You Have a Choice, page 5
Since Lucy now knew how she wanted to behave differently (she had set a clear intention), I asked her to pay attention to what was keeping her from that intended action by using a daily journaling exercise to answer the following questions:
• When today did I speak my mind directly and hold people accountable? What circumstances enabled that?
• When today did I hold my tongue and use my “likable cheerleader” voice instead? What circumstances contributed to that? How did I feel in those moments?
• What will I do differently tomorrow after reflecting on the questions above?
These questions were designed to bring her unconscious parts’ reactions into consciousness, so she could start to notice them taking over and choose different actions instead.
Exercise 3.2
If you have set a conscious intention to change your behavior and actions, and are not following through on that intention, it’s time to pay attention. Please reflect on the following questions daily and write down your answers to discover patterns of how your parts are unconsciously taking over and steering you away from an intended behavior change.
1. When today did I carry out my intended behavior? What circumstances enabled that?
a) Enabling circumstances might include physical (different environments), personal (how well did you sleep or eat?) or social (different people) components.
2. When today did I fall back into my previous reactive behavior? What circumstances contributed to that? What did I physically feel like in those moments?
a) Unconsciously defaulting to previous behavior is often the sign of a part taking over. Parts can be embodied as physical tension, e.g., a sinking feeling in the stomach, your heart racing, your breathing getting shallow and quick, a clenched jaw, a dry throat, or tight shoulders.
3. What will I do differently tomorrow after reflecting on the questions above?
a) What can I do to create the circumstances that enable my intended behavior?
b) How can I use the physical feeling of my parts taking over as a signal to reset and try something different?
This reflection will help you learn to catch those moments where your parts take over and interfere with your intention. If you practice this reflection daily and pay more attention to the tensions and feelings that arise when your parts take over, you will notice those moments more and more quickly until you can eventually catch them in real time. Once you develop this self-awareness, you can pause in the moment before reacting, decide which parts you will listen to, which parts’ rules you will release or loosen, and then consciously choose a different action from your whole self.
Fight or flight
Why are these unconscious parts so powerful and limiting at the same time? The answer requires taking a small detour into the nervous system.
When you are under threat, your body switches into fight-or-flight mode, also known as the sympathetic nervous system. This floods the body with cortisol and adrenaline so that you can respond quickly to danger by fighting or escaping.
Another effect of these chemicals is that they narrow your attention—you become highly attuned to what is directly in front of you and lose your awareness of the larger environment. This makes sense from an evolutionary perspective: if a tiger is attacking you, you want to put your full attention on the tiger and nothing else until you are safe! In this mode, you are on high alert for danger, treating everything as a threat by default.
However, this narrow focus is an impediment in the complex contexts most of us find ourselves in each day, in which there are many “right” answers and no simple responses that satisfy all of our parts. With fight-or-flight “blinders” on, you are literally not aware of the greater complexity, so you default to the simple, programmed reactions of your parts.
But when each part perceives a threat to its pattern as a survival threat, your sympathetic nervous system is getting activated many times a day. While that makes evolutionary sense (it’s better to overreact to potential danger than to be complacent and get eaten), it has several negative consequences:
• You are regularly being flooded with cortisol (the stress hormone) and putting long-term wear and tear on your body, which can lead to heart attacks, mental health issues, and other problems.
• You can’t see other possibilities available to you due to the narrowed focus, and therefore are stuck without options.
• You treat everything as potential threats rather than seeing the possibilities of collaboration or cooperation that might be available to you.
For your long-term health and sanity, you need to learn how to distinguish actual life-threatening situations from the activation of your unconscious parts.
The first step is recognizing the signals that your body has activated fight-or-flight mode. Exercise 3.2 above can help you pay attention to what happens when your parts take over and to identify the associated intense feelings or physical sensations, such as your heart racing, your muscles tensing, or your breathing becoming fast and short. Your body is literally gearing up to fight or flee, so you will likely feel heightened energy from the adrenaline flooding your system.
Research shows that there are two other survival strategies for the sympathetic nervous system beyond fight or flight, which are freeze and fawn.4 These additional survival strategies explain a lot of behavior that doesn’t fit neatly into the fight-or-flight categories. Some people shut down and freeze, much like animals that play dead to avoid getting attacked by predators. In Lucy’s case above, her parts’ survival strategy was fawning: trying to please everybody around her to keep herself safe.
Once you identify your parts’ go-to survival strategies and how they feel in your body, you can then look for those signals as an alert that the parts have activated your body into fight-or-flight mode—and you can choose to interrupt the process.
