Psychobabble

Notes from the book Psychobabble by Dr. Stephen Briers.

Myth 1: The root of all your problems is low self-esteem

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Contrary to popular belief, research suggests that most bullies are not secretly suffering from poor self-esteem – quite the opposite in fact. Dan Olweus, who has spent many years researching childhood bullying in Norway, claims that he could find no evidence that male playground bullies were particularly anxious or insecure.

What passes today as a virtue to be fostered would have been considered a sin or shortcoming to be abjured in ages past. A voice of contemporary concern, however, has been raised by the psychologist Professor Jean Twenge, who fears that narcissism and overpowering levels of entitlement are rapidly becoming a destructive cultural norm in the West.

Being able to accept yourself, warts and all, with some measure of compassion is psychologically healthy, but that’s not where most self-esteem gurus are setting the bar. As inspirational author Alan Cohen insists: ‘Wouldn’t it be powerful if you fell in love with yourself so deeply that you would do just about anything if you knew it would make you happy?’ Powerful perhaps. Desirable? I’m not so sure. It sounds as if this kind of self-love might be capable of justifying some pretty selfish and ruthless behaviour.

A value defended, a job well done, a skill mastered or an obstacle overcome – these we should welcome as legitimate sources of satisfaction and grounds for some measure of personal pride. However, to expect someone to feel good about themselves without having put in the work, in the way Psychobabble’s doctrine of self-esteem promotes, is like awarding someone a medal before they have even run the race. It’s meaningless. Popular psychology does anyone few favours pretending otherwise.

Myth 2: Let your feelings out!

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Arlie Hochschild, a Professor of Sociology at Berkeley, claims that the spontaneity of our feelings is often an illusion: she argues that whether we are aware of them or not, we tend to regulate our emotions according to implicit ‘feeling rules’ that tell us what to feel in a given situation, for how long and at what level of intensity. Thus in the United States the normal duration of grief after a bereavement is assumed to last between 18 and 24 months, after which you may find yourself being referred for treatment for an emotional state that starts to be considered pathological.

You can acknowledge your hon-ne while still preserving your tatemae.

The word catharsis originally comes from Greek tragedy, where Aristotle used it to refer to a purging of emotion to the end of restoring harmonious balance. The point is that in Greek drama this was a carefully orchestrated group experience conducted within a highly structured, ritualised setting.

Precisely because emotions are not just harmless, affective froth, we need to treat them with a greater degree of respect and care.

Our emotions would appear to well up from the most primitive and oldest parts of our brains, but let’s bear in mind that evolution has kindly given us a higher cortex so we don’t have to be at their mercy the whole time. There is a thin line between emotional expressivity and emotional incontinence. Let’s try not to confuse one with the other.

Myth 4: Let your goals power you towards success!

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Student Luo Lu, in a doctoral examination of Chinese folk psychology, summarises the Taoist position on happiness in a way that seems diametrically opposed to all our frantic goal-setting strategies. Lu explains:

‘Happiness in Taoism is the personal liberation from all human desires, through following the Natural force, not doing anything, accepting fate calmly, and facing life with a peaceful mind. In so doing, one may reach the ultimate happiness of merging with the universe, termed “tian ren he yi”. Happiness in Taoism, therefore, is not an emotional feeling of joy, rather, it is a cognitive insight and transcendence. Taoists practice a life style of withdrawal, isolation and quietness. The ultimate goal is to achieve anonymity, vanishing into the Nature, transcending the Nature, and merging with the Nature.’

Myth 5: No one can make you feel anything

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What we do with our bodies has a direct impact on the emotions we experience. Smile (even though your heart is breaking) and science suggests you will indeed feel better. Slump in your seat and your mood is more likely to become listless and despondent. In fact this feedback mechanism is so effective that researchers from the University of Cardiff found that women whose ability to frown was inhibited after receiving botox injections reported feeling much happier and less anxious – even though they believed the procedure hadn’t significantly improved their appearance!

Myth 6: Think positive and be a winner!

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The poet and novelist Anatole France once pointed out that ‘To accomplish great things we must dream as well as act’, but of course the opposite is equally true. Dreaming without action doesn’t usually accomplish too much.

What makes us ‘feel good’ is not necessarily good for us. The ‘feel-good factor’ can prove a pretty flaky criteria for deciding on the value of many things, especially what we choose to fill our minds with. By this kind of reckoning heroin could be seen as a very ‘positive’ drug, but that doesn’t mean I want to start taking it.

A commitment to unrelenting positivity can not only make us quite irritating to be with, it can also make us rather selfish and narrow-minded.

Most positive affirmations are about the self: I challenge you to find one that focuses on the needs or rights of others.

Myth 8: Whatever your problem, CBT is the answer

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The central premise of CBT, that by changing the way we think we can also change the way we feel, is a powerful one and the techniques of CBT have undoubtedly helped a lot of people dig themselves out of some pretty deep holes.

While the kingdom of the mind thus described may look like a democratic polity in which the wards of thought, sensation, feeling and action all enjoy equal status and influence, when it comes down to the nitty-gritty of actually doing the therapeutic work, you will find that most attention is concentrated on one particular area: your thought life. The mutterings of that critical voice in your head, those unwanted thoughts that pop unbidden into your mind – these are the primary targets of CBT and get the lion’s share of its attention. In the realm of CBT, to misquote George Orwell’s Animal Farm, while all the factors involved are supposedly equal, some appear to be more equal than others.

A fascinating and well-known finding by Benjamin Libet, replicated over many successive investigations, indicates that what goes on in our conscious minds may turn out to be far less important than we assume. There have been reliable but counterintuitive studies that indicate that our brains start to initiate movements by booting up the motor cortex 300 milliseconds before we are even aware of making the decision to move. Psychologist and broadcaster Susan Blackmore believes that these experiments indicate that ‘conscious experience takes time to build up and is much too slow to be responsible for making things happen’.

It may come as a surprise to learn that every human being has not just one brain but two. Most of us are familiar with the brain resident in our skull, but in fact your gut also has a ‘mind of its own’. Its lining is embedded with some 100 million neurones, which work together to coordinate the surprisingly complex task of digesting food and expelling waste. The enteric brain has its own reflexes and senses, and although it is connected to the central nervous system through the vagus nerve, it can also operate completely independently of it. The enteric brain employs more than 30 neurotransmitters to coordinate signals and impulses across the system and 95 per cent of the body’s serotonin (the hormone that the most widely-used antidepressants attempt to keep at optimal levels in your brain proper) is to be found in your bowels.

Emotion is often a visceral business, and it may be no coincidence that the ancient Taoists associated anger, anxiety, fear, worry and sadness with different regions of the soft organs that are all linked parasympathetically by the vagus nerve and sympathetically by the splanchnic nerves. The most crucial point for the current discussion is that, due to the way the vagus nerve is constructed, 90 per cent of the nerve fibres are dedicated to transmitting information up towards the main brain, leaving only 10 per cent committed to sending information down in the other direction. This may suggest that while the enteric brain may have significant input into what we experience mentally, our conscious thought life may have relatively little leverage when it comes to controlling what our guts are already screaming at us.