Human Suffering and Cultural Ideas, part 1 - Mind/Body Dualism
In the introduction to this series of posts we talked about the way that received and persistent ideas can contribute to psychological suffering. In this post we’re going to dive into one of these long-standing ideas that is woven deeply into western culture, namely the idea of mind-body dualism. That’s a fancy phrase that just means that we think about mind and body as two separate things. You’re probably familiar with this, at least in a felt way. Most of us who grow up in western culture have a distinct sense that the world of our thoughts is separate and distinct from our bodies. Indeed, any suggestion that those two things are NOT separate might feel intuitively suspect.
This idea of a separation between mind and body has deep roots in western culture, going all the way back at least to the Greeks, but it was really given its modern formulation in the 17th century by the seminal French philosopher René Descartes. Descartes divided the world up into two types of substances - res extensa, which was the material world, and res cogitans, which was the world of the soul or mind. Thoughts and all mental activity, as well as one’s eternal soul, belonged to res cogitans, while our bodies and all material substance belonged to res extensa. And they were mostly not connected.
This division articulated by Descartes has largely persisted for centuries, informing not only how we think about ourselves, but also how we approach animals, medicine, spirituality, and our legal and economic systems, among many others. It’s a super influential idea!
In psychology, the prevalence of this model has created a systemic focus on thoughts and talking, at the expense of addressing the body. After all, if the realm of mental activity is separate from the body, then the fix for mental suffering is achieved by working with the contents of the mental space. So, historically psychology focused on thoughts, on memories (often repressed ones), on dreams, and very rarely on the body (which is ironic considering that Freud originally developed psychoanalysis largely as a way of dealing with inexplicable bodily symptoms!). Later the focus expanded to include emotions, but it has taken a long time for a broader focus on the body in psychology to emerge (to be fair, from the beginning there have been those who have tried to bring the body in, but until the last few decades they were relegated to the fringes).
But at this point there is an overwhelming amount of evidence that this model is simply wrong. First, when we back up from it, it just doesn’t add up - it essentially assumes that the mind somehow operates outside of the basic physical laws of our universe, as some supernatural force. Second, when we look at wisdom traditions it has been clear for millennia that this gulf between mind and body is false. Spend some time meditating and you will pretty quickly observe the ways that mind and body move together.
But perhaps most relevant psychologically, research has made it more and more clear that our minds and bodies are closely intertwined, with the state of our bodies shaping our thoughts and feelings in the moment, and vice versa. This effect has been the most pronounced in trauma work, where it is absolutely essential to be tracking and addressing what is happening in the body, but the same is true of all psychological work. In the practice of Hakomi, which I am trained in, the body is regarded as the royal road to the unconscious, and tracking and constructively using the experiences of your body is the single fastest way to access the deep core beliefs that shape our ways of being in the world (the reasons for this are complicated and might be fodder for a future post).
The long and short of all of this is that thinking of mind and body as separate blinds us to the true nature of our experience in the world. It cuts us off from our senses, tends to make us think of ourselves as somehow different from other animals, and thus limits how we perceive both ourselves and the world. And it can lead to a great deal of self-judgment that tends to melt away when we touch into the true reality. Which is that many of the things that seem so foreign and strange to us are artifacts of the basic truth that we are mammals, who move through life with mammalian bodies not so different from those of all other mammals.
Which leads us to reconsider this thing we call mind. Indeed, the conclusion becomes that this thing we call mind isn’t a thing at all, but rather an experience. Indeed, I’ve found that the best way to think about the mind is as the experience of being a body in the world. And the next time you find your mind doing something that seems irrational and inexplicable, you might try just checking in with your body. What kind of sensations are you having? Are you carrying tension anywhere? A sinking feeling in your gut, energy in your chest, tingling in your arms or legs, or other forms of restlessness? And what happens if you focus your attention on one of these sensations? Are there thoughts or feelings that come up? Memories, images, impulses, or nothing at all?
