TIFT #123: The Inner Mind–Master Strategist

This post is a look at the incredible variety of ways the inner non-conscious mind seeks to ensure our survival. For some time, I have wanted to try laying out the range of possibilities. This is not the first time anyone has made a list of such strategies, but prominent efforts have been limited by our centuries-old love affair with words and cognition. Anna Freud listed cognitive distortions like denial and projection, while Cognitive-behavioral therapy focused on concepts like catastrophization and black and white thinking. Those are only the beginning. When we take nonverbal messaging and behavior into account, the range gets quite a bit broader.

Let’s start with the story of why distortions are needed in the first place. The mammalian central nervous system was designed to detect threats to survival. Young mammals could lose their mother and die. Older ones main risk was being wounded or eaten by a predator. In the brain these dangers were translated into neural signals. First comes pain, long used as a flag for threats to bodily survival. But a more effective approach is anticipation. The brain evolved to predict threats before they happen. Jaak Panksepp lists the negative emotion precursors that signal the need for a life-saving response. They are FEAR, for times when harm is imminent, PANIC/GRIEF for becoming separated from the mother or the group, and RAGE for times when attack is the response most likely to ensure survival. Pain, together with those anticipatory unconscious emotions, became the triggers for life-saving responses.

As signals responsible for launching survival strategies, they became proxies for the real danger. They were the brain’s final representations of the specifics of the danger, leading to calculations of the best response. How imminent, how probable, how lethal was the threat? The response was then honed through evolution and experience to improve survival against that threat.

Avoiding the signal for danger more than the danger itself

With humans, things got more complicated. For us, survival depends more on managing our social environment than on responding to physical threats. But our social life is far too complex. One explanation is that for us, responses no longer aim directly at survival but are designed more to turn down the volume of the alarm signal. It is equivalent to a deep sleeper who sets the alarm to be sure to make an important meeting but turns off the irritating alarm and goes back to sleep. When they are not the same, the brain is more interested in getting rid of unconscious precursor emotions that signal the need for a response than it is to ensuring survival. In PTSD, clients avoid recalling their experience to keep the noise level tolerable. The anxious mind translates unconscious nonverbal fears into a conscious metaphors such as an airplane crashing. Then it avoids air travel as if that might calm the inner fire arising from some early, dark threat. Risking  emotional pain, for example that associated with assertiveness, is avoided, leading to failure to stand up to another person’s controlling behavior.

The threat of failure

Another important trigger for responses is the threat of failure. Panksepp describes the human motivational system as the SEEKING system, capable of attaching itself to any short or long-term goal. When we are moving towards the goal, we feel pleasure and even elation. When the goal is eluding us, we experience discouragement and despair. The threat of failing to progress towards a goal is another non-conscious signal indicating the need for either of two responses. One is to shut down and give up and the other is to find hope and fight on.

Shame, the special emotion reserved mainly for humans

What really challenges our non-conscious survival systems is the new layer of self-management granted to us by evolution. Unlike Panksepp’s deep limbic emotions, shame and guilt originate in the cortex, where behavior is evaluated according to internalized values, attitudes, ideals, and prohibitions. When we find ourselves on the wrong side of our own values, the system showers us with painful emotion. Shame and guilt are such strong deterrents that I suspect they have representation in the limbic system as well. In the end, they work like the other survival systems, using negative emotion to keep us out of trouble. Shame, in particular, is as powerful as the other limbic emotions in influencing behavior. For the most part this system works adequately to keep us in line with the values of our family and culture, but it can also be distorted by adopted values, leading to judgments and shame that are inappropriate and unhealthy.

Maladaptive survival strategies

Once the signal has been given, what troublesome strategies does the non-conscious mind utilize to put out the fires of non-conscious precursor emotions? Entrenched Maladaptive Patterns, EMPs, are less than optimal responses to negative non-conscious precursor emotions. What makes them maladaptive is that they are outdated, that is, replaceable by a more satisfactory response. Typically a contemporary trigger activates an old dread, which leads to an outdated response.

What follows is not definitive, perhaps better thought of as an early draft. Like the human mind in general, the breadth of possibilities is immense and resistant to neat categorization.

FEAR & Discomfort

Here are responses to Panksepp's FEAR, as well as to signals of pain and discomfort.

• Avoidance of scary or painful past experiences: When avoidance means renouncing valuable behaviors it is maladaptive. Beyond that, failing to gain experience with important life skills is the cause of arrested development.
• Avoidance by using substances
• Dissociation: automatic loss of recall or sense of realness of an experience.
• Distraction: Frenetic activity and other intense preoccupations can serve as distractions from a fear-inducing circumstance.
• Avoidance of symbolic equivalents:  The inner mind, pushed by genetics, may carry a heightened sense of danger, which then energizes a specific threat schema connected to a frightening experience and to the appraisal of danger. It then translates that fear metaphorically into a concrete equivalent and projects worries into consciousness, which become the subject of efforts at control. Those might be medical concerns and visits to check on possible diseases, avoidance of leaving home, crossing bridges, etc.
• Amplifiers: A characteristic response is for the conscious mind to focus on the worst consequences of a specific fear, resulting in an increase in the urgency and sense of danger. “Then I’ll surely lose my job, and become homeless!” Catastrophization is an example.
• Intellectualization & Isolation: Identified by Anna Freud, these strategies remove uncomfortable emotional content, whether related to fear, values, or past experiences of discomfort.

