Change Your Life: Living Skillfully

My first degree was in English language, and besides the various other things I do, I write fiction. I’ve completed a novel, City of Masks, which is told in the first person as a series of journal entries and letters, and am working on another, Gu, which is told rather unusually in the second person as a full-sensory-experience documentary.

So I was particularly interested to read on Improved Lives about the significant difference between a first-person and third-person reflection on an emotional past event.

photo credit: MrJuggles

That post is drawn from this New York Times article, which references several different studies. One, by Kross, Ayduk and Mischel, published in Psychological Science, looked at the difference between reflecting on a negative past emotional experience from an internal (first-person) perspective or an external (third-person) perspective, and also between a focus on what you had been feeling versus a focus on why you had been feeling it. As they predicted, a third-person perspective – seeing the experience as if watching yourself on a movie screen – caused less re-experiencing of the negative emotions and more thoughtful reflection. So does focussing on “why” (cause and effect) rather than “what” (the actual emotions experienced).

The importance of this for therapy is that taking people back through the memory of a traumatic or unpleasant past event is only therapeutic if they are able, as a result of doing so, to reinterpret the experience and move on. If they are caught up in a “hot” re-experiencing of the emotions, one which simply triggers their automatic behaviours of avoidance rather than leading to reflective re-evaluation, all you’re really doing is re-traumatizing them. So instructing them to watch the events unfold from a third-person perspective, and to try to understand them in terms of cause and effect, can bring about the shift to a “cool” reflection on the events and, hopefully, therapeutic progress.

photo credit: linh.ngân

What else does third-person reflection help with? The same NYT article quotes a couple of studies by Lisa K. Libby and colleagues. The more recent, also published in Psychological Science, looked at the behaviour of voters and found that when they were asked to visualize themselves voting from a third-person perspective, they were more likely to be positive towards the idea of voting and more likely to actually vote than voters who visualized themselves voting from a first-person perspective. This finding is obviously very useful for motivation and behaviour change therapy.

The other Libby study, Here’s looking at me: The effect of memory perspective on assessments of personal change, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, looks not at the future but at the past. Does a third-person perspective help when you are motivating yourself to change by comparing your past and present selves? Yes, it does, apparently because from a third-person perspective you both identify less with negatives about your past self and identify more with positives about your past self.

photo credit: Bob Jagendorf

So, could it be that the “cool” perspective given by third-person self-reflection gives you a more realistic and more positive assessment of yourself as a person capable of change and growth, rather than dropping you back into an emotional rut? Very possibly. Emotion and memory are closely linked; emotions can evoke memories and vice versa. If we draw out memories – and imagination of future events, which works very like memories – in such a way that they can be put back into our memory storage significantly changed, we are making progress. And third-person reflection seems to offer a helpful way to do that. The “watching yourself watching a black-and-white movie of yourself” technique sometimes used for phobias is one application that’s been around for a while.

In my practice, I’ve tended to use both first-person and third-person more or less interchangeably. First-person does have its uses; it’s good for retrieving deeply buried emotional memories, for example. I’ve also used it very successfully to help people project themselves into the experience of a confident person and feel what that’s like (a technique I borrowed from Paul McKenna). But having seen these studies, I’ll be much more conscious of the advantages of third-person therapy.

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