Reverse Thinking

Why guilt is useless

Guilt is a delusionary state. It doesn't serve you at all and is a creation of the imagination; of Headmind's drive towards conformity.

Here's how Headmind creates Guilt:

1. Headmind is stuffed full of judgments about the person you could be, should be, should not be, etc. Those judgments were not originally your own but inherited from other people. But gradually you internalised them and they became self-judgments.

2. These judgments are re-activated by parents, teachers, priests, employers, children and partners who may be exploiting you.

3. Your Headmind buys into those judgments because it seeks acceptance, conformity, and admiration (even from people who don't deserve your respect).

4. Dwelling on occasions in which guilt comes up - and Headmind judges you - creates uncomfortable Bodymind reactions: cringing, agitation, distress. Although Bodymind creates that discomfort in order to warn you not to indulge in guilt, Headmind interprets this as a signal that you are, indeed, a 'bad' person, worthy of punishment.

Here's another way to understand 'Guilt':

1. Earlier societies did not recognise a psychological state known as 'guilt'. For them 'guilt' was simply another word for 'debt' (as in the German/Saxon word: 'gultig'). It simply meant that one person had harmed another and was unable to put things right. For example, one person stole another person's property but was too poor to pay it back - therefore he was 'guilty' and subject to the penalties of the community.

2. Religious influences gradually changed this original meaning of guilt into 'personal sin'.

3.  When Psychology started up in Germany and America in the 19th century it took over religious ideas about 'sin' and reinterpreted them in terms of 'good' and 'evil' actions. So doing one 'bad' thing made you an 'evil' or 'guilty' person - instead of someone who simply made a mistake.  

4. Mistakes and 'bad' actions you committed in the past were based on the knowledge you possessed at the moment you committed them, no matter how daft. For example: you shop-lifted, knowing you couldn't afford something but that you 'had' to have the item anyway. You let the Headmind state of greed get the better of you.

5. Therefore your past mistakes were based on inadequate knowledge (you thought it was ok to steal, or that you wouldn't get caught, or that it wouldn't matter if you did get caught). Your predictions turned out to be wrong, although you didn't  realise that at the time.

6. Your present self-judgments are based on a false premise: your present self blames your past self even though your past self did not possess the experience of knowledge your present self now has.

Here is the truth:

1. You did not actually have free will back then when you committed your error of judgment. You did what you had to do at the time because you lacked Awareness.

2. Indulging in Headmind worry (i.e. analyzing over and over again about what an 'evil' person you were/are) may actually get in the way of your attempts to put things right.

3. If you have really done somebody wrong you could connect to the emotion of remorse and get on with making amends, rather than wasting time on guilt.


Image by Jsome1

Can feeling grumpy be good for you?

I receive a mischievous communication from my very good friend Mark McGuinness who wants me to comment on a research article he has looked into, written by some 'Australian psychologists', which claims that being in a 'bad mood' can be 'good' for you.

Now, some of my best experiences in life have been prompted by my 'bad' moods. With the aid of those I have got rid of countless annoying relationships, irritating jobs and pointless activities. So my first thought was that - yet again - a bunch of overpaid academics were being subsidised to announce discoveries most of us learned in primary school. And that Mark had forgotten our many rambling midnight conversations about emotions and the meaning of life.

Yet I realised immediately that these gorgeous, Bondi-beach seeking academics have made yet another category mistake: While bad moods can, indeed, be 'good', those are not the same as 'bad emotions'.

To remind you: there is no such thing as a bad emotion. Emotions are an expression of Bodymind
intelligence. A mood is different. It is a  Headmind attitude. It expresses a relationship between our attitudes and the world as we find it. You can read more about moods here.

A grumpy mood, for me, is a relationship based on suspicion. It means that I no longer trust that experiences, situations, people, or the Lord God himself are doing me any favours. And that, in turn, is a cue that I need to revise my trusting attitude towards these entities. I need to retreat, stand-off, complain, and have a moan. I may even need to disengage - permanently.

