Recursive Traps

July 25th, 2010

Psychology is the discipline by which the Psyche (the soul) seeks to understand the Psyche. While the study of experiential phenomena is interesting in its own right, some people become psychologists because they seek to relieve the Psyche’s suffering. Paradoxically, incentive use disorders, the cause of much of the Psyche’s avoidable suffering, is maintained by the Psyche’s motivation to relieve its suffering.

Negative emotional states are not necessarily pathological. Fear, for example, is an adaptive motivational response to threat. The bio-psychological changes that result from an encounter with an objective threat, a dangerous animal for example, are adaptive in that they prepare the individual for fight or flight, and, importantly, the emotional reaction dissipates after the threat has passed.

The fear evoked by worrying about events that may occur in the future is different. Here the emotional state was evoked not by an objective threat, but by the worrier’s predictions about a potential threat. The fearful emotional state does not dissipate with time because there are always potential threats in the future. Rather than energizing adaptive behavior, the emotional state evoked by thinking this way depletes the very resources required to deal with objective threats.

Depressed individuals tend to see the world through negative filters and react to environmental challenges with negative expectations, an orientation that may interfere with good performance. Anxious individuals have a different set of perceptual biases and response tendencies, but their emotional reaction also hinders their ability to cope with challenges. The fact that individuals continue to react to events that happen in ways that make them miserable suggests that they are not learning from their painful experience.

Subjective Reality
Some of life’s problems are self-correcting. You catch a cold, and the body’s immune system learns to recognize the pathogen and defeat it. A child learning to ride a bicycle may fall a few times but will eventually get it. People who have fallen into a neurotic trap may never get it, because their pathogenic beliefs cause them to act in ways that confirm these beliefs. For example, the belief that you will not be able to cope with a challenge may impair performance and produce the unwanted outcome.

We assume that our experience is a natural reflection of objective reality. In fact, the limitations of our sensory apparatus filter what comes through from the objective world to our conscious awareness. The subjective reality we experience is a creative construction of our nervous system. Everything looks different when we expect success than when we expect failure. We appraise environmental threats and our abilities to cope with them through one set of lenses when we are confident and through another when we are anxious. Because the lenses are invisible to use, we assume that we see the objective truth despite the continual shifting of lenses as our state changes from one situation to another. [For more about state-dependent perception, please click here].

Recursive Structures
Suicide bombers and corporate executives are made of the same biological material, but are biased by different beliefs and hence experience different subjective realities. There are many ways to misperceive, but some distortions are special: They have a recursive structure and so can maintain themselves indefinitely.

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, and so on.

Consider how a self-sabotaging recursive structure can continue to diminish the quality of life throughout an individual’s biography:

Barry, a 31 year-old engineer, has low self-efficacy regarding his social skills, and worries about making a fool of himself at the Friday office party. Thinking about it evokes emotions, appraisals, and behavioral tendencies that impair his social skills. In fact, Barry can be very funny and quick-witted when he is in the right state of mind, but when a co-worker made a joke at his expense at the office party he was inarticulate. Although he would have loved to respond with a clever comeback, his expectation of humiliation determined which state-dependent talents and abilities were available to him at the critical moment.

Barry’s story illustrates the cause-and-effect relationships that tend to evoke self-confirmatory bias. Barry’s belief that he is socially inept impairs his social performance, which confirms his handicapping belief. His social life is continually influenced by his expectation of social failure, and 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, he had the intellectual gifts to appreciate how this trap works and to change the cognitive structure that maintained it.

Self-Reference and Reciprocal Feedback
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.

One kind of reciprocal structure is the Circular Chain, which, like a snake swallowing its own tail, has no end and so may repeat indefinitely. Self-sabotaging sequences that have this structure are particularly destructive because they can continue indefinitely. Low self-efficacy and dependence on external agency have a reciprocal relationship of this kind. For example:

H has become dependent on alcohol because it helps him cope with the difficulties of his life. He seeks a solution to his problem from an intensive treatment program. He does fine while in treatment but does not develop the coping skills required to manage high-risk situations independently. Soon after the external supports provided by the program fade away he relapses. The relapse is demoralizing and supports his belief that he is powerless and must depend upon an external agent to help him cope. Sadly, the mind set of powerlessness prevents him from developing the procedural skills required to finally escape this problem

Positive Feedback
When 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. Panic attacks are produced by positive feedback of the fight-or-flight response: Specifically, the symptoms of anxiety, such as rapid heartbeat, are perceived as threatening, which results in the secretion of more fight-or-flight hormones, and so on.

Positive feedback can cause bingeing in much the same way. In the example below, the payoff—escape into mindless eating—is used as a method to help an individual cope with a negative emotion. The suffering produced by the choice amplifies the motivation to escape.