Also, if mind and body are intertwined, then your physical health affects your mental health. Studies have linked inflammation in the body to depression and anxiety, and physical exercise is one of the best interventions out there for helping with both of those conditions. And increasingly, connections between nutrition and mental health are being shown. None of this means you need to go out and run a marathon, but it does mean that tending to your body can be an extremely effective way of addressing mental suffering.
It may seem counter-intuitive, but the real change in therapy often starts when people start accessing their previously-ignored bodily experience (you will hear this referred to as somatic experience in therapy circles). Feel your body, make friends with your animal self, step away from the notion that YOU is just a brain floating in a body jar. Vitality, joy, pleasure in life, and deep connection lie on this side of mind-body dualism.
NOTE: One VERY important caveat to this exercise - if you start to feel into your body and find yourself starting to experience extremely heightened anxiety or any other intolerable sensations then stop this exercise immediately. That is a sign that there is something deeper going on, and you need support from a mental health professional around exploring and working with it.
And if you need help in this process, then please feel free to reach out to me or another mental health professional!
Ecology, Mythology, & Culture
A while back I gave this talk for the Jung Society of Austin, presenting my dissertation work. It’s long, but if you’re interested in the intersection of these three areas, and how our modern lives are influenced and shaped by these forces, then you might skim through it. Enjoy!
The general idea is that the way we humans relate to ourselves and the world around us - especially the non-human world - has always been shaped by mythology. When we’re in a mythology it feels like the common-sense, obvious way that things are, but there are always many ways to see the universe, and especially in an age where human actions have driven our ecology to the brink of collapse it is critical that we be examining the mythology we continue to operate in and the ways it dictates our relations with all this planet’s other beings. I am a strong believer in science, and have a strong background in the sciences, but the scientific paradigm has become the lens through which we relate to others (often including other humans), and it is critical going forward that we recognize the way this mindset has penetrated our ways of life and its limitations. Science is a great tool for understanding the mechanics of the world, but the world is more than mechanics, and we need modern tools to help us approach it from non-mechanical perspectives.
Human Suffering and Cultural Ideas, Introduction
So much of the suffering encountered in the mental health space today is a product of trying too hard to hold on to ideas that are at odds with the realities of who we are as human beings. We learn these ideas growing up - they are in the air everywhere around us, even if they’re never explicitly articulated, and as intuitive beings we internalize these points of view at an early age. They go on to shape how we relate to the world for the rest of our lives. But as our scientific understanding has developed, we have increasingly seen the ways that these old ideas just don’t match reality.
These ideas are important because they are a bit like viruses. They infect us from other carriers - the people and society all around us - and then serve to shape our thinking and our ways of being, even when they are at odds with reality and with our own perceptions. And if we don’t treat them, then we turn around and spread them to others, effectively becoming vectors of bad thinking, reinforcing our own suffering and sharing it with those around us. Making the situation even trickier, much of this happens outside of consciousness - indeed, the most insidious ideas are the ones we received early on, before our brains had developed their critical thinking abilities, and that have then served to shape our lives in ways that tend to reinforce those ideas.
But fortunately there is a vaccine, and that vaccine is awareness. By becoming aware that we carry these ideas, of the ways they live in our bodies and structure our thoughts (as well as many of the aspects of the societies we live in!), we can inoculate ourselves against them. And then rather than acting as unconscious lackeys of these ideas, we can put them in their proper place, which is the role of sometimes-useful tools to help us make our way in the world. We become the masters and they the servants, rather than the other way around.
This series of posts will dig into the common misconceptions that many people hold about how the mind and body function, looking briefly at where these ideas came from and how they became such a fundamental part of the fabric of western thought, and then exploring both the impact of these ideas on mental health and the alternative ways of thinking that have developed in line with the way research tells us the human organism functions. Enjoy!
Socializing Successes, Privatizing Failures
You may have heard the saying that big business in America privatizes their successes and socializes their failures, meaning that when they are successful they claim all credit (and profit) for that, but when they stumble they look to the public for a rescue. While this certainly matches the facts of American business over the last couple of decades, most of us live by the reverse maxim — we socialize our successes and privatize our failures.