So yes - a grumpy mood can be good for you if it helps you get rid of your intellectual garbage.

The funny thing is that I actually find grumpy moods enjoyable. Entraining my suspicion and pessimism on the planet gives me a god-like sense of detachment and playfulness. It also gives me a playground for wit.

Rather like one of my favourite philosophers - Arthur Schopenhauer - who once wrote:

"If we were not all so interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it."

Come to think of it, Schopenhauer deserves an article all to himself, so I will write that next.

Wrist job

Out here in Catalonia I break my right wrist when I lose my footing on a rock climbing away from the beach.

After 3 days in a plaster-cast I recognise three important truths:

1. We can't function without our wrists.

2. Bodymind is a miracle of divine engineering

3. Kindness is the most important virtue

Let's start with Number 2 first, because we will then be in a better position to appreciate Number 1.

The human wrist, alongside the thumb, is unique: no other species owns anything so complex.

It is constructed of two rings of small bones in the hand connected to the two long arm-bones, the radius and the ulnar. The connections are created through a labyrinth of joints. The wrist is a rotating hinge which enables the palm, fingers and thumb to clutch, wave, press, punch, catch, write, pull, stroke, gesture, pinch, grab and poke. Bodymind controls the whole, partly through the motor cortex in the brain and partly via the median nerve that runs down the arm and through the carpal tunnel into the wrist. The result is a body part that can execute an infinite number of programs stored in the brain, from pinching someone's bottom to playing a Beethoven Piano Sonata.

The most common type of break is a Distal Radius fracture, which is shown in the X-ray near the top of the longer arm bone on the right (the radius). A break like this means I have lost the hinge mechanism that commands all the ordinary functions of the hand. Right now I can't shave, eat, drive, wash, dress, throw, catch, or hold a cup, a phone or a hand-rail. I am semi-helpless.

I am dependent on my wife, my children, my friends and on anybody else who happens to be waiting around while I juggle things in my left hand like a trainee clown, or look dumbly at doors I can no longer open.

Most people are so kind. They jump to help, they carry my bag, they open doors, they smile and they talk to me. I notice, also, that when people barge into me it's not because they are unkind, it's because they don't care - they are preoccupied with their own obsessions.

It could be good for the soul to be handicapped for a little while, when it means you have no choice but to accept other peoples' compassion.

Does your body really need you?

Understanding Bodymind is the most important thing to do if you want to understand Reverse Therapy.

I confess that I don't fully understand it myself. Hence the frequent articles on the subject while I try to get to grips with your body....

Lately, I have been wondering whether conscious thinking is simply irrelevant to life. Whether its only purpose is to come up with stories about 'why' we did whatever we just did.

Meanwhile, Bodymind calmly gets on with doing it with no conscious input from us at all. We are merely the ghostly spectators at a tragedy.

Here is a list of things your Body (Brain) can do without any assistance from you provided you don't damage it with stupid Headmind ideas:

• Store and retrieve memories
  Reject and kill wandering bacteria
  Use emotions to guide you towards correct decisions
  Renew cellular tissue
  Change optical focus and recognise distant objects
  Use awe, wonder and ecstatic states to connect you to God
  Keep you on your feet and maintain your balance
  Synthesise protein
  Deliver energy to the muscles
  Catch a ball
  Initiate and complete the sexual act
  Keep your temperature stable
  Digest food
  Excrete waste products
  Use moods to tell you the state you're in
  Cue you to eat
  Trigger thought processes in the brain
  Detect poisonous substances
  Bond you to other people through hormone release
  Wake you up
  Send you to sleep
  Alert you to danger
  Conceive and give birth to a child
  Send you intuitions about other people's motives
  Control your blood sugar level
  Create passion, drive, the will-to-power

What's left for you to do except provide the commentary, the delusions, the explanations, the complaints, the appreciation and the whingeing?