Desiree hates being fat and feels shame whenever she thinks about her obesity or sees herself in the mirror. She has also discovered that she can escape her self-critical monologue and feelings of shame by becoming absorbed in the pleasurable experience of mindless eating. The self-loathing caused by her failure to restrain her eating amplifies the bad feelings she has for herself, which increases her motivation to escape into the warm comfort of mindless eating. In this case, her emotional reaction to the failure is the amplification mechanism: The worse she feels, the more she is driven to eat, and the more she eats, the worse she feels

.

Ruminative Self-Focus
A particular kind of reciprocal feedback forms the core structure of pathological depression, anger, and anxiety: Ruminative self-focus is a thinking strategy in which the focus of attention is the self, how one feels, and why one feels that way. It is ruminative in the sense that one goes over the same thoughts and images without achieving a resolution or plan of action. It masquerades as a problem-solving orientation, but very little problem solving actually takes place. As a rule of thumb, when the content of the rumination is the past, a depressive disorder is the diagnosis; and when the future provides the content, the rumination is called worrying and shows up as generalized anxiety disorder. Because of its recursive structure, ruminative self-focus maintains itself and can diminish the quality of an entire biography.

Julius Kuhl’s research on conditioned helplessness shows that when people fail, their focus shifts from figuring out how to be successful (problem solving) to perseverating thoughts about themselves, how they feel and why they feel this way (ruminative self-focus). This turns out to be a poor strategy because the rumination consumes cognitive resources that are then not available for problem solving. Kuhl found that conditioned helplessness appears to be maintained by the reciprocal relationship between failure and ruminative self-focus: Failure leads to ruminative self-focus and ruminative self-focus impairs performance, which increases the likelihood of failure.

Recent research on depression and the quality of social performance shows that negative mood leads to self-reflective rumination, and self-reflective rumination leads to negative mood. Moreover, the ruminative self-focus and the depressed emotional state it engenders are found to impair subjects’ social problem-solving abilities and to decrease their self-efficacy regarding their social skills, both of which impair social performance. Poor social performance, in turn, may result in loneliness and other negative consequences, which set up higher level recursive structures.

As you may have already guessed, any attempt to improve the self carries with it a trap that is especially debilitating to individuals who become emotionally attached to outcomes, or who are judgmental toward themselves.

The belief that “now I’ve made up my mind, so acting as I intend to act will be easy” is an example of the Soul Illusion. Have some respect for the challenge of acting as intended during crises. This is a difficult task. To perform effectively during crises, requires that you interrupt the recursive sequences that can deplete your cognitive resources. For some ancient solutions to these traps, please click here.

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Perverse Motivation

July 18th, 2010

People often end up doing exactly what they tell themselves not to do. The intention to suppress a response has the perverse effect of making that response more likely. Edgar Allan Poe labeled this phenomenon: the Imp of the Perverse.

Thought Experiment: Negative Suggestion.
Try not to scratch your nose. Continue reading, but be aware that even letting your nose itch would indicate personal weakness. So try not to even think about your nose, and see if you can read to the end of this chapter without once touching your face in the area around your nose.

Trying to prevent your nose from itching may, perversely, produce the very thing you are trying to prevent. The more seriously you try the greater is the effect. Two interpretations of this perverse phenomenon are as follows:

Negative Suggestion: Negative representations are defined in terms of positive representations (their opposite), but positive representations are defined directly. For example, the statement, “It is not raining,” requires one to conceptualize the meaning of the statement, “It is raining.” Likewise, the statement, “Chester is not a pedophile,” associates the conceptualization of Chester with child molesting. Chester would be foolish to make such an assertion during his political campaign. To understand the instruction, “Don’t let your nose itch!” the reader must access a representation of an itchy nose, which evokes that very sensation.

Ironic process: To determine if you are successful at having a nose that is not itching, you must compare the current sensations with what they would be if your nose was itching. According to this interpretation, it is checking to make sure you are successful at preventing your nose from itching that causes the nose to itch. Ironic, isn’t it?

Reactance
Humans hate restrictions—especially of those freedoms they already have. Reactance refers to the motivation to react or rebel against restriction. In one study, two-year-old boys accompanied their mothers into a room containing equally attractive toys. The toys were arranged so that one was easily available to the child while the other stood behind a transparent Plexiglas barrier, out of reach. Which toy do you think the little boys wanted? This is one among many examples of the rule of thumb: Forbidding something increases its desirability.

Attribution Theory: The Insult Is the Injury
Smoking cessation research shows that, on average, successful quitters failed seven times before they finally made it. Most smokers, however, interpret a failure to quit as an indication of their intrinsic weakness. The belief that the cause of the failure is within the self is called an internal attribution for failure. Explanations of one’s failure, which appeal to motivation, intelligence, or character defect, are examples of internal attribution for failure. The belief that the same inadequacy that caused me to fail in the past will cause me to fail in the future is an example of a stable attribution for failure.

