Why My Common Cognitive Biases Make Me Lousy at Poker

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).

As I walked through this past year (recapped here), I recognized the familiar sense of panic that I felt during my last year in my spiritually abusive (cultic) church. A number of years ago, I'd become involved with a new group of people that aspired to achieve some idealistic causes, but as it unfolded, it became an unhealthy and familiar trap. As was true of my old church, not everyone experiences the discomfort of dysfunction, yet like some others, I found myself in good company.  I think that the familiarity of the dynamics caused me to forget about my competent adult self, and I felt swept up in a deep sense of childhood helplessness.  (As a friend put it, these folks did have a formidable "skill set," too.)  

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Wishful Thinking and Jello

I remember when I was head over heels (sometimes literally) in that Toronto Blessing Movement in Word of Faith, I could feel the disappointment coming. I was probably about ten pounds overweight at the time, and I went on an extended fast. I stopped checking my weight when I was three weeks in, and I'd dropped about 35 pounds. I continued to fast until I “believed” I'd achieved what I'd set out to overcome, but I didn't weigh myself again. I do remember when my weight shot about 35 pounds ahead of my happy starting weight. That was the first of many fasts.

I did have some grand insights as a result of that fast, but they weren't what I'd hoped they would be. My mom was undergoing radiation, and she wanted a miracle, signs and wonders, buzzy, exciting healing. I wanted a magical solution that would halt the spiritual abuse and the abuse suffered by women taking place at my church. I'd done just about everything but an extended fast to achieve that special status through which miracles are supposed to flow. I felt as though I'd exhausted everything else.

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Positive Perceptions and Blame Games: The Self Serving Bias

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).

Like the Blind Spot and Confirmation biases, the Self Serving Bias also serves to preserve the ego by painting the self in a positive light. One of many other attribution errors, anything that happens that benefits a person is credited to their achievement and merit. This assumption is sometimes true, but not always. The tendency helps us cope with and manage our fear of failure so that we can find optimism in the face of self-doubt.

In the event of failure or negative outcomes, the Self Serving Bias can also work to preserve ego by laying blame on some source other than the self. If we get a favorable score on a test, we take the credit for knowing the material and performing well. However, if we earn a low score on the test, we can easily blame the test or the teacher or some other factor to assuage our own feelings. We human beings tend to find it easy to assign cause to anything but our own behavior or limitations.

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Cranio-Rectal Inversion and Cognitive Bias

(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.

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The Epiphany Moment: When Your Confidence In Your Religious Group Falls Apart

Graham Chapman / Monty Python 

Whenever I talk to people who have exited a spiritually abusive group, I usually ask them about what I have come to describe as the “epiphany moment” – the moment when circumstances force them to acknowledge that there is something desperately wrong, and they find themselves no longer able to make excuses for what they observe or experience.  (It's as if Graham Chapman comes in and knocks all of the books off of your shelves!)  

Everyone who has walked through the process knows that moment well when they felt the foundations of their trust fail. It's a point at which the the pain necessary to maintain group membership suddenly, significantly, and painfully outweighs any benefit and gain. I believe that people who remain in a group often have such moments, too, but they choose to ignore the conflict so that they can remain a part of their group.

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When your Religious Leader Falls Off the Pedestal

Most people walk away from high demand religion on their own because some event or series of them bursts the bubble of wonder that such systems create. A vital part of that process for me involved “gradually waking up” to see the very negative side of my pastor – the side that I denied through most of the time that we were in contact. I was moved to write this after reading about Peter Bradrick's experience who seems to have had a more abrupt awakening and a much longer indoctrination period during a more impressionable time in his life.

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