Your body knows best

This is the third in the series on Bodymind wisdom - or Emotional Intelligence, if you prefer that description.

In this article I want to teach you how you can use cellular memories to make emotionally intelligent decisions for yourself.

In my last article on Cellular memories I wrote that the brain stores emotionally-charged information on every significant event that has ever happened to you. Each and every one of those experiences comes with an emotional tag so that - if a similar experience comes around again -  Bodymind can signal to you what kind of experience it might turn out to be. Your Body also sends you one of these signals when you are making a decision about whether to go for it or not. Using its database of experiences from the past it might flag up:

1. That it will most likely be a boring, frustrating waste of time.
2. That it could be worthwhile, but also scary, as you are plunging into the unknown
3. That it will be an exciting opportunity.

Each emotional tag flags up an action you should follow next.

For example:

1. Find something better to do
2. Do it - but get advice from experienced people before you start
3. Get going - now!

Generally, you are either going to get a Go-Ahead signal (situation No 3), a No-Go signal (situation 1), or a mixed signal (2).

• Go-Ahead signals are, as a rule, pleasant, arousing, and exciting.
• No-Go signals are uncomfortable, flat, and discouraging.
• Mixed signals are a combination of the two.

You can use these signals to make decisions.

Like this:

1. Attune to your body
2. Imagine yourself going ahead and doing what you plan to do. Be sure to imagine being in your body with the new experience happening all around you.
3. Check whether you get the Go-Ahead signal or some other signal.
4. Now imagine that you have chosen NOT to do it and are doing something else (e.g. staying in same job, same relationship, same home, etc). Once again, be sure to imagine that you are in your body.
5. Check the signal again.

Notes:

1. You may get mixed signals (e.g. scary-exciting) that say 'Go Ahead' but exercise caution
2. You may get no signal at all. This tells you either that you don't yet have enough information to make a decision or that, deep down, you know the opportunity is never going to  happen.

Good hunting!

Image by Leonard Low

 

Cellular memories

This is the second in the series on Bodymind wisdom.

The first was Your body remembers.

Today I want to write about cellular memories. - your body's intelligence system.

A cellular memory can be stored in brain cells, in the glands, in the blood, the gut, the muscles - in fact anywhere in the body. In the Immune system, for example, T-cells  'remember' previous encounters with infectious cells which they recognise from their structure. If they meet up with them again, they attack them.

Cellular memories that relate to your prior learning about life are stored in the brain in the Hippocampus. Packets of information from the senses are relayed on to there, so that it can compare them to its memory bank of past events. Each of these experiences is tagged with an emotion. Some of these emotions are simple, hot, basic (i.e. anger). Some are complex, subtle and haunting (i.e. the nostalgic mood that comes over you when you revisit your old school). When it has found a match it signals a release of emotion to tell you, in emotional code, what kind of experience it is, and what you need to do about it. I have written before about this emotional coding here.

For example, the data sent to your Hippocampus might contain the information that your partner has just said 'so what?' for the 5th time in 7 minutes, with a flat voice tone, a bored expression and body language that suggests that s/he wants you to just shut up. Depending on the type of relationship you have (and the Hippocampus will have that information too) you might be sent an anger signal (time to start asking for more respect), frustration (time to change the subject), or sadness (your relationship is breaking up and you need to get together with other people).

The same mechanism can work in a more proactive way. So if a new opportunity comes along, Bodymind (working through the Hippocampus) will create neurochemical releases that signal whether you have the thumbs up to go ahead (because similar risk experiences in the past proved rewarding) or whether you should run in the other direction. I will write more about this mechanism - and how you can utilize it to make decisions - in my next article.

One interesting thing about the Hippocampus is that it shrinks in size if people give up on life. That's because it constantly needs new work to do. It gets that from new experiences: excitement, risk, challenge, growth. Retired, depressed, traumatised, imprisoned, disabled, or rigidly conformist people often show signs of neural degeneration in this respect.

