TIFT #107: The Gift of the Inner Child

Most of us light up when we see a small child. That’s how we want to respond to the our own and our clients’ inner selves. I’m afraid I haven’t made that as clear as I would want, especially because that inner child is so often the main character in the drama of psychotherapy. Let’s put aside pathology for a moment to delight in the innocent strength of inner children.

This is especially important because our field is still somewhat under the shadow of 19th Century attitudes when children were supposed to be seen but not heard. Since the age of enlightenment, the goal was to get past childhood and embrace “reason,” keeping emotions under control and suppressing irrationality. Today, we have changed a lot. We value spontaneity and emotion. We seek innovation and creativity and talk about “flow,” when the intellect steps aside to let the inner mind take over as our reliable guide.

The unconscious mind

The word unconscious tends to conjure up images of inner conflict and trouble, but let’s think about everyday experience. As we speak, thoughts “pop” into consciousness, but where do they come from? We have no awareness of their source. From nowhere they arrive, often remarkably well formed. They are gifts from our automatic, unconscious mind. When we have a creative idea, it is because somewhere, our mind put things together in a novel way. We weren’t aware of the process, only of our subsequent evaluation as to whether the new combination might actually work. These creative processes are automatic and unconscious. Paying attention to our inner mind’s products gives us an indirect view of the amazing activity that powers some of the best things in our lives.

So the “unconscious” is an active partner in most of our mental activity. And it often displays the delightful characteristics of a child, an inner child. Of course, children can be challenging, but much more, they are among our favorite beings.

Thinking fast

Kahneman, in popularizing the distinction between “thinking fast” and “thinking slow,” did us a favor. That idea creates a new and more detailed way to distinguish between conscious and unconscious mental activity. He characterized fast thinking as rapid but imprecise, while thinking slowly was valued as more reliable and accurate. Maybe the popular presentation of thinking fast reflects a subtly negative attitude regarding the unconscious, but it also highlights the evolutionary and practical importance of having rapid and automatic internal information processing. 

For our purposes, the importance of thinking fast is that it refers to the operation of the inner child we want to understand and appreciate. It is presented as fast but inaccurate, but more than that, it is lively, surprising, creative, innovative, and often incredibly accurate. Furthermore, it operates both day and night with no effort on our part. It is also largely outside our control. Most important, like having a child in the family, it brings delight. Engaging with inner selves enriches life.

Metaphor as a unit of information

I like to say that “the mind is a metaphor engine.” What that means is that the inner mind stores information in a way that is more like metaphor than anything else. Neural networks are groups of neurons that tend to fire together. That’s the meaning of Hebb’s 1949 statement that “neurons that fire together wire together.” Wiring together means their synaptic links are strengthened so that one neuron tends to trigger the next. We might think of them as clumps of neurons, functionally linked together. Now think of the word, “bicycle.” Immediately your unconscious mind links it to a number of other clumps of neurons. You might think of your first bike, or its color, or your own children learning to ride, or the Tour de France, or spinning wheels, or a flat tire. The connections are rapid and endless.

Metaphorical truth

The connections between these clumps of neurons, which we could also described as “pieces of information,” can be more or less close. When one clump does a good job of representing another, we say the metaphor is “accurate.” When a client describes a person in their life, we might check back by giving our own description. “You mean she was overly controlling?” That is not a fact but a metaphor that popped into our own mind and might be “on target” or not. “No, I mean she was always right, no matter what.” With words, we are trying to find a metaphor that subjectively links our experience to our client’s. That is the definition of accurate empathy. This is a different kind of accuracy compared with formal logic. Formal logic is true or not true. This truth is relative, an ideal, approached but never perfectly achieved.

This is important in appreciating the inner mind. Science, since the age of enlightenment, has focused on mathematical or logical truth. That means that things are precisely defined and can be proven or disproven. The inner mind doesn’t work that way. It cares a lot about accuracy, but accuracy is a quality, not an absolute. We can call it “fuzzy logic.” Trying to apply the rules of formal logic not only doesn’t work, it tends to devalue the reality of metaphorical accuracy. We all know the feeling when the metaphor we offer to our client “resonates” or does not. When it has a “ring of truth” that means it has metaphorical truth. There is no such thing as absolute metaphorical truth. Metaphors are only better or worse, more or less accurate. Furthermore, they can, and often are, exquisitely accurate in one aspect, and off the mark in another. That is the reality of metaphorical truth. It is what great poets are so good at creating.