Take a deep breath
We have all heard the advice to pause and take a deep breath before making a decision, but until a few years ago, I didn’t know the science of why this works. Taking deep breaths is the signal to our nervous system to deactivate the fight-or-flight sympathetic nervous system and return to the calm, “rest and digest” parasympathetic nervous system. If you are actually facing a tiger, you will be taking fast, shallow breaths to get oxygen into your system so you can respond quickly. If you are taking calm, slow, deep breaths, you are clearly not in immediate danger and your body can relax into a more open and connected state.
Exercise 3.3
In exercise 3.2, you discovered the intense physical feelings that accompany the moments when your parts take over. These are signals that your body has been activated into fight-or-flight mode.
When you notice those signals and physical reactions, try these actions to interrupt the programmed response of your parts:
1. Pause and take a few deep breaths to start resetting your nervous system.5 I recommend the box breathing technique:6 you breathe in for four counts, hold for four counts, breathe out for four counts, and hold for four counts.
2. Remind yourself that you have a physical body by feeling your feet touching the floor or listening for your own heartbeat. This reconnection to your body reminds you that you are not in actual physical danger.
3. Depending on your particular fight-or-flight response, you can try different actions to release the tension and energy built up by the adrenaline and cortisol hormones.
a) Fight: Do aggressive actions such as shadow box, jump up and down, or shout into a pillow.
b) Flight: Go for a walk or run, or shake out your arms and legs to let your body act out its flight behavior.
c) Freeze: Physically move or stretch to break the body’s instinct to freeze. A habit of avoidance (e.g., a part of me escapes into playing games on my phone when I don’t know what to do) can also be a form of freezing, so you can use your avoidance strategy as a signal to take a deep breath and start moving.
d) Fawn: Take a few minutes to journal on what you wish you could say, so that you become more aware of the gap between what you think and your people-pleasing tendencies. Declaring that reality for yourself can help break that part’s habit of apologizing and placating.
In my case, fight-or-flight mode tends to show up as me getting into a defensive posture with my shoulders tensed and curved in, as if to protect myself from a punch. So, when I notice myself in that mode, I pause, remind myself I am safe, take a few deep breaths, and open up my chest and consciously relax my shoulders. The mind follows the body, and once I relax my body, my mind lowers the “blinders” and lets me see more options. You will have to experiment to discover what works for you.
According to the research of Harvard neuroanatomist Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor,7 the hormones activated by fight-or-flight mode will clear out of your system in just 90 seconds once the threat has passed. This may seem impossible if you have had the experience of being stuck in an angry or resentful state for hours if not days. She suggests that when you have that experience, you are retriggering the emotion repeatedly by thinking of the conditions that you and your parts consider threatening.
Dr. Robert Sapolsky’s (2004) book Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers similarly describes how, after animals in the wild go into fight-or-flight mode, they release their bodily tension and quickly return to their resting state once the threat has passed. But in our world of chronic stress, we stay in fight-or-flight mode. Our systems aren’t designed to operate with those elevated levels of stress hormones, and thus experience cumulative damage unless the stress is released.
When my kids were babies, they would sometimes get angry about not getting what they wanted and would scream at the top of their lungs. Surprisingly, after they expressed the emotion, they would regularly become calm again within a minute. Their behavior gives a clue as to why mindfulness practices are so effective at lowering stress. If we feel our feelings and express them, they can be processed by our body and we can move on. But most of us in Western cultures are taught that men can’t show any emotion but anger, and women can show any emotion except anger, so we hold those “unacceptable” emotions tightly inside, unprocessed, leading to great tension.8
So, when you notice your parts taking over by recognizing the physical signals identified in exercise 3.2, take a moment to breathe deeply and feel what you are feeling.9 As I tell my son, that doesn’t mean that you act from the feeling—just because he is feeling angry, he doesn’t get to hit his sister. But naming the feeling helps to identify what’s going on with our body, so we can interrupt unconscious reactions and instead be more consciously aware; for example, “I am feeling angry, and I want to yell at somebody. Instead, I will take a deep breath and find a more productive response.”
I have also found that merely naming the feeling is often all that a part needs to relax. Like a toddler who seeks attention from their parents, turning to a part and saying, “I see you and the big feelings that you have!” can be enough to release the part’s tension. All humans want to feel seen and acknowledged, and our parts have that same need.
Love your parts
Emotions can feel overwhelming to the point where we identify with them, e.g., “I am angry.” Our parts can similarly overwhelm us such that we identify with them and can’t see any other possibilities.
What I’ve learned10 is that this is not a coincidence: strong emotions come from our parts. Our parts feel that things “should” be11 a certain way and when things don’t turn out that way, they get angry, sad, or scared. The good news is that our whole, integrated self is resilient and can accept whatever happens, and we can reconnect to that self when we recognize what’s happening and disidentify with our parts.