In other words, if you don't - or can't - grow, you die. 

 

The body remembers

This is the start of a new series on Bodymind.

I want to write about how your body remembers the experiences that weren't good for you, recalls the emotions associated with them, and reminds you what you need to do if they happen again.

I will also be writing about how you can use cellular memories to recall the experiences that have been useful for you in the past.

Let's start with a story from the history of Psychology. Specifically with the work of Claparede, a Swiss Psychologist, who worked with patients suffering from brain damage in the Salpetriere, an asylum in Paris.

One of his patients suffered from a type of amnesia that left her incapable of forming new memories. 

What Claparede experienced when he met with her was this:

Each day Claparede would say 'hello' to her and introduce her to his colleagues. Fifteen minutes later she would forget who he was. So he would have to go through the same round of introductions over and over.

Now, Claparede noticed that this woman always 'remembered' how to get to the breakfast room in the morning, even though she couldn't tell other patients how to get there. In short, her Bodymind remembered what to do when Headmind didn't.

So Claparade tried an experiment.

When he greeted her next he concealed a pin in his palm and shook her hand.

The next day, his patient greeted him with the usual blank welcome— no memory of yesterday's meeting, no memory of yesterday at all— until Claparède extended his hand. Without being able to explain why, the woman refused to shake. She could not recall Claparede's name or his face but, unconsciously, she recalled the pain.

Nowadays, we call this type of remembering implicit memory. And implicit memories are stored in the cells, some in the brain, some in the immune system, some, even, in the muscles. Next up I will write about what these have to do with emotional states.

Crying for Diana

The fact that it is the 10th anniversary of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, coincides neatly with my reading and talking about Mark Earls’ blog on emotions last night, which you can read for yourself by clicking here.

If I understand him rightly, Mark is saying that grief, of the kind we saw in epidemic form in the week after Diana’s car crash, has a primarily social function. The tears we shed are released by what I call Bodymind in order to signal to us that we are in need of comforting and, indeed, crying is also in itself soothing. And the tears also signal to other human being around us that it is time for them to exercise empathy and compassion.

Now this is certainly borne out by neuroscience. The brain creates the emotion of sadness and signals the release of tears automatically once the limbic system detects that we (or people close to us) have received a shock - usually connected to losing someone close to us. Tears are involuntary and we have no conscious control over them. According to Anthony Damasio, once we become aware of an emotion it turns into a feeling and we straight away connect to the body’s ‘thoughts’ about the situation we are in. At the same time, the body is using an elaborate system of hormonal and neural signals which dictate what we (and the people around us) ought to do next. These, in turn, should trigger such social activities as empathy, compassion, sharing and the offer of constructive help.

OK - all well and good. But I felt nothing at all for the Peoples’ Princess. I recall grouching to my wife on the morning of the funeral about ’stupid royal soap operas’ watched by people who had nothing better to do with their lives before I went off to my completely empty gym club. Coming back, there was my wife glued to the TV. I stared at the thousands watching outside Westminster Abbey while Elton John tinkled through ‘Candle in the Wind’. And - yes - before long I was blubbing too. But WHY THE HELL WAS I CRYING?

According to Mark Earls I cried because everybody else was crying. And they were grieving because they had lost someone important to them, because they were experiencing compassion for Diana’s two sons, and because they were sharing in what was seen then as a national disaster. The huge amount of money that was raised for Diana’s Charitable Fund attests to the help that followed.

However, it seems to me that this explanation - as true as it is for most people - doesn’t explain why I and many of my fellow republicans were crying. At this point I offer a deeper (or, if you prefer) an additional, explanation. It seems to me that I was crying for the same reason that some people cry at the theatre, or the opera, or when they recall the sufferings of Christ. They go through what Aristotle called ‘catharsis’ -a release and cleansing, indeed a celebration of the tragedy each one of us carries through life. The death of the heroine reminds us of our own death, the death of those we love and the terrifying suddenness of it all. We weep for our fragility but we also celebrate our ability to withstand it - so long as other people are there to stand with us.