In general, the top-down therapeutic approach for symbolic worries is to face the fear and engage in healthy activities. The bottom-up answer is to change the schemas responsible for appraising the triggering circumstance as dangerous and that is best accomplished through memory reconsolidation. 

PANIC/GRIEF

These are strategies in response to the threat of loss of connection.

• Avoidant attachment: Early fear of separation can lead to unhealthy self-sufficiency (or failure to develop interdependence) from the first years of life and subsequently. Later this can be seen as a pattern of craving closeness, but unconsciously fearing it.
• Anxious attachment: A response to fear of separation with clinginess and constant seeking of reassurance of attachment.
• Disorganized attachment: involves random and generally unsuccessful attempts to deal with the need for attachment.
• Splitting: Around the third year of life, difficulty with attachment can lead to mentally distorting relationships into purely positive and purely negative forms. Later relationships are forced into either mold, and can change abruptly from one valence to the other, causing confusion and instability in life. 
• Identification with the aggressor: The Stockholm syndrome is an example, where fear of aloneness and harm can trigger internalization of values seen through the eyes of the aggressor.

RAGE

• Attacking others: These aggressive attitudes and behaviors can manifest as strategies triggered secondarily by the other inner emotions listed here. Attacking can also lead to consequences and dread of experiencing them. Acting on rage and hate can be mistakenly sought as a path to closure, that is, resolution of painful feelings.

Failure of SEEKING

• Depression, discouragement, demoralization: These are usual responses to the inner mind’s appraisal of low likelihood of success in reaching a goal. They can be seen as archaic survival tactics based on saving energy and resources.
• Obsession: This is often the inner mind’s instinctive and primitive response to failure to achieve a goal. In effect, an illusory version of hope is maintained by repetitive thoughts related to the goal. Such thoughts may be associated with the belief that performing a ritual will reduce anxiety, which may, itself be related to inner fear of failure to achieve a SEEKING goal.
• Maintaining hope: Many patterns embody strategies for maintaining hope of achievement of a goal. Unconsciously driven seeking to undo deprivation, for example after loss of a parent, can be a way to keep hope alive. It also serves to avoid the pain of final acceptance of failure.
• Seeking justice: The pursuit of an apology, admission of wrongdoing, punishment, or retribution can all be thought of as ways to avoid the pain of failure to achieve a goal when thwarted by the other person.
• Applying rules: Associated with later childhood, a strategy for controlling others can be pursued by scrupulously following rules in the false hope that the other will be influenced into doing the same.

Shame & guilt

This may be the largest category. As stated earlier, one of the powerful ways humans solve problems is by internalizing values, attitudes, ideals, and prohibitions as ways to make sense of a distorted world. One established, these are resistant to change and potent sources of shame, which then shapes behavior. Below are some commonly held values that lead to outdated and maladaptive strategies.

• Powerlessness: In response, when the feeling of possession of power becomes a value, it’s lack becomes a trigger for shame and leads to a host of unhealthy strategies. Achieving and expressing powerfulness compensates for a shortfall. This can result in abuse of others, with its own consequences.
• Self control and maturity: Essentially all humans come to value these qualities and feel shame when they fail. Limitations due to young age and normal immaturity can still be experienced as shameful, causing significant damage in life as well as avoidance of experiences that could lead to further healthy development.
• Helplessness: Lack of agency also functions as a value, where failure leads to shame. Avoidance of that shame can lead to exaggerated passivity or to the opposite, turning passive into active, sometimes through an exaggerated emphasis on control and sometimes unconsciously motivated voluntary re-enactment of problematic experiences.
• Being caught by surprise: The value of being prepared can be evidenced by shame when caught by surprise. A strategy is hyper-vigilance and bracing, which can be muscular as well as mental. This can become habitual and part of one's identity.
• Warding off shame and guilt:  Many of the traditional defenses of psychoanalysis consist of cognitive distortions implemented to avoid shame and guilt. Projection may be a way of denying aggression. Denial expresses the opposite of an unacceptable idea. Displacement puts responsibility on another and undoing gives the illusion that a problem action was never taken.

Behavioral strategies

Here, I am breaking the pattern I have followed above. In many of the above categories, behavioral patterns were among the remedies. However, maladaptive behavior patterns are often rationalized by the client and tend to be underemphasized in psychotherapy. For that reason, I want to mention some important patterns of behavior, each of which serves as a strategy for avoiding some painful, uncomfortable, or overwhelming inner emotion. In treatment, voluntary changes in behavior constitute a powerful top-down approach, while exploration of the triggers and schemas involved can lead to bottom-up removal of the drive that maintains the behavior. Without inner drive, what remains is habit, and that becomes a target for further change from the top down. Here is a preliminary list: 

• Passivity
• Inactivity (not doing).
• Aggression towards others
• Aggression towards the self
• Hyper-vigilance
• Self-deprecation
• Self-aggrandizement
• Excessive self-sufficiency
• Overcompensation
• Manipulative behavior towards others
• Controlling behavior towards others
• Self-harming behavior
• Self-defeating behavior
• Over-control of self
• Compulsive tension relieving behaviors
• Re-enactment

I hope this attempt is helpful in considering the many shapes, sizes, and forms of EMPs we encounter in our work. I’m sure this list is incomplete, and you are welcome to use the comments facility below to add your thoughts on helpful additions.

 Jeffery Smith MD

Photo Credit: Ahmed for Unsplash