Internal, stable attributions for failure are associated with low self-efficacy. If you believe that you don’t have what it takes to succeed at this challenge, and, moreover, that you are not going to change, then it is understandable that you would not invest much of your own effort and instead turn yourself over to a treatment provider or a higher power. However, good long-term outcome requires that you persevere through difficult challenges, and internal, stable attributions for your past failures are demoralizing and rob you of the energy and perseverance required for good long-term outcome. Efficacy-enhancing imagery, contemplation, and other trance formative exercises are included in the kit. These tools are especially useful during times of crisis when your self-efficacy may be threatened.

Paradoxically, the belief that, “I cannot succeed at this task,” often results from an initial underestimate of the difficulty of this task. You might think, “It shouldn’t be that hard to change my ways once I make up my mind, so my history of relapse means there must be something wrong with me.” This demoralizing belief results from underestimating what it takes to end an addictive relationship.

Attribution and Self Image
Consider the following study, which demonstrates how internal attribution and counter-regulatory motivation can work together to influence one’s appraisal of oneself: Teen-aged boys were told that a book was too sexually explicit to be read by those under 21. This restriction had the effect of dramatically increasing their desire to read the book. The experimenters knew that the attractiveness of the book was enhanced because the book was forbidden. However, ignorant of the principle of reactance, the boys attributed their motivation to read the book to a specific personal tendency to be attracted to lewd content. Forbidding the book had the perverse consequence of causing the subjects to believe that they were perverse.

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Online Course – Suggestions Please

July 14th, 2010

My academic training in cognitive and neural sciences along with the more expensive education earned over 3 decades of helping my clients escape the self-sabotaging traps they have created or fallen into has yielded a set of tools that will be of use to individuals who seek to follow a more advantageous path. I would like to make these tools available to anyone who could benefit. [These tools are unusual because they are experiential. Unlike the tools used to build a house or repair a car, these tools are designed to alter experience, a phenomenon that exists on a different dimension than concrete objects].

Among the tools are:

  • Media files that invite the user to explore trance phenomena and develop his or her ability to manipulate it.
  • Text files that include thought experiments to illustrate cognitive and behavioral tactics to manage crises of stress and temptation.
  • Formats and protocols to promote that have been developed through the school of hard knocks to promote the exercise of will.

There are many possible formats to deliver this material. It turns out that I am a better psychologist than a web designer, and have been wasting a lot of time learning the rules of the many possible communication formats. It is time to make a decision [and thereby condemn the alternatives to oblivion]. One possibility is to send each lesson as an email with appropriate links. Alternative include an e-book in PDF format, or a series of web pages in html

I would be most grateful for suggestions or thoughts about the pros and cons of different formats. The easiest way to get a comment to me is by clicking here..

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Conventional Addiction Treatment Can Increase Dependence

July 5th, 2010

Conventional treatment for addictive disorders often makes the problem worse. The term “iatrogenic” refers to a pathological condition caused or exacerbated by treatment efforts—that is, outcome would have been better if the treatment had not been administered.

For example, most treatment for problem drinking is based on the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, which advocates that alcohol abusers admit powerlessness over their “disease” and comply with a treatment program developed and supervised by an external agent [e.g., treatment provider, support group]. For alcoholics whose cognitive or medical condition allows them no options other than to replace dependence on a substance with dependence on a more benevolent source of control, this is the only viable approach. However some problem drinkers can develop the skills and faculties to act in accord with their interests and principles, even during crises. For those capable of exercising will, promoting the idea that they have a disease over which they are powerless can increase their dependence and expectations of being helpless during a crisis.

The Problem of Immediate Gratification (The PIG)
Addicts are suckers for the promise of an immediate payoff. True to form, most seek immediate gratification of their desire to be free of their problem. Turning responsibility for good outcome over to a powerful external agent generally makes them feel better right away., Indeed, accepting the passive, patient role does promote good short-term outcome as long as the external source of control [treatment provider, support group, rehab program] is salient. The downside of this strategy shows up some time after the program has completed and the change agent is not available to exert its influence. Individuals who are not prepared to cope with crises of stress and temptation are likely to relapse when they encounter high-risk situations on their own.

Over the past 30 years, psychologist William Dubin, Ph.D. has accompanied thousands of individuals through their passage to freedom from dependence. The Path of Greatest Advantage: How to escape addictive traps and act in accord with your interests and principles is the resource kit that has emerged from these collaborations. The ambitious goal of this kit is to enhance the user’s ability to follow his or her path of greatest advantage rather than yield in the direction of least resistance.