That is, when many of us are successful we downplay that and ascribe it to collective effort.
“Oh that was easy, I just got it from Larry down the hall.”
“I can’t take credit for that, I was just copying Eileen.”
“I could only afford that house because my parents helped out.”
While it’s definitely a positive thing to recognize the ways that we have benefitted from the efforts of other, too often this becomes a double standard. The things we wrestle with become OUR fault, while the things we succeed at belong to all the people around us.
But if your successes are as much because of the efforts of those around you, then your struggles are also social! It’s a raw deal when everybody else gets the credit for the positive things while you soak up the responsibility for the not-so-great things!
I’m not advocating that you blame everyone else for your problems, or refuse to acknowledge others’ contributions to your success. But in my work I’ve never seen it really be helpful for anyone to refuse to acknowledge the ways that the things they struggle with have been co-created with others. Not only is it unrealistic to blame only yourself, it is also often a way of avoiding conflict.
It’s so easy to just say “oh that’s my fault” as a way of not having to have a difficult conversation with important people in your life. You take the blame, and you don’t have to deal with other peoples’ potentially unpredictable emotional reactions.
But when you do that again and again, then you start to think of yourself as the one who always messes things up. And you’re not. You’re a complex, fully-featured human being who, like all of us, is trying to make your way in a complicated world.
Give yourself a break. Be realistic about how your screw-ups have happened. Have some difficult conversations with people around you. And if you need support in that process then reach out to someone!
Why Does My Therapist Want Me To Talk About My Childhood?
The short answer: because it’s important in ways that aren’t always obvious.
The long answer: ultimately the past is irrelevant. Whatever did or didn’t happen to you, what’s really important to feeling better in your life is your stance in the present, and that should always be the underlying focus of therapy. But the past always continues to live in the present, often shaping our patterns of thinking and feeling in ways we aren’t even aware of. Getting to know those patterns is essential to taking control of your life in the present moment.
Neuroscience and psychological studies have shown that patterns of relating, feeling, and thinking are laid down in the first 10 years of life. From the time a baby is born their unique genetic makeup is melding with their caregiving environment to produce these patterns. Even before the brain has the ability to make explicit memories (the kind we’re all used to), the brain and the body together are producing implicit memories in the form of associative patterns. Someone says something in a tone that is very familiar to us and suddenly we feel sad, or happy, or angry. That’s implicit memory at work.
Sometimes, making these implicit memories explicit is essential to understanding our reactions to the world around us. This can be particularly true when you carry some judgment about your reactions. Judgment towards the self tends to arise out of fears that whatever is going on is evidence of something deeply, deeply wrong with us, and that it is all our fault. Especially in our highly individualistic western culture, people tend to feel that these inherited patterns are their fault, and then feel shame about them.
But shame tends to block things out of awareness. And you can’t change what you’re not aware of. So talking about your childhood — how you were related to, cared for, things that happened to you, and the demeanor of your caregivers — offers insight into the origins of your own patterns. And there’s no shame in any of that, only old history that you’re ready to let go of. But you can’t let go of things until you recognize them, and understanding the patterns of your past can help you see how they still live in the present.
The point of this is also not to shift blame. My goal isn’t to get you to stop being mad at yourself and start being mad at your parents (though it is certainly both common and totally okay if that happens), but to get you to regard yourself with a more compassionate eye. Your parents are humans too, like most of us probably doing the best they knew how to do. But you shouldn’t have to pretend that the experiences you had didn’t have an impact on you. Positive or negative, they did. The positive is usually easier to acknowledge, but we often deny the negative.
Ultimately, again, all of this is building towards recognizing what, in the present moment, needs to change, and then developing the ability to shift these things in the present moment. But sometimes (not always!) we have to look back before we can go forward, and in those cases your childhood might offer essential clues.