“It is often possible to discern a structure to people’s difficulties,
in which internal states and external events continually create the conditions for the recurrence of each other.”
— Paul Wachtel
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.
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.
Positive Feedback
When the 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 amplification or 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 of the fight-or-flight response to threat is the cause of panic attacks. Specifically, the symptoms of fear, such as rapid heartbeat, are perceived as threatening [“perhaps I’ll have a heart attack”], and so trigger the body to secrete more fight-or-flight hormones, which exacerbate the fear reaction, thereby causing increased heart rate, and so on.
Recursive Cognitive Structures
Some of life’s problems are self-correcting. You catch a cold, and the body’s immune system learns to recognize the pathogen and eventually defeat it. A child learning to ride a bicycle may fall a few times but will ultimately get it. People who have developed a pattern of self-sabotage may never self-correct, because the source of their emotional reaction is a belief within themselves that is often confirmed by the way things play out.
Some beliefs are special because they cause one to act in ways that confirm the original belief – even when it was not initially valid. For example, the belief that you will not be able to cope with a challenge tends to impair performance and make the unwanted outcome more likely.
Self-Confirmatory Beliefs often become Self-Fulfilling Prophecies. Once established a Pathogenic Belief can last a lifetime. Mood Disorders that result from these beliefs are hard to change, because the impaired performance results in negative outcomes that confirm the pathogenic belief. Consider the effect of Barry’s belief that he is socially awkward:
Barry’s Self-Confirmatory Beliefs
Barry, a clever but socially anxious engineer, can be very funny but is inarticulate in social settings in which he feels like a loser. The appraisals: “I’m a loser,” or “I am a witty guy” exist only in Barry’s mind and not in the objective world. Nevertheless, his subjective reality influences how he behaves in social situations. Whether he reacts to the snide insult at the office party with a witty come back or with a humiliating silence depends to a large extent on his subjective reality at the time. His retort is more likely to be clever if he is in a confident trance than if he is in his “loser” trance.
He wants to bring on the clever version of himself and enjoy a social victory for a change, but he expects to be intimidated as usual. Observers who know Barry have their own predictions, but these are just the creative fictions of their minds. Only the actions Barry performs become part of objective reality; the other expectations and possibilities will fade into oblivion.
There is a battle between the creative fictions that will determine Barry’s psychological state at the critical moment. On one side is his intention to be the cool and clever Barry, on the other is his expectation that he will be tongue tied. The winner of the battle will determine which version of Barry gets to be part objective reality. The expectations have the advantage—both Barry and his audience believe them to be true. From our dispassionate perspective we can see they are both creative fictions, which are neither true nor false until Barry performs and actualizes one of them.
Barry’s story illustrates the cause-and-effect relationships that tend to result in self-confirmatory bias. Barry’s belief that he is socially inept sabotages his social performance, which confirms his handicapping belief. His social life is continually influenced by his expectation of social failure. The objective evidence that Barry does, in fact, perform poorly in social situations continually validates this expectation. 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. [Fortunately for Barry, once he appreciated how his trap worked he develop a strategy to cope with it – see Emotion Focused Coping].
Barry’s limitation does not come from outside of him, nor is it due to a slow wit. He is handicapped by his own self-sabotaging suggestion. In contrast to injuries that tend to heal with time, the source of Barry’s misery is Barry, and so the passage of time offers no respite. Barry’s acceptance of the premise that he is socially incompetent continually recreates the conditions that confirm his worst fears.
Another example of the power of a self-confirmatory bias is the fact that Bernie, who believes that everyone is trying to screw him so he better screw them first, is surrounded by people who are, in fact, trying to screw him. If you knew Bernie, you’d be trying to screw him too.
Both Barry and Bernie have influenced their subjective and objective worlds unintentionally. In each case the self-fulfilling prophesy resulted from “acting as if” the pathogenic premise was true. The consequence of accepting the suggestion is that state-dependent phenomena such as perception, motivation, and response tendencies are biased in ways that bring about unwanted outcomes.
The Consequences of Bernie’s Expectations
Bernie reported: “During a chaotic situation at an airport ticket counter someone kicked me in the back of the leg. When I turned around to confront the ass hole I saw a handicapped girl in a wheelchair, which had evidently rolled, out of control, down a ramp and into me. She was terrified by the rage on my face. I felt terrible.”
Bernie still cringes over this memory several years after the incident took place.
The facts that Barry often behaves incompetently is social situations, and that Bernie is continually surrounded by people who are trying to screw him confirms each of the pathogenic beliefs that cause them to act counter to their own interests.
Other people’s thinking errors are more obvious than our own. Like Barry’s friends, I see him as a successful and clever guy. Barry sees things from a different perspective and hence has a different appraisal of his social attractiveness. As long as buys into a pathogenic creative fiction, he will continue to sabotage his social performance. It would be better for Barry if he could see things from the perspective of a dispassionate observer.
As dispassionate observers, we can see things from a different perspective than Barry does. If you knew Barry you would agree with me that he is not intrinsically defective — except for his belief that he is defective. Happily, beliefs are relatively easy to change — especially when compared to the difficulty of changing behavior or emotional reactions to the things that happen.
If you have not already reviewed the list of Popular Thinking Errors, now is a good time to do so. below are a few that relate to our current discussion of recursive traps:
- Fortune Telling [the belief that you can predict the future], for example, “I will fail,” generally decreases the quality and perseverance of your performance making failure more likely.
- Mind Reading [the belief that you know what the other person is thinking] can have relationship-enhancing or -destroying effects depending upon the motivations you attribute to the other person. “She does that because she loves me” versus “She does that because she wants me to suffer.”
- Note: Even when you feel certain that you know what another person is thinking or what is driving their actions, you are probably wrong and almost certainly missing some key elements of their experience. Nevertheless, attributing negative intent toward you by a lover can do permanent damage to an intimate relationship — even when the belief was initially wrong!
- Insomnia is often caused by worrying about what will happen if you don’t get enough sleep. Click here for a brief presentation.
- Binge eating illustrates the recursive trap that maintains most addictive disorders. In the example below, the payoff—absorption in the pleasurable activity of eating—is used to help the individual escape unpleasant experience. The suffering produced by this trap amplifies the motivation to escape it, which strengthens the entrapment mechanism.
Bonnie hates being fat
Whenever she thinks about her obesity or sees herself in the mirror, she thinks self-critical thoughts and experiences shame. She can escape the negative emotional state by becoming absorbed in the pleasurable experience of mindless eating. When she stops, she becomes conscious her failure, which elicits self-loathing. Now that she is in a negative emotional state she seeks relief, the easiest path to which is the warm comfort of mindless eating. The worse the self-criticism and shame, the more she is seeks relief from self-awareness through escape into mindless eating. The more she follows this sequence the stronger it becomes and the worse grow her problems.
Adult humans have access to the most powerful tools available to biological creatures: The capability to think. As an observer of the human condition, what do you think is the most compelling thing to think about?