“Depending upon an external agent to free you from slavery is part of the slave mentality that maintains the addictive trap. You become free of dependence when you can act in accord with your own interests despite the pull of local stressors and temptations. The capability to exercise your will emerges during a developmental passage that no one can take for you nor spare you,” says Dr. Dubin.

The passage from dependence to personal sovereignty is a difficult one with many traps and pitfalls. Real escape from dependence requires that the individual, rather than an external source of control, be the responsible agent of change. The Path of Greatest Advantage provides methods and tools developed by Dr. Dubin and the thousands of collaborators he has accompanied through their passages to freedom from dependence. Reviewing the text can spare the kit’s the falls and painful lessons of cause-and-effect that these collaborations have identified and resolved. More than passive reading of text is required to develop the skills and faculties to escape an addictive trap. Supplementing the printed manual are audio and multimedia tools including thought experiments, meditation exercises, and hypnotic inductions designed to enhance the user’s cognitive and imaginative faculties.

Good long-term outcome is the byproduct of exercising these faculties during the real-time crises each user is bound to encounter. Each individual is different and each will develop a unique solution to his or her problem. The kit offers several general strategies to approach the problem, along with a wide range of specific tactics to cope with crises.

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Self-Efficacy

July 4th, 2010

I am a psychologist who works with those who can afford my fee. My clients tend to be impressive individuals who generally accomplish what they set out to accomplish; they typically develop the necessary skills and work industriously until they achieve their goal. But when it comes to controlling their use of a particular incentive [e.g., alcohol, food, sex, gambling] they perform less well, astoundingly less well.

Perseverance and Self-Efficacy
In contrast to ordinary language in which a word may mean different things to different individuals, a technical term has a single definition. Self-Efficacy refers to the expectation that one can master the challenge. “I can fix any computer problem” is an example of the confident expectation of a person with high self-efficacy in that domain. That same person may have low self-efficacy in another domain: “I am a nerd and will probably be socially awkward at the party.”

As you would expect, self-efficacy influences performance: People with high self-efficacy can tolerate physical discomfort and surprising amounts of frustration, and yet they persevere, creatively solve problems, and stay the course until one way or another they accomplish what they set out to accomplish. In contrast, people with low self-efficacy tend to abandon the effort after minor discomforts or frustrations. “I’m not going to succeed anyway, so why suffer more than necessary?” is an example of the demoralized attitude of a person with low self-efficacy in a particular domain.

Achieving a worthwhile outcome often requires that you tolerate some discomfort or frustration. A mountain climber would never achieve the intended outcome if [s]he abandoned the task at the first sign of discomfort or frustration. It is persevering in the face of challenge that is part of the adventure of mountain climbing. But discomfort and frustration do not evoke a heroic reaction from people with low self-efficacy. Instead of triggering resolve and creative problem solving, setbacks and discomfort often elicit negative emotional reactions such as hopelessness, guilt, or self-loathing, which may motivate them to abandon the effort. People relapse because they misperceive the nature of their challenge and underestimate what is required to achieve good outcome.

A Peak Experience
Mountain climbing is a metaphor for a difficult but surmountable challenge. It would be foolhardy to attempt a serious climb without proper preparation or without the understanding that you will probably encounter physical discomfort and difficult challenges along the way. Despite the dangers and obstacles, most people who set out to climb a mountain successfully achieve their goal and remember their adventures as peak experiences. Mountain climbing is hard and often painful, but people take it on voluntarily without financial compensation because it’s fun to experience the enhanced self-efficacy that results from mastering a difficult challenge. In fact, when competent individuals have realistic expectations about the nature of their challenge, they tend to perform responsibly, and persevere—despite the physical and mental discomforts they encounter—until the goal is achieved. The difficulty of the challenge is in fact an essential part of the story, and the whole enterprise—including the discomfort—is often remembered as a positive experience.

In contrast, the vast majority of people who resolve to change their relationship with an addictive incentive do not have realistic expectations about the nature of their challenge. Consequently, they relapse, become demoralized, and lose faith in their ability to overcome their problem. The resulting diminishment of low self-efficacy makes future failures more likely, which in turn lowers self-efficacy, and so it goes.

It is important to distinguish between process and outcome. The mountain summit is the nominal or outcome goal of the mountain climber’s efforts. Performing well is the process goal. For the climber, the real goal of going mountain climbing is the peak experience that results from engaging the challenge. The function of the summit is to provide a focus that gives structure to the activity and later to the story the climber will tell friends, family, and self. If, for example, a storm developed during the climb and the team performed brilliantly by getting everyone off the mountain with no injuries, the climber would feel successful despite failing to achieve the outcome goal.

Major life accomplishments emerge over time as you systematically solve the problems encountered along the way. In domains in which you are successful, it is likely that you focus on the task rather than on self-evaluation. Actual success is encouraged by an attitude that permits you to competently and consistently perform all the actions required to achieve your goal, the pleasant ones as well as the unpleasant ones. Ironically, low self-efficacy often causes people to focus more on outcomes than process. Understand this: Good outcome is a byproduct of good performance.

