Irreversible Change

We don’t receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves
after a journey that no one can take for us, nor spare us

— Marcel Proust

Even though they know better, otherwise competent individuals repeatedly and apparently intentionally, cause themselves and their loved ones unnecessary suffering. Look back at your own history. Do you see a recurring pattern of excessive consumption of food, alcohol, pornography, or some other incentive that comes with more costs than benefits? Perhaps from the vantage point of hindsight you can observe recurring episodes of hurting someone close to you. Addictive and other self-sabotaging actions did not seem like errors at the time because of how you appraised things then. But now, in retrospect, you have regrets and wish you had the chance to do it over so you could follow a different path.

Regret is typically accompanied by the intention to do better next time. Perhaps you have gone on a diet, vowed to control your drug use, or promised you lover you will be more understanding in the future. If you’ve made the same commitment repeatedly, then, evidently, you violated your original intention.

So we have a puzzle: Why do you intentionally follow a path that leads to a bad outcome when you have already learned the painful lesson? If you have learned the lesson of cause-and-effect and resolved to change, then: Why do you act contrary to your own interests despite your sincere intention not to repeat the mistake?

One explanation is that you were compelled to act counter to your own interests by an underlying disease. According to this view, addictions and self-sabotaging emotional reactions are symptoms of an underlying medical illness or biological impairment.

This disease model is helpful in guiding treatment in many cases. Bipolar Disorder is an example of excessive emotionality that results from an underlying biological disorder. Likewise, individuals with significant neurological impairment resulting from head injury or from the long-term neurological effects of heavy alcohol abuse have such diminished mental capacity that they are indeed powerless to exercise willful influence over their reactions to stress and temptation.

Treatments based on the disease model encourage the patient to admit powerlessness over the disease and seek treatment from an external source of control — for example, comply with doctor’s orders, take medication, or comply with the norms of a support group. Treatment outcome is more dependent on the effectiveness of the change agent than on the intentions of the patient. When the cause of a disorder is primarily biological, it would be a tragic error for the patient to believe that [s]he can achieve good outcome through their own efforts.

On the other hand, some people don’t need a disease to compel them to act counter to their own interests. They are driven to self-sabotage not by a biological disorder but by their beliefs, perspectives, and thinking habits. For them the cure involves changing the mind rather than the body.

When the body is not the source of the problem, medication and other medical interventions are not the cure. External sources of control often produce short-term results, but long-term failure. Appetite suppressants do produce weight loss, problem drinkers who attend AA do stop drinking, spouse abusers swear to God that they will never do it again. The problem is that the changes tend to last only as long as the change agent is present— for example, the effects of medication begin wearing off as soon as you stop taking it.

Individuals with good reasoning abilities can learn to recognize thinking errors and reconsider their childish and erroneous beliefs. It would be a tragic error to demand that a person who was capable of cognitive restructuring admit powerlessness when self-efficacy [the belief that one is capable of resolving the problem] is precisely what is needed to change one’s course. Conversely, it would be a tragic error for. Because of these two types of critical error [this one and its converse: a person with an underlying biological disorder believing that the problem is primarily psychological], it is essential to match the change strategy with individual circumstances.

Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom

The approach described here is designed for those who are best matched with psychological rather than medical treatment— that is, individuals who have good cognitive abilities and whose problem is not caused by an underlying biological condition. Knowing yourself well enough to mindfully operate the creature you inhabit has a big advantage: Once you know how to do something, the change is irreversible.

Subjective experience is a strange subject matter [pun inevitable]. Studying your own experience is a different kind of challenge than researching subjects, such as chemistry or physics. When investigating the latter, we can safely assume that the cause-and-effect principles are the same in different laboratories. The results obtained by one scientists can be replicated and used by other laboratories. Knowledge, once acquired can be passed down from generation to generation.

In contrast, subjective phenomena exist within the experience of each individual. Each of us is unique and has idiosyncratic reaction tendencies. You may react quite differently to a particular provocation than another person would. In fact, there is no one exactly like you, and so your challenge is different than anyone else’s. You cannot rely on a particular therapeutic method or way of looking at things that worked for someone else, because procedures designed to influence subjective phenomena don’t generalize well from person to person. Each individual has only a single lifetime to learn how to work with the cause and effect principles that operate in their unique subjective universe.

Meta-Cognitive Awareness

Few of us have been taught how to work with subjective phenomena such as thoughts, images, emotions, appraisals, etc.. Most of us enter adulthood blindly following the thinking patterns we used as children  — even when continuing to do so produces bad outcomes. You begin the process of change from within by researching the sequence of external events and internal states that produce the bad outcomes.

By observing your reactions to the things that happen you are shifting to a Meta-Cognitive perspective—that is, you are observing your own experience. The understanding that you subjective experience [thoughts, emotions, perceptions, etc.] are products of your nervous system is called Meta-Cognitive Awareness and is an important step along your passage from the mentality of childhood to more advanced cognitive tactics.

With Meta-Cognitive Awareness comes the understanding that there is a difference between the map your brain constructs to represent the real world and the territory it is attempt to represent. The feeling of certainty that you see the world as it really is is simply one of those subjective experiences that your brain creates, so naturally it accepts this feeling as confirmation of the validity of your interpretations and judgments. As comedian, Emo Phillips, concluded: "I used to believe that my brain was my most important organ, until I realized who was telling me that."

If you can step outside yourself and observe how you think, you may be amused by some of your own Thinking Errors. We are continually taken in by the illusions that result from assuming that we see things as they really are, so buy into these bogus beliefs. The folly of such certainty is often obvious to others and to ourselves in hindsight.

In real-time the distortions caused by the thinking errors are invisible to us. So we react to the things that happen as if the lenses though which we perceived the world did not distort. If you could detach from your first-person perspective and see things from the perspective of a dispassionate observer, you would be able to see how your self-sabotaging trap works —or in Paul Wachtel’s terms, you would be able to discern the structure of your recurring difficulties.

In contrast to the temporary effects of being the passive recipient of treatment such as medication, the benefits of becoming familiar the cause-and-effect principles that cause you to act counter to your own interests and principles persist after treatment ends. In fact, your ability to work with subjective phenomena tends to improve with practice.

The ability to shift from the first-person to the Meta-Cognitive perspective is the key that opens the door to mindful influence of your life’s course. This is one example of the faculty of consciousness to shift from the first-person perspective to the perspective of an observer. I think you will find that exercising your ability to shift from one perspective to the other is truly delightful.