Just
a reminder that the purpose of this discussion aims at stimulating
thought and self awareness as tools
to help those in recovery
from trauma learn how to make safer
choices. To make the discussion more jocular, we've defined
Cognitive Biases as “CranioRectal
Inversions” (CRI).
We
don't come with a user's manual for our parents when we're born, and
no one gives us one when we head towards adulthood. We are human,
and as the old slogan goes, “Children
learn what they live.”
I can see where I've made nearly every one of these errors in
judgement at one time or another, and I ventured into this topic as a
growth experience for myself. Like every other creature on the
planet, I fall into predictable patterns of behavior, and I'm blind
to some of them. Always remember that the most amazing thing that
our minds do involved avoiding painful truth, but sometimes if we
dare stare into the abyss of what we think that we can't see, we see
how self-destructive we become in our blindness.
The
term 'self-destructive' brings to my mind the more obvious behaviors
like gambling and drinking. Drug abuse or self-injury come to mind
next, as they directly and literally destroy the body in an attempt
to numb the soul's pain. But in considering my own most common
Cranio-Rectal Inversions, they're not ones that I like to think of as
self-destructive....but they are perhaps the most dangerous of all
for me.
Learning
I
am careful about what I blog about, particularly when it comes to
personal information that involves other people in my life. A few
years ago, I sent something I'd written to several mothers, because
I'd written about how difficult it was for me to forgive my parents
for a devastating exchange we'd had --- that was not forgivable. I
did forgive by releasing them from the debt I felt that they owed me
for the hurt they'd caused, but they make the mistake of considering
forgiveness and reconciliation to be the same thing. I could move on
from that painful moment of the way that they define me, but I
couldn't continue to repeat and repeat the sentiment in word and
deed. And they just were not willing to do so. The way they defined
themselves became the way that they defined me, and it set my most
common cognitive biases in stone in my mind.
Over
the past year or so, I ventured into a new challenge of a similar set
of circumstances outside of my family. I've never faced these things
in a workplace because of the operating procedures and clear cut
chain of command that provided protective structure for me.
Interpersonal relationships aren't governed by such structure unless
we create it through boundaries. Needless to say, having faced these
hard patterns of behavior with family, resolving to abandon the
self-destructive biases which harmed me and those who love me, that
resolve would again be tested.
Part
of me felt that I'd never really made any healing, maturing progress
at all, but I know to question any statement of 'always' or 'never.'
I had to grow beyond the path of least resistance while honoring my
limitations by coming to terms with how I learned to behave – as if
this were the next graduate level course that I didn't know I'd
enrolled in. I had to figure out how to make that new information
work in a broader situation. How could I do that while committed to the high road?
Painful
Grieving
I
almost laughed one day when a friend of mine said that it was obvious
that I always thought about what I said. I only wish that it were
true. Maybe I am with some things, and my own biases have much to do
with that. I can also talk to a friend about what I did and didn't
do right or wrong as I walked out this new part of my journey of
letting go of people and events that were impossible. Because of my
own biases, I didn't want to let go of the situations as they were,
but while in the throes of the pain of it all, I didn't want to blog
about something so fresh. I needed to weather some of the grief so
that I could look my own biases head on to see how self-destructive
they were for me all along.
So
I hope to pick up where I left off so many months ago, not only to
work on the Redeeming Dinah blog, but also to grieve. And I'm not sure if I fell back into a cycle of hopefully healthy constriction, though it's lasted a bit longer than I would like to admit.
An acquaintance who I consider a friend who considered my husband and me to be like second parents committed suicide this past year. I was thinking of her as I was traveling and bought her a gift, but while sitting up all night in an airport, spotty internet made it hard to contact her. I returned home and slept nearly all day to be awakened by a phone call that she'd taken her life, right about the time that I was collecting my luggage.
A few weeks later, my sixteen year old cat died, and I have lived without a cat for the first time since I was two years old. It's strange to me how one experience gets wrapped around another for me. (I don't know if that happens to other people like it does for me.) I had to move on from people and endeavors and hopes and joy with them because either they couldn't come with me, or I couldn't continue to follow along with them. I decided that writing on a blog about such precious things while brokenhearted was not wise. It comes with risk.
An acquaintance who I consider a friend who considered my husband and me to be like second parents committed suicide this past year. I was thinking of her as I was traveling and bought her a gift, but while sitting up all night in an airport, spotty internet made it hard to contact her. I returned home and slept nearly all day to be awakened by a phone call that she'd taken her life, right about the time that I was collecting my luggage.
A few weeks later, my sixteen year old cat died, and I have lived without a cat for the first time since I was two years old. It's strange to me how one experience gets wrapped around another for me. (I don't know if that happens to other people like it does for me.) I had to move on from people and endeavors and hopes and joy with them because either they couldn't come with me, or I couldn't continue to follow along with them. I decided that writing on a blog about such precious things while brokenhearted was not wise. It comes with risk.
Getting
Things Right
That
phrase of 'getting it right' has echoed through my heart and mind my
whole life. Firstborn and only children get drilled with this idea
as they're growing up, as their parents learn along with them about
how to develop reasonable expectations in life. As an imperfect
person in an imperfect world, I had to make peace with the idea that
it's a virtue to seek perfection, but I didn't know how to temper my
expectations. We can perfect our skills which improve our ability to
'get it right,' but I learned that this was also possible within
relationships, too.
I
don't know that I get anything right, and relationships are so
dynamic and changing that setting such an expectation does become
self-destructive. But my own biases make letting go of this
expectation so difficult. And letting go brings grief for what was
hoped for but cannot be.
But in the spirit of getting this Cognitive Bias business right, so much as a novice can do, I wanted to wait. They are just ideas about what I see as I move along on my journey of life, trying to live fully and love tenderly. Love requires vulnerability, and vulnerability involves risk.
But in the spirit of getting this Cognitive Bias business right, so much as a novice can do, I wanted to wait. They are just ideas about what I see as I move along on my journey of life, trying to live fully and love tenderly. Love requires vulnerability, and vulnerability involves risk.
For
Further Reading:
- One of the $3 Kindle books about Cognitive Bias at Amazon.com
- Gilovich, Griffin & Kahneman's Heuristics and Biases
- Gilovich's How We Know What Isn't So
- Robert Cialdini's Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
- Judith Herman's Trauma
and Recovery