Self-Efficacy Research Highlights

    Individuals who have high self-efficacy are willing to tolerate physical discomfort and psychological frustration without abandoning the path to their goal.

  • Individuals with high self-efficacy tend to employ an action oriented thinking style—that is, they focus on how to solve the problems.
  • Action oriented thinking makes success more likely.
    Individuals with low self-efficacy tend to abandon their goal in the face of even minor obstacles

  • Individuals with low self-efficacy tend to employ a state oriented thinking style—that is, they focus on how they feel and why they feel that way.
  • State oriented thinking makes failure more likely.

For a discussion of self-efficacy, social anxiety, and depression please click here.

Thought Experiment: Efficacy Enhancing Imagery.
Consider an area of your life in which you are usually successful—athletic, artistic, occupational, social, etc—and imagine what it feels like to be you when you take on a challenge in this domain. Elaborate this imagery until you experience the confident state associated with high self-efficacy. Now, imagine that you are presented with an impressive new challenge in this domain: What is your attitude toward it? How would you expect to react to the discomforts and frustrations you encounter

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An Alternative to Powerlessness

June 28th, 2010

The Problem of Immediate Gratification [The PIG] is a defining feature of Incentive Use Disorders. So, naturally, those suffering the negative consequences of their excessive appetites want immediate gratification of the desire to be free of their problem. Overeaters want quick weight loss, but weight loss is not a cure for obesity! The vast majority of the participants of diets and weight loss programs will weigh more a year later than they did when they began their program. One- and two-year outcome research for substance abuse, gambling, and other addictive disorders shows similar patterns of short-term behavior change (while the individual is under the influence of the program) followed by an increasing likelihood of relapse with time from program completion, typically reaching around 80% within the first year after treatment.

There is no external salvation from dependence on an external agent. To the extent an external agent—a treatment provider, program, support group—was responsible for the behavioral control, relapse is likely when the salience of the external source of control diminishes with time.

The Nature of Your Challenge
An alternative to admitting powerlessness over a disease and turning responsibility for outcome over to an external agent is to admit you have freewill and accept the responsibility to develop the faculties required to act as you intend despite the influence of local conditions.

Volition is a controversial topic and many people believe that willpower is a destructive illusion. Most everyone with an excessive appetite has tried what they call willpower—”white knuckling it”—without success. [The "brute force" method may, perversely, provoke counter-regulatory motivation.] However, if willpower is defined as acting as intended despite the influence of local conditions, then the term describes a faculty worth developing. Simply stated, you have a two-phase challenge: First, you must decide how you intend to act when you encounter high-risk situations. Second, you must get yourself to act in accord with that decision, despite the influence of the local stressors and temptations.

You learn to exercise will during your encounters with a wide range of high-risk situations. At these critical moments, you have the opportunity to observe the cause-and-effect principles that govern your actions when exposed to stress and temptation. An important component of exercising will is to shift from an emotional trance to a dispassionate trance. This shift in perspective can enable you to become aware of your core motivation and act accordingly.

Addictive traps are easy to fall into and hard to escape. No escape plan works for everyone, because each trap is unique. An external source, such as a book or generic program, cannot show you the way to good long-term outcome, or even tell you what good long-term outcome means in your particular case. To act in accord with your interests and principles, you have to first define what they are. No external agent can do this for you; the path to self-determination is for your steps alone. Experiential invitations designed to encourage contemplation will enable you to focus your cognitive resources on how you want to use the remainder of your lease on life—your core motivation.

Appreciating what you want and doing what it takes to get it are different challenges. Acting as intended despite the influence of local conditions that would motivate you to lapse defines the “exercise of will.” This kit has the ambitious goal of enhancing your power to intentionally influence the course of events.

An Efficacy Enhancing Treatment Strategy
The strategy of this kit is strikingly different from that used by programs based on the 12-Step model of Alcoholics Anonymous. According to the latter view, incentive use disorders are diseases. Treatment emphasizes getting the patient to admit powerlessness over the illness and to comply with the plan developed by a treatment provider. Rather than encourage you to accept powerlessness, or recommend that you turn your problem over to a higher power or treatment provider, here are tools and methods to enhance the power of your will.

Preventing relapse requires that you are able to make good choices in real time, which turns out to be much more difficult than it sounds. In your fantasy, you will respond heroically during your future encounters with stress and temptation. When you are in the midst of a crisis, performing mindfully will not be as easy as it now seems. To follow your path of greatest advantage rather than yield in the direction of least resistance requires the exercise of will.