We could think of metaphorical truth as “pattern matching.” That is quite a useful conceptualization, but it misses the fact that information held in the mind has as many aspects as it does associations. Pattern matching is binary. There is a match or not. This is sometimes relevant, for example, regarding whether or not the mind identifies a threat, but we need to be aware that pattern matching only captures one aspect of a metaphorical truth.

A good example of the importance of metaphorical accuracy is how we speak about the inner mind itself. It is often helpful to personify the inner mind. I use whatever metaphor seems the closest to the client’s experience. It might be “inner child,” but could just as well be “inner mind,” “inner self,” or “nonconscious problem solver.” In choosing our words, we are constantly seeking greater metaphorical truth in relation to the client’s living experience.

It is only recently that we have a metaphor to describe how the inner mind processes information. Modern machine learning works more like the human mind than previous generations of computers. The old style of artificial intelligence was to gather rules from experts, put data into rigid but consistent forms, and apply those rules. Even hybrid systems, using both rules and machine learning, have turned out to be less effective for speech recognition compared to pure machine learning, where the computer mimics biological neural networks. Like the human mind, machine learning seeks a probabilistic solution, that is, the best answer, rather than the “true” answer.

 My suggestion, then, is that when we are dealing with the inner mind, we should leave aside notions of mathematical truth and embrace the idea of metaphorical truth. This may be awkward, since most of what we call "science" is firmly entwined with formal logic and mathematical truth. This begins to get at the problem of “evidence-based” versus clinical wisdom. In our field, the latter has been effectively banished from respectable science, but we may be throwing out the baby with the bathwater. I would argue for the legitimacy of seeking ever better metaphors to express individual human experience, where the truthfulness of a metaphor is more aesthetic than mathematical.

Black and white thinking

Besides truthfulness, thinking fast has other important characteristics. Imagine that someone you love has received a preliminary lab test suggesting a serious cancer. Emotional responses to this emotionally powerful information show sharp limitations. The inner emotional self will either predict that the person “definitely has cancer" and will die, or goes the opposite way and predicts that everything will turn out OK. The doctor says there is a 28% chance, but that belongs to the world of thinking slowly, and has no impact on the emotions or predictions arising from the inner mind. I suspect this is a consequence of the fact that groups of neurons can interact with one another in only two physiological ways. They can be excitatory, increasing the likelihood of another group firing, or inhibitory, lowering the likelihood of firing. Whatever the explanation, the fact is that metaphorical relationships come in two varieties, positive relatedness or negative relatedness. This black and white thinking may also be related to the fact that when we ask the inner mind to give us opposites, they pop into consciousness with almost as much ease as similarities. Unlike formal logic, the precise nature of the relationship between chunks of information is not defined, only its strength and its positive or negative valence.

To summarize, fast thinking relates things or aspects of things as associated in a positive or negative way, and those relationships can be stronger or weaker. When they are “spot on,” we get a delicious feeling of understanding. This special form of logic is different but no less valuable than the mathematical kind. Much of the time the two minds form a perfect partnership, the inner one supplying the creativity, while the conscious one filters out what doesn't work.

The origins and purpose of the inner mind

The inner mind was there, thinking fast, long before humans invented mathematical logic. It evolved from earlier species to process information about the self and the environment, but for what? Evolutionary theory says that evolution has driven this increasingly elaborate information processing to increase the likelihood of survival and procreation, not necessarily for the individual but for the population. That is the purpose of the human mind. Some have said that art and creativity have nothing to do with survival. Here is why that is not true.

In the case of humans, we are not just social, like dogs and wolves, but super-social. From birth, our survival depends on eliciting caring from grown-ups and others. Being banished from the tribe, for most of human existence, has meant death. Current theory says that we outlasted Neanderthals because we were more socially connected. For humans, social success or failure is often weighted more than physical safety. Why do humans create art? It is to communicate with other humans, a profoundly social activity. Art is a metaphorical way of expressing experience such that others can relate, and that strengthens connections. Appreciating art is allowing our own mind to resonate with the mind of the other, and that could not be more socially useful.

Prediction

The inner mind, then, has been exquisitely shaped by evolution for managing the joys and perils of social life. It is important to realize that this purpose is best served by focusing on prediction. The past is done with and only useful for improving our ability to predict and cope with the future. Knowing what is coming is the mind’s real focus. Since before cave paintings, human culture has, as best we can tell, been aimed at gaining control over the future by acting in ways believed to influence what happens next.

