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positive aspect of the pattern running. However, positive feelings that are reinforced by reward can be highly addictive, both because of the dopamine rush and also because we assume our response has been caused by our current circumstances; we are ignorant of the hidden childish sources of our motivation. As the mechanism must have evolved to calculate immediate risk, it may be blind to long-term consequences. Fortunately, the resulting unconscious programming can be corrected quite quickly with the right therapeutic technique. I will now illustrate this, and the painÐpleasure recall principle at work, through some personal anecdotes and cases histories.
First in the queue
I fly regularly between Ireland and England and used always to become agitated about getting to the departure lounge check-in desk well before time — often before anyone else was queuing or, indeed, before the desk was even staffed. This only happened on occasions when I was flying Ryanair, however. I had no problem with Aer Lingus. The difference was that Ryanair doesnÕt allocate seats, so it was always a free-for-all. No matter how much I would reason with myself and do calming breathing, I had to be one of the first in the queue at the departure gates because I had to be one of the first people on the plane and be free to choose my seat. I knew this was neurotic behaviour but nothing would alter it.
On one particular day, I was at Dublin airport, anxiously looking at the time and itching to get to the head of the Ryanair queue, when my wife Liz, who had accompanied me with our granddaughter Jessica, suggested, after I'd checked in and we had enjoyed a cup of coffee, that I should take Jessica by the hand and walk her with me to the departure gates. Being then only just over a year old, Jessica, of course, walked very slowly. So I said to Liz, in what I thought was a calm, reasonable manner, "You do realise thereÕs only 35 minutes till I have to be at the departure gates!" Now Liz, who has a well-developed capacity for picking up emotional nuances, responded rather negatively to me putting my preoccupation with being at the head of a non-existent queue above the pleasure of walking with my granddaughter.
However, despite this, I scooped Jessica up into my arms, walked quickly to the departure gates with her, gave her a kiss and then put her back into Liz's arms.
Once I was waiting at the head of the non-existent queue, I could relax. Then I started thinking to myself, what an unfortunate way for us all to have parted company. If Liz hadn't been so unreasonable and hadn't reacted like that, everything would have been perfect! But then, although loath to admit it to myself, I thought, knowing Liz she must have picked up on something in the way I spoke to her to react like that. And, when I recreated the scene in my mind, I admitted to myself that maybe there had been a certain edge to my voice. This then led me to thinking about how absurd and ridiculous my behaviour had been — about to be away from my family for a week, wouldn't I much rather have spent more time with them instead of this pressured, neurotic need to rush to the gate resulting in our unhappy farewell?
But, as soon as I started replaying in my mind what had really happened, all the feelings of urgent desperation to get to the front of the queue resurfaced once more, along with the anger at Liz for trying to stop me. However, rather than pushing the feelings away or trying to rationalise them again, I decided to explore my odd reaction by intensifying the feeling. I then imagined how I would feel if I didn't get on a plane early, for one reason or another (perhaps because people pushed me out of the way or jumped the queue), and the frustration that came up was intense. I closed my eyes, and invited my unconscious mind to see if there was something in my past that connected with that feeling. Nothing happened for a little while. But then, slowly, a childhood memory of a time when I was sent to spend a fortnight in the summer holidays with distantly related cousins crept into the edges of my mind.
Not an idyllic summer
Now, life for me at my cousins' house that summer had been extremely disorienting. I hardly knew them and it seemed to me that they had the most bizarre and uncivilised way of going about things. For instance, there might be meals provided or there might not. In my mother's very ordered household, meals were always delivered at specific times every day, so this was extremely disturbing. The only ritual I could be sure of was that my aunt would come home from work every evening with sweets or biscuits or a bag of some kind of edible goodies, and my cousins would all start screaming and jumping on her and pulling at her, to get at the bag. At first, I stood back, aghast, but it became obvious to me, after a couple of days, that whoever screamed, jumped and behaved the worst got the lion's share of the sweets. So I soon realised that, if I wasn't to starve, I had better start jumping and screaming louder than anybody else. But, when I did so, my aunt, having thrust some sweets into my hand, instantly turned on me and exclaimed, "Joe, I'm shocked at your behaviour, a well-brought up boy like you!" I withdrew in shame — but, I had got my sweets.