The challenge ahead is among the most important and the most demanding of your life. It takes more than wanting it to achieve the benefits of good long-term outcome. Preventing relapse demands that you act as intended during the critical moments of crisis when your energies and cognitive resources are depleted or otherwise occupied.

Exercising will is a heroic undertaking. The text and other media contained in this kit provide conceptual models, concrete tools, and experiential invitations that will strengthen your ability to act in accord with your interests and principles, rather than yield in the direction of least resistance.

A major advantage of a self-directed approach is that it encourages the development of the faculties required to exercise will.

Consider Mr. Hasslebring who has been clean and sober during his stay at a 30-day rehab program. Sadly, the content discussed in the psycho-educational groups was of little value during the critical moments of the actual crisis he encountered in his home environment, and the program staff and structure were not available to help him.

The vast majority of the graduates of inpatient and intensive outpatient chemical dependence and weight loss programs relapse soon after the influence of the external agent disappears. Evidently, their treatment left them insufficiently prepared to cope with the high-risk situations they actually encountered. Good long-term outcome is the byproduct of good performance during high-risk situations.

Question: Why is it that the thing you are trying to find is always in the very last place you look for it?
Answer: Because once you have found it, you can stop looking.

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Steering Versus Drifting

May 10th, 2010

In George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman, the Devil asks Don Juan why he bothers learning about himself and what he really wants (his core motivation), and Don Juan responds:

“Why, to be able to choose the line of greatest advantage instead of yielding in the direction of the least resistance. And there you have our difference: to be in hell is to drift, to be in heaven is to steer.”

If you do not steer, your actions will be dependent upon the cause-and-effect principles that effect the Psyche rather than upon your interests and principles. For example, the Problem of Immediate Gratification [the PIG] results from the fact that a small but immediate payoff has a much greater influence on behavior than a larger but delayed payoff. This causes a problem: People knowingly trade what is dear to them [health, wealth, relationships] for the trivial but immediate payoff of using an addictive incentive.

Better would be to steer so you could choose the most advantageous path. However, as you may have noticed, getting the creature you inhabit to perform as intended can be challenging—especially during crises of stress and/or temptation.

This article is about learning to steer. It is designed to help high functioning individuals develop their strength of will so that they are able to steer effectively, even through crises of stress and temptation that would cause less prepared individuals to relapse. The ability to steer emerges gradually during a passage that no one can take for you nor spare you. During this passage, you will develop an appreciation of several weird and nasty traps.

Animals do not consciously steer; they react to local conditions. What steers the mouse is not its best interests, but the cheese that baits the trap. Humans who appreciate how a mousetrap works are not taken in by it. However, if Mickey likes cheese but is trying to lose weight by restricting cheese intake he will probably be taken in by a different kind of trap. Perversely, the intention, “not to eat cheese” has the effect of increasing many dieters’ desire for cheese.

Over the years, I have accompanied thousands of individuals on this journey and have seen many variations of this perverse trap. Each of my collaborators is different and has created a unique puzzle for us to solve. By the time they sought my services most have relapsed many times, despite the best efforts of self-help groups, treatment programs, and their own sincere vows to change their ways. As a consequence of their repeated failure to prevent relapse, they tend to begin our collaboration with the tacit belief that they are bad, sick or defective. This demoralizing view is widely accepted by friends, family, and the treatment community.

This is unfortunate, because attributing the cause of failure to a defect or disease of the person, rather than to a characteristic of the task, makes it less likely the person will do what is necessary to achieve good outcome. People develop an Incentive Use Disorder not because they are deviant but because they are all too human.

The individuals with whom I work tend to be good problem solvers who generally accomplish what they set out to accomplish. My decision to dedicate my career to this specialty was not random. As a human myself, I have my own history with the PIG, and I can testify: It looks different than it feels!

Each of us has a unique genetic predisposition, past learning history, and current social reality. The cause-and-effect principles that pertain to this bio-psycho-social creature [in your case, you] causes it to react in predictable ways to certain triggering events. Whatever caused previous relapses is likely to cause future relapses unless you develop the ability to steer your way through high-risk situations.

Please begin this journey with the awareness that:

• Motivation is fluid and changes with local conditions. A lapse occurs when local conditions influence you to use the incentive despite your intention not to. The exercise of will occurs when you act as intended despite the pull of local stressors and temptations.

• Relapse is demoralizing and motivates a search for an external rescue. As we will see, escaping dependence on an external source of control is complicated by assuming the passive patient role and accepting a treatment provider as the effective agent of change. Your outcome will depend upon how you perform during the crises that you will have to face alone. You, not an external agent, must be the one responsible for steering the bio-psycho-social creature you inhabit.

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Problem of Immediate Gratification

April 7th, 2010

The Problem of Immediate Gratification (the PIG) refers to the universal principle that immediacy is much more important than magnitude of a payoff when it comes to influencing overt behavior. This is especially true for animals, children and impulsive adults.