So tears can have a mythic point too. It is Bodymind’s way of registering our what it means to be human.

Greed is good - yeah?

As Gordon Gekko once famously quoted Ayn Rand - in 'Wall Street' - 'Greed is good'.

Well, both Ayn and Gordon got it wrong. Greed isn't good. Passion is good. And Greed is a Headmind distortion of passion.

What goes on here is that Headmind (or Ego, if you prefer) substitutes Being for Having, and Emotion for acquisitiveness.

Now some people have a passion for making money. It's not one of my attractions but I can understand why some people get that way. And if they are living that passion then they may well be doing other people a favour by giving them something they want - or making jobs for them. But when passion is distorted by acquisitiveness then they get greedy - and obsessive - and lonely - and sad. They may even end up in the Penitentiary like Gordon did.

When you live in Bodymind (as I try to do) you realise that Passion is its own reward. Work, Love, Telling the truth and being Creative are exciting things to do. Its not a guarantee that you will be rich, famous, loved or powerful. That's Headmind telling us that we are unworthy if we are not in one of those categories.

As it happens I recently made up a list of emotions (passions) which get distorted by Headmind's need to have something rather than to be something.

Joy - Addictions (Headmind has to possess happiness rather than just being with it and then letting it go). The addiction can be to sex, drugs, love or even money.

Anger - Revenge (Headmind has to control the offender rather than just express and forgive)

Fear - Dependency (Headmind has to collect helpers rather than accept personal responsibility)

Awe - Religious mania (Headmind has to impose the truth on others rather than admit that Life is too tremendous to be understood completely)

Sadness - Grief (Headmind refuses to live without the lost friend, father, mother or child) and lives in the past, holding on to memories.

Love - it isn't really an emotion but it is a passion based on joy. But its distortion by Headmind is interesting because when the Ego tries to control it, then it becomes jealousy or possessiveness.

Monty Python and Kurt Vonnegut

"Life happens too fast for you ever to think about it. If you could just persuade people of this, but they insist on amassing information."
Kurt Vonnegut 1922-2007

A fantastic story appeared last week from Tom Hart Dyke - the Eccentric Gardener. Apparently he and a friend were plant-hunting in the South American jungle when they were kidnapped by the Indians. Trying to persuade them that they were not CIA agents but just two average joes who got lost in the jungle, they hit on the idea of singing and dancing to them.

They launched into the Pythons' 'Always Look on the Bright Side of Life' announcing it as the English National Anthem.

'If Life seems jolly rotten - there's something you've forgotten - Always look on the bright side of life' one of them sang in a baritone, while the other leapt into the air with his knees up to his chin, waggling his hands.

Very soon the guerillas, sub-machine guns at their sides, were rolling around on the floor, crying with laughter.

Life of Brian could well be the funniest film ever made. Be that as it might, Tom Hart Dyke's story tells us that extreme situations invite laughter or tears. Either are ok but I prefer laughter. The Life of Brian is full of characters - religious zealots, empire-builders, revolutionary conspirators, who just don't get how funny they are when they are trying to be serious. In short, they are stuck in their heads. And the more pedantic they try to be, the funnier they are.

Now in the story Tom Hart Dyke tells it could have gone the other way. He and his friend could both have got very serious in a way that would have made things worse. The more worried they got the more those Indians would have gotten suspicious. But the crazy idea of doing that song broke through the barriers. Through laughter they avoided tragedy.

Which brings me to the late, great Kurt Vonnegut. This was a man who, as an American POW, survived the Dresden Fire Bombing in 1945 which wiped out 130,000 people. And who still managed to write SlaughterHouse 5, a book which is funny as well as grief-stricken for the men, women and children who died in the worst war in history.

God bless all those like the Pythons, Kurt Vonnegut and Tom Hart Dyke who give us the gift of laughter. Goodbye Blue Monday!