from each small piece. If one envi­sions the holo­gram as a “win­dow” on the object, then each small piece of holo­gram is just a part of the win­dow from which it can still be viewed, even if the rest of the win­dow is blocked off.” [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hologram]

Holo­graphic mem­ory may oper­ate in the same way. All of the data is there, and is made up of bits of infor­ma­tion that are the build­ing blocks of mem­ory. These bits of mem­ory can be extracted, lined up, and formed into any­thing we choose.

Here’s a metaphor for that.

Image you are a film direc­tor, shoot­ing a biopic. You fol­low “Susie” around, and film her for a month. Let’s even imag­ine that you film her 24/7 for 30 days. Now, clearly, no one wants to see 5040 hours of someone’s life. So, you, as the direc­tor, first of all pick a theme. It might be “Susie, exer­cis­ing,” or “Susie, cooking.”

Or, it might be, “Susie, unhappy.” Right away you see that a lot of film will be irrel­e­vant to the topic you chose. And, let’s also impose a two hour limit on the fin­ished prod­uct. Let’s say Susie was unhappy 100 hours in a month. This must be con­densed down to 2 hours.

So, the direc­tor might start with a blank screen, and then frame the movie with,

And then, what fol­lows is a col­lec­tion of scenes from the “life of Susie,” selected to rein­force the theme of the movie. Remem­ber, in our lim­ited exam­ple, 4940 hours of stuff is elim­i­nated (the non-sad stuff) and then, 98 addi­tional hours of the sad stuff are also dropped—to get us down to two hours.

The end result is a film that runs from the ini­tial framing-point through to the wrap-up. This entire film is designed, and the scenes cherry-picked, to make (con­firm) the frame-point. Here’s the premise, and here is the evidence.

This is exactly how our minds con­struct inter­nal rep­re­sen­ta­tions of our day-to-day reality.

An idea (“I’m abused!” “I’m help­less!” “Every­one leaves me!” “I’m a fail­ure!”) or judge­ment occurs to us as an inter­pre­ta­tion of an event—something hap­pens to us, typ­i­cally as pow­er­less kids, and we “spin it” to give it mean­ing. We then cherry pick scenes from our lives to sup­port the ini­tial premise. Pretty soon, we have a movie that illus­trates what we believe to be so.

How­ever, and this is the prob­lem, this movie is not true.

It’s a con­coc­tion out of a bil­lion other pos­si­ble sce­nar­ios. Because we have invested time and effort into craft­ing the movie(s), how­ever, we develop a blind spot. The blind spot is this: I am the direc­tor, edi­tor, and actor in the film in my head. I for­get this, and assume the film

• a) depicts what actu­ally hap­pened, and
• b) demon­strates that I am a pas­sive vic­tim of “life.”

So, we repeat the ini­tial, invalid mantra, and add on evi­dence for a belief that causes us misery.

Dia­log is one way through the impasse of a stuck and rigid belief.

In ther­apy, the dia­log is sim­pler, as it is not a rec­i­p­ro­cal rela­tion­ship. The client pro­vides the raw mate­r­ial, the data, by being com­pletely open, and totally hon­est. The ther­a­pist helps the client to see, artic­u­late, and dis­man­tle only the men­tal dra­mas that are not func­tional. (No sense fix­ing what is not broken…)

To repeat: The client pro­vides the data through hon­est and open rev­e­la­tion, and the ther­a­pist uses var­i­ous meth­ods and tech­niques to chal­lenge “the valid­ity of the movie,” the framing-point, and the use­ful­ness of the story the client is telling.

This work also can be done with one’s prin­ci­pal part­ner,
with a few caveats.

We are great believ­ers in hon­est, open, and vul­ner­a­ble dia­log with one’s prin­ci­pal part­ner, and also with a few (2–3) pri­mary friends. This dia­log is meant to “let the cat out of the bag”—to share with oth­ers who you are and what is going on for you. It’s all about hav­ing a part­ner with a will­ing pair of ears, and you lis­ten­ing to feedback.

