(You
can't live very safely if your head's up your _____.)
The
title of this post conveys a rude image, but I find it sadly and
uncomfortably true. In pondering my own recent disappointments in
life and establishing safety in trauma recovery, I found myself
looking squarely at my own cognitive biases. And I realized that you
can't see and hear if you've buried your head away somewhere, even if
it is self interest.
“Cognitive”
refers to thinking ability, and when teamed with “bias,” it
refers to errors in our thinking that result in faulty judgements and
poor decisions. The good news? We expereince them as a function of
our humanity, and they don't seem much like biases or errors when we
fall into them. And if you think about it, a life well lived might
just be the long process of “pulliing our heads out” over
the course of our lives concerning all sorts of sundry matters as our
world and our experiences expand.
While we
need to “fly
from the dream squashers,” we also need to manage the task of
keeping our feet on the ground, too. If we grew up in a high demand
home, we very likely saw little of this
kind of balance modeled for us, so we must learn it without our
family's safety net in our adulthood.
Wisdom
to Know the Difference
What do
we do first? We focus our attention and our actions primarily on
those things that we do have the power to control or change. We need
to develop a balanced and realistic appreciation of locus
of control – and that serves as the most basic element of
safety and stability. If we've exited a high demand relationship or
grew up in one, we might not even understand what is or is not within
our realm of control. We may have believed the illusion that we're a
victim
of circumstances, have no choice or that we only have bounded
choice. If we're battling chronic trauma, we may feel especially
powerless.
We can
also over and underestimate ourselves and our influence – so that
is why the management of ignorance becomes so important to us. (See
this previous
post about types of ignorance – a very human trait of a lack of
understanding.) That is also why educating oneself about the nature
of our humanity can be so helpful. We can work to develop the most
realistic view about who we are and how we fit into life to combat
these human problems and to avoid the high costs of the hard
pitfalls.
He
(or She) Who Will Not See
An
interesting thing happened to me as I sat down to look at material on
this topic. Inaccurate
memory proves to be on the most difficult cognitive biases that
sneaks up on us, so it's always good to look at a reliable, fixed
source. I definitely identified the errors that I notice in others
with whom I share ongoing, frustrating conflict in my review. I
didn't expect to recognize bad habits and traits that I make myself
which do little but fuel the conflict. There were a few that I don't
ever remember stopping to consider in days past.
I say
this often, but the amazing thing about our human brain is not the
capacity to realize things compared to our remarkable, creative,
resilient ability to avoid, forget, miss, and fail to consider those
things which cause personal stress, fear, or even just discomfort.
That ability proves to be of great protective benefit, and it can
also be our greatest curse.
Seeing
new inconsistencies in myself becomes a good sign of my own
healing....though it feels awful! as my first journey through this
looking at safety and stability, I was in too much pain to take in as
much as I can now. My world is bigger, and I'm stronger. I don't
know that I feel any less disappointed that I'm not more further
along in my growth process. Recognizing one's blindness and deafness
hurts pride. But knowing that I'm human does soften the blow a bit.
I'm strong enough in my own concept of self which partly depends on
my own balance of locus of control to see. I have pulled out of some
of the illusion of ignorance. The struggle of discomfort means that
I'm still growing.
May you
grow along with me in posts to come about what it means to be safe
and stable and how our blind spots can thwart that process. The best
way to begin disarming them starts with understanding what they are.
For
further reading until the next post:
- Robert Cialdini's Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
- Judith Herman's Trauma and Recovery
- Bessel Van der Kolk's The Body Keeps Score
- Francine
Shapiro's Getting
Past Your Past