The emotion I recalled, when this memory came back to me, was of the social embarrassment at being told off in front of my cousins. This puzzled me because the emotion I was experiencing at the Ryanair check-in, which had taken me to this holiday memory, was not embarrassment but aggressive determination to be at the front of the queue. So I stayed with the memory, holding on to those feelings, seeing myself jumping up for those sweets and, after a brief while, with what felt like a little rush, I reconnected with them. I was jumping up aggressively, determined to fight to get my share and so, at the Ryanair check-in, I had experienced a straightforward pattern match.
That fortnight in the country with my relations had been a free-for-all; you had to fight to get what you needed. But, in my case, the situation aroused two strong, but conflicting emotions: my need to survive (expressed as desperate greed and fighting for my due) and my desire to be a good boy. But, although I had wanted to be a good boy, what had 'worked' for me then, in survival terms, was pushing and shoving and doing anything that was needed, to get fed. So when, at the Ryanair check-in desk more than 40 years later, I again experienced a free-for-all, the instinctive reaction that was activated was, "Do what you need to do to get your place, Joe!"
We can clearly see the painÐpleasure recall principle at work here. I had pattern matched Liz's social disapproval (and, on other occasions, the potential social disapproval of other passengers if I were too forcible in pushing myself forward) combined with the pleasure of getting on the plane early and choosing my seat in comfort, to the previous experience of my auntÕs social disapproval combined with the pleasure of getting the sweets. The first thing I had been aware of at the airport, however, was the pain of potential social disapproval so, in this case, I had dealt it with by lifting Jessica up and carrying her to the departure gates to speed up the whole process. I had figured that this would, to some extent, reduce Liz's disapproval. And I had also dealt with the potential social disapproval of my fellow passengers by making sure I was near the head of the queue, so that there was no need to queue-jump. Once I had a strategy in place to deal with the social disapproval (the painful or negative aspect of the memory), the positive emotion of aggression could come to the fore — getting to the front of the queue.
When I had previously brought that particular memory to mind, the only feeling I had recalled was the embarrassment at my aunt's disapproval. I had, therefore, had no conscious memory of the greed and desperation that I experienced when fighting for the sweets. But this time, when I stayed with the anger that I was experiencing as I stood in the departure lounge queue, I became conscious of my angry feelings towards her in the memory. And when, in my mind, I gave voice to those feelings ("I've got to get my share of sweets, if I'm to survive in your stupid house!"), both my desperation to get to the head of the queue, and the anger I was feeling against Liz evaporated. More importantly, the feeling of pressure to head the queue has never returned, although I have caught many more Ryanair flights since. Of course, it is always nice to be one of the first on a plane, so as to choose where to sit in comfort and have enough storage space to put cabin luggage overhead, but the crucial difference is that it is no longer an uncontrollable compulsion.
The technique of focusing on a current feeling that seems to be excessive given the present circumstances is known as an 'affect bridge'.[5] It is
well known to psychotherapists as a powerful way to access a pattern match from the past that needs de-conditioning. I will illustrate with an example.
No time to play
All my adult life, when engaged in social conversations, I would soon get a restless feeling that I should be working. This feeling used to perplex me because it would occur even when there was nothing urgent that needed doing.
So, on one such occasion, when this compulsive feeling of needing to work came up, I stayed with it to see what memory, if any, might come to mind. Up came a childhood memory of how, every Saturday, my parents would go into town to do the shopping and my older sister would marshal us older boys to clean the house from top to bottom, while my younger brothers played outside. I could easily reconnect with the feeling of, "You can't play. You have to work!" Having accessed that feeling and relocated it back in its correct context, I have since ceased to be troubled by the compulsion to work at seemingly inappropriate times. Now I make more of a conscious choice about when I work.
This is a classic example of how the affect bridge works. In this instance it had helped me to discover a sub-threshold trauma which was soon resolved. However, had this technique, as normally practised, been used on the childhood memory I had pattern matched to when checking in at the airport to fly Ryanair with its two associated emotions (painful and pleasurable), it would have had me focus on the first accessed emotion (the social embarrassment) and simply intensify it. But this would have been the incorrect emotion to focus upon as it was not what was driving the problem behaviour.
