Freud famously claimed that “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”.
It isn’t, though.
I was having a conversation the other day with Gareth of Fight Mediocrity, on his guest post for Catherine Caine (she who is awesome online and teaches others to be likewise).
He’d read my last post about replacing caffeine with meditation, and commented, “It’s not that the give up coffee message doesn’t reach me. You’ve definitely given by far the best argument I’ve seen for it. But coffee for me isn’t about the caffeine. It’s about what it represents.”
Which got me all excited and helped me to become aware of something I’d not yet fully articulated. Here’s my reply:
Exactly, and this is always the difficulty with change. Things are not just themselves, they’re what they represent to a person emotionally.
That’s what a lot of diet programs miss. Cake is not just cake. Cake is celebration and comfort and memories, and besides that it changes the state of the brain and pushes some dopamine around… There’s a lot more to it than “eat apples instead of cake”, which is why so few people make the switch.
So (in my opinion) as well as understanding the literal and scientific and rational things that are going on, it’s important to understand the emotional and symbolic things too. Not either/or but both/and.
What I do (which is how the conversation got started) is help people who want to change their behaviours, thoughts and feelings. I want to do an excellent job of that, so I’m studying health science to learn not only what behaviours are particularly worth changing, but also the ins and outs of helping people to change them.
I also read a lot in the field (as you’ll see if you follow me on Twitter). And here’s what I’m increasingly concluding: Hardly anyone ever does anything for a purely rational reason, even when we think we do.
I’m not the only person thinking this, either. There are several books around at the moment about irrationality and how to work with it. We’re finally getting over the 19th- and 20th-century myth that humans are rational and emotions are an aberration.
Ironically (I’m never sure now if I’m using that word correctly, but I think I am), we’ve come to this realisation through the application of science. It turns out that if you set out to measure human behaviour objectively and dispassionately, you discover that it’s neither objective nor dispassionate. And people don’t respond to things as what they are.
We respond to things as what they remind us of.
This is the entire reason, of course, why poetry works – also symbolism, art, literature, ritual and ceremony. This is how politics works, and marketing. (Eating burgers doesn’t make you look like, or attract people who look like, the slim, beautiful models who are holding the burgers, but that’s the association the burger advertisement creates.)
This is the reason why, when your partner says or does something small and entirely innocent that happens to remind you of that thing your mother always did, you practically tear their head off.
And this is the reason that I can help you to change your state of mind, and even your patterns of behaviour, by sitting you in a chair and talking to you, getting you to imagine things.
If you’ve been listening to me talk about my Emotional Circuit-Breaker Toolkit, you may have got the wrong impression. You may be thinking that it’s about switching off your emotions so you don’t feel them any more. Not even slightly!
What the Toolkit is about is breaking the automatic cycles of emotion that take you round and round the Emotional Hamster Wheel and keep landing you up in the same place, only worse. It’s about understanding the process of your emotions so that you can work with them and end up where you want to end up, because emotions are a good horse, but a bad rider.
photo credit: cmaccubbin
And the way I get you there is by working with imagery, metaphor and symbol, with the things you already think and know and feel. A lot of it is based on scientific research, but it’s not about turning your body and mind into a cold technology. I’m not very interested in pure theory. I think application is the really important part.
“Many thinkers and scientists want to think ‘without the heart’ in order to be objective – which is an illusion, because one can in no way think without the heart, the heart being the activating principle of thought; what one can do is to think with a humble and warm heart instead of with a pretentious and cold heart.”
- Anonymous, Meditations on the Tarot.
And one can think with a wise and conscious heart rather than an unruly and impulsive heart that does things you don’t understand or like. That’s what the Toolkit is all about.
If that sounds at all interesting, then join my Beat The Rush List for the Emotional Circuit-Breaker Toolkit. Members of that list get preview material and a very substantial discount (really, if you don’t join Beat The Rush and you end up buying the Toolkit for full price, you’ll kick yourself. See what I did there?)
What in your life isn’t just itself, but what it reminds you of? Tell me in the comments.
(Update: Gareth got a post on Letting Go out of the same conversation. It’s good.)
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