Impulsivity is defined as the tendency to choose a small reward now at the expense of a larger reward later (e.g., choosing $1 now over $10 tomorrow). Alternatively, impulsivity can mean avoiding a small punishment now in exchange for a big punishment later (e.g., avoiding dental treatment).

The relationship between immediacy of a payoff and the magnitude of its influence on behavior is hyperbolic. So when the incentive is nearby (in terms of time, space, or psychological distance) it can be awfully influential on real-time behavior.

Motivation is fluid and changes with local conditions. When the incentive is near, it has a greater influence on motivation than a commitment made some time ago. Experiential phenomena are state dependent. When you are close to the incentive, it will exert an influence on you in ways that you cannot now fully appreciate. Choices that may seem ridiculous now may seem like a good idea then.

Ultimately, the outcome of your efforts will be determined by how you perform during the high-risk situations that lie ahead. At these critical moments, you will be in conflict: Pulling in one direction is the motivation to follow the path of greatest advantage, and pulling in the other is the motivation to yield in the direction of least resistance and get the payoff of doing so.

Incentives that motivate both approach and avoidance evoke conflict within the individual. The PIG says, “Regardless of which payoff is biggest or most important, the one that comes first determines what you will do.”

Some outcomes such as physical health, professional success, or loving relationships may have large magnitude but are not produced immediately by a specific behavior. In contrast, the gratification produced by your incentive of choice is immediate, and for that reason exerts an influence on behavior that is disproportional to its magnitude or importance.

Impulsive individuals are particularly vulnerable to the PIG and some incentives are particularly corruptive. Even though they feel guilty about it, several women with whom I have worked have voluntarily given up their babies to use the drug. The PIG is worthy of your respect. Appreciating it intellectually is not the same as experiencing the change of motivation personally. Understand this: Your appraisals and response tendencies will be different when the incentive is nearby than it is now when the possibility of incentive use is not so immediate.

When you are far from the incentive, the motivation to avoid it is greater than the motivation to approach it. But when you are near the incentive, the PIG works its magic and the pull of the incentive can become very strong very quickly. Once the gradients cross and the motivation to approach is greater than the motivation to avoid, there is nothing to stop relapse—the loss of control can happen so fast that you won’t even notice it happening.

When the motivation to avoid the incentive is subtracted from the motivation to approach it, the resulting gradient of net motivation is also hyperbolic; the tendency to approach increases exponentially as the distance between you and the incentive decreases. Note that the motivation to lapse is relatively flat until it crosses the “X” axis. But as soon as it does, the increase in net attraction is so rapid that you may lapse before you know it—there may be no internal debate, no attempt to override the urge; you may simply have gone from intending not to lapse to intending to lapse before you knew what hit you.

When you are far from the incentive, the gradient of net attraction is below zero indicating motivation to avoid the incentive. Under such circumstances the prospect of long-term success appears certain. But when you are near the incentive—in terms of time, space, or psychological distance—net attraction will be greater than zero and you will be motivated to approach the incentive. As the distance between you and the incentive continues to shrink, its influence on state-dependent phenomena insidiously increases exponentially. It is important to be vigilant for the changes in subjective reality that can tip you off that you are getting too close to the incentive. It is important to be vigilant for these warning signals early and, once you do, urgently put distance between you and the incentive.

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Alcohol Dependence & Will

April 1st, 2010

Most problem drinkers appreciate that the costs of using alcohol the way they do are greater than the benefits, but they vastly underestimate what it takes to change. As a result they fail to adhere to their intentions or solemn vows. Repeatedly failing at a challenge that seems so trivial may suggest to some that the problem drinker is defective [powerless, diseased] and requires an external agent to take responsibility for recovery.

The Paradoxes of Control

  • The paradox of using alcohol consumption to control experience results in the loss of control over alcohol consumption: The motivation to increase pleasure and decrease pain is fundamental and universal. The discovery that drinking alcohol can produce immediate pleasure or relief gives an individual a way to cope with the difficulties of living a life. Anything capable of delivering such a desirable payoff can corrupt the soul. Alcohol is so effective in helping some people control their experience that they lose control of their alcohol consumption..
  • Because controlling alcohol intake seems so trivial a challenge, most problem drinkers do not invest the effort required to succeed, and end up relapsing: It is possible to exercise will, even in the presence of great stress and temptation, but doing so requires considerable preparation. Shallow attempts to control drinking through “willpower” often produce the spectacular failures that discredit the concept of willpower. Lack of respect for what is required to act as intended during a crisis is the primary cause of failure of will..
  • Depending on an external agent to free one from dependence does: When you act counter to your intentions, you weaken the power of future intentions to influence action. Loss of control occurs when alcohol consumption is dependent upon local conditions rather than upon your intentions. Demoralizing relapses may motivate the individual (or loved ones) to give up and seek an external agent who can produce the intended outcome. However, there is paradox in turning to an external agent for the solution to a problem of dependence. Consider treatment strategies based on the medical model, in which the problem drinker is urged to accept powerlessness over a disease and to accept the patient role as recipient of the treatment: The strategies and goals are selected by, and the interventions are performed by, an external agent [treatment provider, self-help group]. This approach, most closely associated with 12-Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, is well matched with physically dependent alcoholics and many non-physically dependent problem drinkers. However, it provides a poor match for some high-functioning problem drinkers.