It was only when I stayed with the memory, while acknowledging
that first emotion of embarrassment, that another strong emotional connection, which was at first hidden, became apparent — and proved to be the troublesome one. This explains why the affect bridge doesn't work sometimes: if the initial problem has involved both pleasure and pain, the first emotion linked to isn't the problematic one. In the Ryanair example, the problematic emotion was the second emotion related to the memory: anger.
In psychodynamic psychotherapy, anger is often regarded as a cover-up emotion. So, in a case like this, it would be common practice to encourage the patient to be in touch with the feelings of social embarrassment that are supposedly being covered up by the anger. The patient would also be encouraged to recall other examples of excessive anger covering up social embarrassment and to give expression to those feelings of social embarrassment along with the feeling of anger thus engendered. In this process the patient would come to recognise excessive anger in situations involving social humiliation as 'one of their issues'. But the excessive anger problem would continue to exist because its source in the angry/positive root of the molar memory would remain untreated by this method.
It is necessary, then, to adapt the affect bridge to resolve a painÐpleasure problem. Here is another example.
One of the boys
Throughout my adult life, I have been aware of a strong desire — stronger, I suspect, than other men might experience — to be accepted into a group of males. This has been a strong influence on my behaviour over the years — it certainly influenced me, as a young man, to drink more than I otherwise would have done because drinking 'with the boys' was an easy scenario in which I could be accepted. Indeed, I could excel — telling jokes and contributing to the 'craic', as we say in Ireland.
So, on one occasion, when I knew a party of male friends would be meeting for a few drinks and was experiencing the usual longing to meet up with them and be one of the gang, I deliberately decided not to go. Instead, I sat down quietly and focused on this longing, now thwarted, of wanting to be one of the guys. When I focused on and intensified that yearning, it brought me straight back to a ritual humiliation that I went through day after day for years during my childhood.
I was a socially inhibited child and, for socially inhibited children, team games are torture. I had no difficulty defending myself in one-to-one arguments; it was only in team sports that this inhibition manifested itself. Every day at primary school, the boys would have to play football. Two of the best players would be chosen to pick a team each, and every day I would be standing there, with a mounting sense of shame, as more and more 'boys' names were called, until only I and a few other boys, who were equally as unenthusiastic about the prospect of playing football, were left. But the biggest terror was that I wouldn't get picked at all, that neither captain would eventually say, "Oh, let Griffin join our side, then".
When, on the day of the proposed meeting with my male friends, I stayed with that feeling of desperation for peer-group acceptance, what came up initially was this memory of shame, as I waited to be selected for the team. Now, if I were in therapy of a certain kind, at that stage I would be encouraged to really experience the shame, to get right down into it and relive every gruesome second of it. But, as we have seen, it was not the right emotion. To focus on the shame would make the experience of shame many
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References
5. Watkins, J G (1971). The affect bridge: a hypnoanalytic technique. International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 19, 1, 21—7.
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© Joe Griffin (2006) |
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This article is a revised version of an article which first appeared in Volume 13, No, 3 (2006) of the Human Givens journal.
JOE GRIFFIN is a psychotherapist who, with IVAN TYRRELL developed the human givens approach.
Choose a case study from a human givens therapist working with molar memories:
Case study 1 — Pamela Woodford
Case study 2 — Mike Beard
This article appears in the new human givens book An Idea In Practice: using the human givens approach
Choose a case study from a human givens therapist working with molar memories:
Case study 1 — Pamela Woodford
Case study 2 — Mike Beard
Return to top
Choose a case study from a human givens therapist working with molar memories:
Case study 1 — Pamela Woodford
Case study 2 — Mike Beard
This article appears in the new human givens book An Idea In Practice: using the human givens approach
Choose a case study from a human givens therapist working with molar memories:
Case study 1 — Pamela Woodford
Case study 2 — Mike Beard
Return to top
Choose a case study from a human givens therapist working with molar memories:
Case study 1 — Pamela Woodford
Case study 2 — Mike Beard
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