That being said, what is not help­ful is for one or the other of cou­ple to act as ‘ther­a­pist’ for the other. This degen­er­ates into “I’m here to smarten up and fix my partner”—a game that only leads to misery.

To be clear, dis­cus­sions regard­ing the direc­tion of the rela­tion­ship, about com­mu­ni­ca­tion, and about “cou­ple related issues” are fair game for dia­log. Self rev­e­la­tion is always accept­able, and highly encour­aged. We also encour­age clients to estab­lish “word pat­terns” to remind their part­ner of “blind spots.” We teach clients to lis­ten to their partner—really lis­ten, and give feedback.

Dis­cov­er­ing Blind Spots

To recap, most peo­ple believe that the movies in their heads are true. Thus, when one of these “head movies” runs, they get sucked right in. It’s anal­o­gous to the expe­ri­ence you’ve had in really excel­lent Hol­ly­wood movies. Your “dis­be­lief is sus­pended” and you are immersed in the action. Time flies by, and you feel emo­tions arise, and it all seems very real. Then, the movie ends, you give your­self a shake, and reori­ent your­self to “the real world.”

Now, if a 2-dimensional cel­lu­loid movie can do that to you, imag­ine what your inter­nal rep­re­sen­ta­tions can do!

“Tun­ing in” (being present) requires, first of all, notic­ing our phys­i­cal reac­tions. We’re often so wrapped up in the men­tal movie that we are unable to step back from it. We teach body awareness—noticing where tight­ness occurs, where queasi­ness is felt, where anger arises, etc. The way out of the men­tal movie is to notice what your body is doing.

Once you iden­tify where and how you react in your body, you can choose to mon­i­tor that or those parts of your body, and “catch your­self” before you swal­low the whole movie.

The goal is to “wake up,” much as you do when a real movie ends. In other words, to come back into the the­atre, notice the screen, and see the actual peo­ple around you (as opposed to the actors you were just “relat­ing to.”)

Then you give your­self a shake, get up, and exit the the­atre. “Wak­ing up” is notic­ing the phys­i­cal sen­sa­tions, and using them to become con­scious of the dys­func­tional movie that is play­ing between your ears. Once you notice, you can choose to shift your atten­tion back to the actual expe­ri­ence you are having.

Ulti­mately, our goal here is to get you to the place of informed obser­va­tion, and choice­ful response.

Informed obser­va­tion: our expe­ri­ences are guides. They are meant to be help­ful and retrievable—“Don’t touch the hot stove!” kinds of things. “When I yell and berate and blame my part­ner, things dete­ri­o­rate” is a neu­tral data chunk. Using it to trig­ger the, “All men are morons, and I’ll show him!” movie is an invi­ta­tion to disaster.

A client recently said, “We still haven’t sat down to talk. Does that mean we are not invested in the rela­tion­ship?” I replied, “No, it means you haven’t sat down to talk. Would you two like to set a time to talk, and stick to it?” Her approach was to shift off into inter­pre­ta­tion and blam­ing. Mine is to note the data, and set a behav­iour that matches a pre­de­ter­mined goal.

Choice­ful response: we have to notice our addic­tion to our movies, or we are doomed to con­tinue to react in non-helpful ways. After we notice, we cre­ate a choice. In the above exam­ple, going to “…not invested in the rela­tion­ship” leads to, “No one I’ve ever been with has been invested in the rela­tion­ship.” From there, the fight you see com­ing is all about whether or not your part­ner is “invested” or not. Blame, recrim­i­na­tions, and denials.

If you wake up, you see that this is not the path to walk.

Instead, the real ques­tion to ask is, “Will you com­mit to talk­ing with me for 30 min­utes, tomor­row at 7?”

A choice­ful response, aris­ing from an informed observation.

It takes both prac­tice and deter­mi­na­tion to deal with what is going on in the moment, and not to get side­tracked into gath­er­ing more evi­dence of how hard done by you are. Yet, full and authen­tic liv­ing is liv­ing in this moment, with­out ref­er­ence to the movies that live in our heads.