Experience That Violates Expectation

I was considering a client I am working with, and while considering something about them I wrote perhaps the most important line in my work as a therapist yet. 

The absolute best way to break conscious/unconscious sets, ingrained beliefs, life rules, organizing/governing principles—is to contradict them and to experience something different than what’s expected. 

This is why someone can go to therapy for years and feel no better. This is why people can try anything and everything to address their problems and get nowhere. 

Conscious and unconscious sets are the habituated and repeated ways of being that we all engage in. When you go to the movie theater and buy a ticket, snacks, and a drink, you expect to go and find your seat and watch a film as you walk through the theater door; you do not expect, however, to walk through a theater door and find a room full of giraffes. Why not? Rooms full of giraffes do exist after all. 

You have been to a theater before, you know what should happen. You have also been to a zoo before and you know that the theater is not a zoo. But when you were young, and had not yet been to either a zoo or a theater, it could have been easy to play a trick on you. A sibling or parent could have told you “we’re going to the theater, that’s a place full of animals in rooms where we get to see them”. And you would be primed for an experience, expecting a certain outcome. To your confusion and surprise, there will be no animals at the theater. But before your finding out, animals at the theater did exist in possibility and imagination. 

We brush our teeth with our dominant hand, not our secondary hand, let alone our feet. Why? It’s possible to brush with a different hand. It’s possible, though improbable, to brush with our feet. 

We write, draw, paint with objects in our hands. Do you remember pressing a paint covered hand or foot against a flower pot or page?

We all learn through experience. What to do, what not to do. What makes sense and what doesn’t make sense. And we generalize. One of my favorite examples is the hot stove. Almost everyone has had the distinct experience of being told not to touch that glowing red-orange thing on the metal box in the kitchen. 

Some of us listened, some of us found out a more painful lesson. Now, here’s where it gets interesting—though we all extrapolated something from those experiences, not everyone learned exactly the same thing. There is some variation. 

Many learned don’t touch the red-orange circle on the rectangular metal box called a stove in the place that we call the kitchen which also has a different large metal box called a refrigerator. That’s a lot of work for a young brain to go through. As our little brains learned many different things about the world, we developed general rules for how to proceed.

So, whereas some of us learned not to touch the hot stove, some others of us learned not to touch the stove—still others learned not to go in the kitchen, and still more learned not to touch metal boxes. 

If our brains only worked through conscious awareness and direction alone, it would be disastrous. It would be disastrous because we are not really all that good of multi-taskers, and to focus on all the biological processes themselves would be an olympian task, let alone anything occurring in our immediate environments. 

Our brains have special capacities, functioning in a manner to keep us going and able to cut through all the noise and focus on what really matters. For the time being, let’s just call that the unconscious mind. 

The unconscious mind helps us with those rules previously mentioned. And none of those rules are wrong in and of themselves (if you were wondering so, that’s one of your life rules—to filter things through a moral lens more readily than others), however, you can begin to notice how some can become limiting. 

Take for instance, “don’t go into the kitchen”. Not that big a deal and most children will eventually learn that’s a silly rule. But let’s say for whatever reason the rule of “don’t touch the hot stove” was very impressed upon a person. Our brain, functioning in a way to help us survive, creates a more generalized learning for our safety to avoid the kitchen. Then another experience is stacked upon that rule. The little child decides to venture into the already potentially dangerous kitchen after having been avoiding it (a self-corretive experience one would hope). While there, they come close to that scary stove. A guardian walks in and in an angry or anxious reaction scolds the child. 

The self-corrective experience was not only interrupted but the attempt to learn something new was actively discouraged. The brain learns several more things, and remember, it is functioning in a manner to help us stay alive.

Depending on the exact nature of the situation, several messages can be obtained: “the kitchen is not a safe place”, “attempts to overcome fears are bad/wrong”, “I make mommy/daddy upset when I do certain things”, “to stay safe, I have to be compliant”. Repeated experiences, stronger learning and ingrained beliefs. 

So how does someone come to view themselves as incapable? Not through being yelled at once in the kitchen, but from a lifetime of experiences and our brains doing what they naturally do. Extrapolating data, creating inferences for continued survival, seeking out patterns to sharpen the neurological processes dedicated to our survival. 

And once a rule, belief, or principle is in place, it becomes primarily unconscious. 

We need that brain space to focus on what’s happening in the moment and to plan for the future. We’re now in a discussion very different than giraffes in a movie theater. Allow me to share some clinical examples. 

“If I live right, then nothing bad will happen.”

“Don’t go outside, talk to people, or do anything different.”

“I’m not very good at making friends or talking to people.”

“I have to be a good husband, father, brother but I’m not (and will never be so I’ll keep striving and being disappointed no matter what).”

“If I don’t allow myself to feel, then everything will be okay.”

There are endless combinations and possibilities for such rules, beliefs, or principles and we all have them. Not every rule has to be this large though, some are rather simple like when to shower or what route to take to work. The point is that our brains have natural processes to help reduce cognitive load, thus freeing up our ability to consciously focus on what matters, while relegating broad and overarching “how to proceed” to the unconscious mind so that we can live another day.  

Our brain’s ability to do this is really a wonder and it’s beautiful. However, in this process, rules can inadvertently be made which unnecessarily limit us. And we’ll go on and on without ever thinking twice about it—because that’s how it works. 

People only stop to consider when they realize something’s not quite right. When they feel stuck. When for some unknown reason the same problems keep occurring, no matter how much insight they gain. 

This returns us to the beginning of the article. Why years of therapy can happen, with no meaningful change in outcome. Why problems stick and even when we escape them for some time, seemingly come to revisit us out of nowhere. Why “talking about it” tends to frustrate people.

Most modern approaches to therapy build a person’s skills to manage difficult thoughts and emotions. It focuses on helping people understand themselves better and answer the “why” to questions of how a problem came to be. It gives people a safe, validating, place to discuss difficult things. 

Repetition alone does not produce change. Insight alone does not produce change. Even conscious intention does not produce change. 

What produces change is an experience which meaningfully violates expectation. 

What modern therapy often does not do is create violational experiences which catalyze new or contradictory learning in real time that cannot easily be reinforced into the current belief structure. 

The only debate here is what constitutes meaningfully?