Week 7/May 1, 2015
On a morning walk last spring, I happened by an enormous white
pick-up truck parked on the street. The truck was so big that the rear view
mirrors were almost at eye level. There was a mockingbird pecking and fighting
with the passenger side mirror, caught in an intense dual that was clearly real
to him. It was spring time, after all, and he was sure his image was another
male, challenging his territory.
As I kept walking, I wondered at the fearful reflections and
storylines I have saved and continue to mirror from my past. Hurtful
experiences, snapshots of a feeling, or an image held in my mind that I fight
with and peck at. Projections or worries that seem so real but aren’t true at
all.
Emotional reasoning is an irrational way of thinking that
says, “If I feel it, therefore it is true.” “It” often is a negative construct
that gets laid down in the mind as a truth.
What is so challenging is that many times when I am going
through a difficult or upsetting experience, the way I feel in that moment is
accurate. If someone says something hurtful to me, it’s appropriate and normal to
feel hurt. If a client of mine talks about abuse he or she was subjected to as
a child, pain is the logical end result. In his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl writes, “An abnormal
reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior.”
When we have difficult or hurtful experiences, especially as
children, we don’t have the ability to zoom out and see a situation from an
observer perspective. And our prefrontal cortex, the part of our brain that
reasons and analyzes information, is not fully developed and “on-line” until
our late 20s.
The younger we are, the more literally we experience things.
A sweet example of this is illustrated in a conversation my ex-partner had with
my seven-year old niece. She was at the kitchen sink, giving her baby doll a
bath, and my ex teased her about how careful she was being with the doll’s
head, avoiding getting water in her nose and ears, acting as if the doll was
real. My niece dramatically stopped what she was doing, looked at my ex, and
very seriously said, “It’s real to me.”
The brain is also wired to notice danger for survival
purposes. This was helpful when we had to look out for saber tooth tigers on a
daily basis, but can get in the way when we are young (or old) and trying to
sort through psychological distress.
So, it is essential to be mindful of when I am allowing an experience
to linger and create a negative and more solid belief about myself, because it
can in turn seep into and contaminate the water table of my consciousness and current
experience. Sometimes there may be a grain
of truth in a distorted belief that I need to be motivated to change or address,
but it’s the inability to be more objective about the belief itself that hurts
me.
To see the bigger picture and not get caught up in the
intensity of emotional reasoning is part of the solution. Challenging and
changing incorrect beliefs starts with awareness and a sincere question, “Is this
belief true?” See Byron Katie’s “Four
Questions” at Oprah.com for a practical way to put this principal into action.
May I be more aware of false projections that mock me and
learn how to see myself without bias.
NN