“Today I escaped anxiety.
Or no, I discarded it,
because it was within me,
in my own perceptions— not outside.”—-Marcus Aurelius
I often try to get pessimistic, self-critical clients to give themselves more encouraging suggestions. For example, I told Barry: "Act as if the people you are going to meet at the party like you." But what was intended to be a simple, supportive recommendation turned out to be a hard sell—"I’m not going to lie to myself." This response is based on a key pillar of Barry’s subjective reality: The certainty that "people won’t like me." [Of course, the people at the party have not met Barry yet and so have not had a chance to form an opinion.]
I remind Barry that he does not have the extra-se sensory powers to predict the future or read the minds of other people. Beyond his unquestioning acceptance of the obvious thinking errors, as his therapist I want Barry to understand: "Your negative judgments of yourself are no more objectively true than appraisals that would be more helpful. If it is truth you seek, then it is more accurate to say: ‘In the past, I acted like a wallflower at parties and no one approached me.’ But your judgment of yourself as intrinsically unlikable and doomed to social failure goes way beyond that valid statement. The only truth about your negative appraisal of yourself is that it impairs your social performance."
How self-fulfilling prophecies work
The brain creates a map of the outside world from all the data it receives. As you know, the map is not the same as the world it is attempting to represent. Nevertheless, when you see a snake in the grass it is adaptive to react as if you encountered a genuine threat—even if the snake you saw was not actually dangerous, or what you saw was not a snake but a curved branch that looked like a snake.
A stage hypnotist entertains his nightclub audience by getting the subjects on stage to act as if his suggestions were true, when they are in fact fictions —for example: "There are heavy weights pulling your left arm down while helium balloons are lifting your right arm up," or more humorously and hence more likely to be part of a stage show, "There are snakes at your feet" [see Suggestion].
To be effective, suggestions do not have to be delivered by an external entity. In fact, the most potent suggestions do not come from professional hypnotists but from the fictions you create to represent the world around you.
Whenever you act as if a particular belief was true, you are exhibiting the hypnotic phenomenon of suggestion. Of particular interest to us: Negative self-appraisals — such as, "I cannot succeed" are effective at impairing performance for several reasons, including the fact that they are disheartening and so sap the motivation required for successful performance. Because expectations of failure are self-validating, they strengthen the potency of future handicapping suggestions.
Implicit Suggestion : Attribution Theory
The appraisal of yourself as a failure carries with it implicit causes for your failure. According to Attribution Theory, individuals who attribute their failures to internal, stable and global causes are more vulnerable to clinical depression.
- Global versus specific— My failure is global: "I am a failure through and through."
- Stable versus changeable—The cause of my failure is stable and so is not going to change: "Whatever caused me to fail in the past causes me to fail now and will cause me to fail in the future."
- Internal versus external—"The cause of my failure is within me; it is not due to circumstance, task difficulty, or other external factors."
Extensive research indicates that those who benefit from talk therapy come to attribute their failures to specific, changeable, and external causes. Those who do not benefit from therapy continue to attribute their failures to global, stable, and internal factors.
The tragic irony of internal attribution for failure:
Ironically, people who attribute their failures to causes within themselves such as lack of talent, attractiveness, motivation, etc. are, in fact, responsible for their failures. Indeed, their history of failure is not due to an external factor such as bad luck, nor is it a consequence of an evil and manipulative hypnotist who suggests that they will perform poorly. There is something about them that causes them to fail, but it is not lack of talent or some other internal attribute, rather it is the performance-impairing suggestions that come from within that is responsible for their history of failure. Fortunately, they can change their perspective! Meta-Cognitive Awareness is the truth about our subjective reality that gives us all the power to intentionally shift to more advantageous ways of looking at things.
Understand this: Your interpretations, judgments, appraisals, understandings, etc. are you creations and not objective facts. Whatever map of reality you are currently using contains distortions. that are . Your map—which is the product of your early conditioning, current emotional state, thinking errors, etc—is not the same as territory it is trying to represent! Nevertheless, you react to the things that happen as if it were. We are all taken in by this soul illusion and so act in ways that seem foolish to others and to ourselves in retrospect.
The stage hypnotist evokes laughter from the nightclub audience by getting his subjects to do ridiculous things as they act as if his bogus descriptions of reality were in fact true. Likewise, you may create unwanted outcomes for yourself and others by acting as if your bogus interpretations of the things that happen are the same as objective truth.
Your representation of reality is a convenience for your nervous system— a working hypothesis— that simplifies the task of interacting with a complex and ever changing environment. Recurring patterns of bad outcome suggest that the filters you are using to facilitate you interaction with your environment are not serving you well.
To follow Nietzsche’s logic: Your interpretations is just one of the many possible ways to look at things. Since none of these perspectives are valid and complete, you cannot use validity as the criterion to select among the contenders. Then on what criterion should you base you selection?
The Photographer’s Selection Criteria
I recently had to choose a photo of myself for my web site. Naturally, I selected the most flattering one. Then I had the thought: "You can’t use that one, it makes you look more handsome than you really are," which was followed by: "Actually, it’s the other pictures that make you less handsome than you really are." Needless to say, this internal dialogue is nonsensical. I did not alter any of the photos, so none of the selfies are more valid than any of the others. Each shows how I look from a particular angle, with certain lighting, at a particular moment in time. There is no "most valid" photo of me, so I cannot use validity as the basis of selection. Instead, I’d be wise to choose the photo most likely to do the job I want it to do: Elicit a favorable reaction in the viewer.
Likewise, there is no most valid appraisal of Barry’s worth. Despite his certainty that he is a worthless failure, it is obvious to anyone who knows him that this appraisal reflects Barry’s bias not reality. He would do well to replace his creative fiction with one that is equally valid but of greater utility.