TIFT #121: Emotion Amplifiers

Lately I’ve been thinking about how our inner “thinking fast” mind interacts with our conscious mind, the one we normally sit in. This has brought into focus the ways my anxious clients dwell on thoughts that serve only to make their bad feelings more intense. I have been calling them “amplifiers.” For example, “Oh, no! I’ve got the flu, and that, along with other medical problems, is going to shorten my life. I’ll die young and never get to see my grandson’s wedding!”

The top down approach to therapy helps to an extent, suggesting to sufferers that amplifiers only make anxiety, anger, and depression worse and should be replaced with something more positive. A nice formula someone shared with me was to replace “What if?” with “Even if.” CBT calls these cognitive distortions. Here is one list:  

• All-or-Nothing Thinking
• Overgeneralization
• Mental Filtering
• Discounting the Positive
• Jumping to Conclusions
• Magnification and Minimization
• Personalization
• Should Statements
• Labeling

But I want to know why. In researching the new book, I’ve realized that behaviorists are deeply programmed not to speculate about unconscious goings on in the mind. One of the behaviorists I most admire is Stephen Hayes, founder of ACT, acceptance and commitment therapy. He is an exception to the rule, going so far as to discuss how the unconscious logic units that neurophysiologist LeDoux calls “survival circuits” can be sources of human emotional problems. But even Hayes, writing about one of his core concepts, Experiential Avoidance, EA, speaks only of conscious experiences and does not mention that the things people most dread are unconscious. For me, those dreaded unconscious precursor emotions are the original triggers of EMPs (entrenched maladaptive patterns, the primary targets of psychotherapy). They are also what bottom-up therapy seeks to change.

In the meantime, with behaviorists still avoiding speculation about unconscious processes, neuroscientists have no trouble posing questions about how evolution has shaped the unconscious mind to be purposeful in predicting threats and opportunities and creating and launching responses to them.

It will have to be up to non-behaviorists to use observation and other indirect tools to understand why humans do such a good job of making their troubles seem worse using amplifier thoughts.

How can we get to know unconscious mind better? 

Socrates used the term acrasia to describe things people do that are against their better judgment. (Sadly the Greek word is not the origin of  the word “crazy,” which comes from “cracked.”) Unfortunately Descartes decided that all mental processes were conscious. That set us back a couple of centuries and was a cause of the “conscious-centrism” that still permeates so much thinking today. It wasn’t until hypnotists in the 19th century had people doing things and not knowing why that the idea of an unconscious mind began to form. It was Freud who had the courage, wisdom, and persistence to bring us the modern concept.

What was first noticed were times when the inner, nonconscious mind was at odds with the conscious one. For our purposes that happens mostly when one of those survival circuits becomes frozen in time, resisting new information and contradicting experiences. When that happens, a part of the unconscious mind becomes detached and rigidly out of step with our conscious life. That is how EMPs come to be.

Now that the unconscious mind has revealed itself in its perversity, we can begin to appreciate its more subtle and very helpful presence in our everyday lives. Those are times when the inner mind is not rigid, but is an active partner in our lives. I wrote in TIFT #95 about “My Favorite Brain Network,” the default mode network. That loose net of connected neurons is an important part of the nonconscious mind and a great source of creative ideas, the ones that “pop” into consciousness. I first discovered mine as a freshman in high school when I realized that I was good at geometry because every time I immersed my mind in a proof, somehow the answer would come from nowhere. I relied on this seemingly magical phenomenon. It wasn’t analysis of the problem. That isn’t possible for proofs. That could work for algebra, but not geometry, where some kind of relationship just had to appear.

With AI an every-day presence, we can begin to understand better how it works. Sitting with a client the image of an airliner with no landing gear came to mind. I listened to my inner mind and consulted my conscious, logical mind to see if that might be a good metaphor for what my client was feeling. It was. She was suffering from not feeling “grounded.” What this means is that the way the nonconscious mind thinks is by associations and they can be expressed in images, metaphors, songs, and any number of ways. Associations are what AI uses, too, to analyze vast amounts of data and create answers.

This form of thinking is quite different from the conscious form we are used to every day, but it makes sense when we think of the architecture of the nervous system. There, each neuron has connections with many others. Connection is the most basic characteristic of how the brain is set up. Eric Kandel won the Nobel Prize by showing that anything can be stored in memory as groups of connected neurons. They tend to fire together due to the strength of the synapses that join them. That’s what is meant by “wired together.”