Treatment Matching
While the challenge is great, you are not the first one to face it. Methods to develop the skills and faculties that enable one to perform as intended in the face of crisis have been practiced throughout history. Tools and experiential exercises described by early philosophers and modern cognitive and neural scientists can enable problem drinkers to complete an important developmental passage: From dependence to self-determination.

Please click here to develop the capability to intentionally influence your subjective reality during the critical moments when you are at risk of relapse. With some preparation, high-functioning problem drinkers can develop the requisite skills and faculties to change course and follow their path of greatest advantage rather than to continue to yield in the direction of least resistance.

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The Soul Illusion

March 5th, 2010

Some otherwise competent individuals repeatedly act counter to their interests and principles. They are not intending to hurt themselves and their loved ones; they are taken in by an illusion. And, as is the case with optical illusions, experience does not prevent us from being taken in again.

The soul illusion is a critical element of mood disorders (depression, anger, and anxiety) and incentive use disorders [chemical dependence, obesity, compulsive gambling, gaming, sex/pornography, etc.]. If there is a recurring pattern to your problems, appreciating the soul illusion is likely to be the key to escaping your trap.

The Illusion
The alcoholic really means it when he says he will never have another drink, but everything looks different when he is lonely and frustrated on a Saturday night. He makes a solemn vow of abstinence, when he is in one motivational state, and predictably breaks it when he is in another. After the violation of his vow, he will once again receive the painful education that the lapse was a mistake and will probably vow never to do it again. But, naturally, everything will look different when he next encounters a high-risk situation and his good intentions and cognitive resources are far away. Immediate stressors and temptations tend to be the primary determinants of our subjective experience, especially during the critical moments of a crisis.

The soul illusion: Local conditions have a much greater influence on an individual’s perception, motivation, and response tendencies than remote influences such as long-term health consequences, interests of loved ones, and solemn vows made in the past. Because local factors are always more influential than we predict, we are doomed to be taken in by the soul illusion again and again.

Perceptual Bias and Will
The Rodney Dangerfield of philosophical questions: When a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around to hear it, is there a sound? It gets no respect, because it seems to be one of those pointless questions that has no answer. But there is an answer – an answer with profound spiritual and practical implications. The answer is: There is no sound!

When the tree falls, it produces a series of pressure waves in the surrounding air. The ear drum converts these waves into a mechanical signal which is transmitted by 3 small bones to the fluid filled cochlea – the spiral bony canal of the inner ear. Hair cells of the cochlea are the actual receptors. Each is tuned to a particular frequency of the fluid waves. Hair cell vibrations are converted to electrical impulses, and transmitted along the auditory nerve to the auditory cortex where intensity and frequency of the vibrations are mapped. Neither pressure waves, physical movements of body parts [bones, hair], nor electrical signals are sound. The experience of sound exists only in the mind of the perceiver.

Perception differs qualitatively from the physical properties of the stimulus. The nervous system extracts only certain information from the natural world. We perceive fluctuations of air pressure not as pressure waves but as sounds that we hear. We perceive electromagnetic waves of different frequency as colors that we see. We perceive chemical compounds dissolved in air or water as specific smells or tastes. In the words of neurologist Sir John Eccles: “I want you to realize that there exists no color in the natural world, and no sound – nothing of this kind; no textures, no patterns, no beauty, no scent.”

Sounds, colors, patterns, etc., appear to have an independent reality, yet are, in fact, constructed by the mind. All our experience of the natural world is our mind’s interpretation of the input it receives.

When we are angry we both perceive the world and respond to it differently than when we are contrite. Perception, motivation, and response tendencies are state-dependent, and local motivational states [e.g., anger, craving, etc.] are continually influencing our subjective reality and behavior. The Psyche is continually taken in because the the perceptual system itself is subject to the state-dependent bias, and so the distortions are always invisible to the perceiver.

We do not appreciate, at the moment, that actions such as striking out in anger, giving in to fear, or relapsing back to drugs, food, sex, etc. will seem crazy or stupid in retrospect. The states of mind that put us at risk of behaving foolishly are subjective and temporary, but the errors they evoke play out in the objective world, and so are irreversible.

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