I love Ann Weiser Cornell’s simple exercise to create that separation from our feelings and parts. Using the example of anger, here’s how the sequence of transformation works:
1. I am angry.
2. I am feeling angry.
3. Part of me is feeling so angry right now.
With this disidentification, we can now treat our parts as separate entities to whom we can offer compassion and support when they are struggling with big emotions.
What can make our parts feel overwhelming is that they are often internalized versions of authority figures from early in our lives, who feel much bigger than us. If a big internal voice says, “You must do X,” then you shut up and do X. That immediate, unthinking obedience is how our parts get us into difficult situations with no easy answers.
As I mentioned earlier in this chapter, I find it helpful to think of parts as toddlers who have good intentions but sometimes get overwhelmed by situations. They are not powerful voices that know better than me; they are little kids doing the best they can to navigate a complex world. When they get louder, they are throwing a tantrum about being ignored, so it helps to acknowledge them and the big feelings they are feeling. As the parent of a toddler, I’ve learned that the best response to a tantrum is for me to calmly respond with love and connection because they are emotionally out of control and need me to calm them down rather than getting emotionally activated myself. Similarly, when our parts are overwhelmed, they need an acknowledgment of their situation and warm compassion and support, similar to what we would offer to a friend or loved one going through a tough time.
To do so, you can imagine having a conversation with your parts. The script could go something like this (and it can help to speak this out loud):
“I see you, little part, feeling so angry right now because you didn’t get what you wanted. You have been working so hard and doing everything you can to get that result, and it didn’t happen. That’s so frustrating! Let me give you a big warm hug to let you know how much I appreciate your efforts to keep me safe—you are working so hard, and I see that. Thank you! But please take a step back so we can try something different this time, and I promise it is safe for us.”12
You might call this re-parenting your parts, giving them the loving parenting and appreciation they didn’t receive in childhood, which is why they had to come up with other strategies to earn love, safety, and belonging.13 By seeing them, and acknowledging and honoring their perspective, you are directly satisfying their emotional needs and giving them the love they desire, so they don’t feel as compelled to enact their previous strategies to fill those needs.
Calming your parts gives you the space to make a choice about what you will do next:
• You can follow your previous pattern and let your parts unconsciously choose actions that follow the survival rules they developed to get their needs met; or
• You can act as the wise, calm parent of the family of your parts, listen to their input, and then choose a more intentional path through the world.
This brings us back to the story of my client Lucy from earlier in this chapter. Lucy grew more aware through these practices of how her parts were taking over and feeling anxiety and terror whenever somebody was unhappy. By taking a deep breath and acknowledging that her parts were feeling such terror, she was able to separate herself from her parts and let go of the humiliation and shame they felt when things weren’t working out as they “should.” As Lucy released the constraints her parts had imposed on her, she felt a great sense of freedom, of “I can do what I want to do,” allowing her to map a new path chosen from her whole self.
Chapter 4
Accept Others
When someone shows you who they are,
believe them the first time.
—Maya Angelou
In chapter 3, you learned how “you” (aka your parts) create your own cages and keep yourself constrained with rules that previously helped you earn love, safety, and belonging and/or protected you from feeling “negative” emotions. You developed awareness of the signals that indicate when those parts are taking over in exercise 3.2, so you can address their emotional needs directly rather than unconsciously enact their rules. With this approach, you can consciously choose actions that align with your intentions, rather than being derailed by your parts.
You might be thinking, “But that still doesn’t solve my stuckness! Even if I get out of my own way, I still have to deal with all of these other people who are being unreasonable—my boss, my coworkers, my spouse, my parents, my kids. They are the ones keeping me stuck, not me!”
In this chapter, we will investigate how true that claim is, and what we can do in those interactions to get different results.
Accept others as they are
In Buddhist philosophy,1 our suffering is a consequence of the gap between our expectations and reality. When we drop a ball, we expect it to fall to the ground, so when it does, we don’t feel frustrated because it happens every time. In other situations, we create our suffering and discontent by yearning for a different outcome.
We have many unconscious expectations of what other people “should” do, based on our previous life experiences, or perhaps from consuming media that shows us how people “should” behave. When another person does not do what they “should,” we get frustrated and blame them for not conforming to our expectations. The root cause of our suffering in that interaction is not the other person, but our model of what they “should” do. For instance, you might hold the following beliefs:
• My coworker “should” want to work with me and do what I ask of them.
• My manager “should” look out for me and support me in difficult situations.
• My company “should” make sure I’m appropriately compensated and promote me without me asking. I “shouldn’t” have to play politics to get what I deserve.
• My spouse “should” take care of me and never hurt my feelings.
If your coworker, manager, company, or spouse doesn’t live up to those ideals, you will be frustrated with them, even though they never made those commitments and regularly behave differently.