Not surprisingly, in this limbic-centric system, predictions are closely connected with emotion and attention, and those are closely connected with motivation. Much of the time, our inner mind is working quietly to organize experience and manage our social world, but when a critical situation is predicted, everything changes. We immediately feel a pulse of adrenaline and increased alertness. Like a cat, our inner mind comes to attention and focuses on the immediate opportunity or threat. This is highly relevant to our work as therapists because the problem patterns we deal with tend to be rigid and hard to change precisely because they are related to existential or at least serious threats.

Stories: An extension of the drive to predict

The mind’s goal of increasing the accuracy of prediction tells a lot about our love of stories. A story is essentially an if-then statement, a prediction. If this happens, then here is where it will lead and this will be the ultimate outcome. The classic plot line is that the protagonist, someone with whom we can identify, encounters a dire challenge, which is played out, and ends up in this way. Stories are about trying to predict and anticipate what might happen and what the outcome will be. That’s why we appreciate, “closure.” Closure means the ending is known, not up in the air. When endings are unknown, our mind’s drive to predict is frustrated and we can’t help our inner mind spending a lot of energy trying to fill in the blanks. This is why asking or posing a question is so powerful.

The Five Key Questions method

This is of critical importance to therapists because what it means is that asking a question is the equivalent of beginning a story but not knowing the ending. The inner mind automatically and powerfully goes to work to try to predict the ending. This is why the Five Key Questions method of pursuing therapy (TIFT #101) is collaborative. Posing a question is just as powerful a prompt for the therapist’s inner mind as it is for the client’s. Understanding the mind’s problem solving strategy is a task where eliciting metaphors from the inner mind is far more productive than logical analysis. Not only does conscious analysis, that is, thinking slow, not work here, but it blocks the inner mind from doing the creative work it is capable of performing. Naming what is not known automatically engages the full resources of the inner mind to find the answer.

Clinical application

When I ask a question in the course of a session, I make the conscious assumption that what I hear over the next few seconds will somehow embody the answer. It may be in a form we can’t read, but it will be a hint. Since the inner mind does a great deal of its work overnight, it may be that the answer appears in the morning, or when one might least expect it. No matter what, it is highly valuable to identify what we don’t know and wait for the inner mind to come to the rescue.

On a personal note, I query my inner mind every day. At night I think about and often review the problems I need to solve. Then in the morning, I expect to have the answer dropped into the in-box of my consciousness. It works reliably as long as one is ready to receive the answer in any form, at any time, expected or not.

Entrenched maladaptive patterns

To conclude, let’s put Entrenched Maladaptive Patterns (EMPs) in perspective in relation to the inner mind. Toxic stress is when the mind feels it must solve a problem that it can’t satisfactorily solve. Salespeople encounter this every quarter. They have a number they must hit, which they may not be able to. Children, sadly but not infrequently, have to deal with problems they are unequipped to solve. They need nurturing that is not available. They can’t count on safety, but experience danger instead. They need encouragement to take risks, but there is none. They need places where it is OK to be upset and even out of control, but there is no place for that. These are examples of problems a child’s mind can’t solve definitively, so it digs deep into whatever resources it has to find the best solution available. The results are patterns such as denying that there is a problem, waiting for a big person to solve it, dissociating from the problem, etc. What makes those patterns especially problematic, is that, since they are experienced as life-and-death matters, the mind locks onto one solution and reacts to the prospect of change as the loss of a vital protection. When we therapists suggest change, the inner mind often responds as if we are trying to take away safety measures upon which the self depends. That is what we call "resistance" and why, in describing EMPs, the subunits of pathology that psychotherapy is designed to treat, we start with the word, “Entrenched.”

Acceptance 

To conclude this discussion, how, then, does the inner child let go of a coping strategy experienced as necessary for survival? The answer is very different from what one might expect using formal logic. It is more like a capitulation, like giving in to sleep. For the inner child, letting go of resistance and trying a new approach requires two elements. The first is “lowering the stakes,” meaning an increasing sense that giving in will not have the predicted life and death consequences. The second requirement is some sense of trust in the other person or expectation of a positive outcome. When both factors support change and the atmosphere is one of safety, then the inner child is most likely to let go of resistance and adopt the new approach, the antidote offered through the therapy. I often picture the situation as something like having a street kid come under our care. The kid is suspicious and untrusting. We will have to prove our trustworthiness before we can ask the child to let their guard down and abandon the rigidity that the inner mind equates with safety. Of course it helps greatly if we have a strong fondness for that inner child and help our client have a fondness for their own inner self.

Jeffery Smitrh MD

Photo credit,  Torsten Dederichs, Unsplash