This amazing system can store literally anything as a group of connections between nerve cells. My best definition of anything is “anything that can be described in poetry.” That could be an image, a word, or even a weird feeling or emotion. Furthermore, the natural way this kind of thinking works is by linking one “thing” with another. This is a higher level of connection, but still the same principle. Dogs are linked with cats, and the two are connected with squabbling. This incredibly flexible system can pattern match by association, which makes it possible to perform if-then logic. “If this, then do that.” The two parts are linked by association, and can perform remarkably powerful thinking. The reason my definition, “whatever can be described in poetry” works is that metaphor is the basic way poetry works. It establishes metaphorical links between all kinds of things. That doesn’t take place consciously by analysis. It is automatic and intuitive. We also know from poetry that there can be metaphorical truth, things that really belong together or are revealing associations versus those that are false or trite.

Understanding this basic mind, the one we share with all other mammals, puts a helpful perspective on Descartes' beloved conscious mind, tacked onto the original as humans evolved into existence. The conscious mind allows us to manipulate symbols that stand for things, giving us the ability to visualize time and space and to define precise relationships between things. Consciousness says “this came before that.” At best, the unconscious mind might have a metaphor for the quality of this before that, but it can’t represent the two on a time line or ask how much time elapsed between this and that. On the other hand, the unconscious mind is the source of the curiosity that prompts us to ask the questions that only formal logic can answer.

In health, the two minds work together constantly and effectively. Like a writer and an editor, one comes up with creative ideas, while the other applies symbolic logic to edit out the ones that don’t work. When the old original mind really feels strongly, it usually wins. As it does throughout biology, evolution once again makes use of a mostly friendly competition to arrive at balanced and effective answers.

What about emotion amplifiers?

Why, then, would the inner, unconscious mind come up with thoughts that make our worries worse, anger more rageful, and depression deeper? Dreams are metaphors for what the inner mind is concerned about. Amplifier thoughts are the same, but with more drive and purpose. They arrive in consciousness as thoughts, feelings, and impulses that carry a sense of urgency. They push us to take some form of action. They are products of the inner mind trying to steer us in directions it thinks is best for survival. This makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint. Consciousness is there as an added feature to improve survival and procreation of our species. For us, unlike most mammals, survival is not about saving ourselves from attack by a predator. It is far more a matter of building and maintaining social connections with the right people. The incredible complexity of our social networks requires a powerful computer to help decide which of the inner mind's ideas are good ones to follow and which are bad.

The inner mind’s worries exist in nonverbal form outside of consciousness. The EMPs that remain troublesome over years are frozen in time, but the inner mind’s concerns are constructed in general as plans for improving survival by gaining control. Even artists and poets are driven by the need to connect with others, ultimately for survival. An inner mind worried about being alone and abandoned uses past experiences and knowledge to construct a metaphor to encapsulate that dread, along with a solution. “I must have a mortal disease and I need a doctor to do tests and find what it is.” The details, as in dreams, may be made up of material the mind has associated with the original worry, but they all work together to create a pathway for bringing the problem under control. 

When the inner mind is up against a problem it can’t control, things begin to get weird. Obsessions represent attempts to solve the insoluble simply by going over and over the problem. In the case of anxiety, there is often no practical solution. In that case, the best one the inner mind can conjure up is a metaphor, built from familiar materials, and carrying a sense of urgency. As we all know, these solutions create new problems. As soon as the doctor says there is nothing wrong, the conscious, logical mind begins to find holes in the solution. The metaphorical diagnosis was not the actual trouble. The inner mind doesn’t know what to do and is throwing out ideas in the hope that one will stick, and of course, none does.

Working with amplifiers

Besides the top-down approach at the beginning of this post, the bottom-up approach is to ask why the unconscious mind has chosen that metaphor. That's how we can follow a path of associations down to the real worry. Asking the client and engaging one’s own inner mind are two mainstays. It is often helpful to follow the outward story to it’s end. “If it were to turn out that you had that illness, then what would happen?” Not infrequently, the end result turns out to suggest, not the obvious fear of death, but something more social like wanting others to care. “They will be sorry when I’m gone!” Exploring patiently is how we find the best answers. Seeking accurate empathy or complex caring, giving time for answers to rise up from our own and the client’s unconscious minds, asking questions to pique the inner mind’s interest, those are ways we can enlist our own and our client’s nonconscious mind. It’s like listening to a crying child and trying to glean the source of pain.

What is the solution to insoluble problems? From the beginning of life to its end, the ultimate solution is being understood.

Jeffery Smith MD

Photo credit:  Nik Helloimnik, Unsplash