TIFT #115: Of Time and the Inner Mind

One of my major goals is to promote familiarity with and appreciation of the inner self that has a huge role in ours and our clients' daily lives. It is the source of our truest motivations and most authentic feelings. Today I’ll talk, mostly from experience, about how the inner mind evolves in its relationship with the dimension of time. But first, a bit more about the concepts of mind and the inner self.

Mind

Plato realized that mind was something different from the body, but required the body to exist. With the age of reason and Descartes, western culture began a love affair with logical thought. By the time of Freud, its opposite, the inner, not so logical, mind was a “seething cauldron of excitations” to be suppressed and overridden. That relatively negative attitude persisted until the 1960s, when there was a rediscovery of the less rational inner self, rich with passion and poetry.

Philosophers struggled with the problem of the mind needing a body as its host, questioning whether mind, itself, was a substance, a material thing, or pure spirit, whatever that might be. (I hope true philosophers will forgive my historical approximations.) The arrival, in the 1940s, of the concept of general computing machines provided an enlightening analogy with the concepts of hardware and software. Computer hardware is physical and electrical, but so are memory and software. The difference is that the programs and data are represented by tiny electrical currents. They are so minuscule that they can’t do any work other than carrying tokens of meaning, that is, information. This is not so different from the difference between the energy of a scream and the subtle variations in sound energy that carry words and their meanings. Words and other symbolic meanings, for example, written text, still require embodiment, but, in every case, distinctions that create meaning are physically and energetically minor and useable only as carriers of meaning. In the brain, the situation is analogous. The firing of 86 billion neurons carrying vast amounts of information utilizes about 10 calories per hour or .001 watt. We can think of the brain as a complex and interesting host to the even more complex and interesting information processing going on there. According to one modern definition, the information processing in the human brain is what we call mind.

The domain of psychotherapy is the irrational

As much as we therapists are often quite intellectual, what we deal with every day are those products of mind that are not so rational, and often work against our and our clients’ best interests. The aim of psychotherapy is to change the mind’s information processing such that the same inputs will now lead to a different result. The source of those patterns is the division of the mind that operates autonomously and is outside of consciousness. Even our conscious but maladaptive decisions are made under the influence of that other aspect of mind.

Freud introduced the world to the part of the mind that otherwise was thought of as the dark source of “baser instincts.” The rest of the world preferred not to know too much about that dark aspect of human nature. When it was hard to deny, the impulse was to suppress it, but eventually, reality forced even scientists to consider it. Cognitive science began to talk about “System 1.” Jonathan Evans’ 2003 description characterized System 1 thinking as autonomous and operating outside of consciousness, “old in evolutionary terms and shared with other animals.” Contemporaneously, Kahneman won the Nobel Prize for realizing that economists were wrong in assuming that human financial decisions are logical. This led to his coining the terms “thinking fast” for System 1, and “thinking slow” for system 2, popularizing the difference between them. Cognitive science was most interested in improving conscious decision making and there has been controversy over whether system 2 really represents a distinct mode of information processing. They have largely ignored the richness of our irrational lives, but Richard Lane and I see the concept as helping ground psychotherapy in a rich trove of observations and experiments showing that Freud was not wrong. Our inner, nonconscious mind, like those of animals, is especially concerned with survival and, for that reason, has strong access to emotions and motivation, even if it has its own ways of looking at the world.

The inner mind or self

One of the best things we can do as therapists is to gain familiarity with the inner selves of our clients and ourselves to the point where we form empathic and caring relationships with them. This is helpful for both therapist and client, as we partner to help the inner self change and grow.

The most important consequence of building a relationship with the inner self  is changing clients’ attitudes in a positive direction. Often when they learn that their inner mind is causing trouble, their first instinct is to punish or try to eliminate that aspect of the self. Just as in dealing with real children inner children are highly responsive and goal oriented. They want the best for themselves, but may see the world differently. The worst thing we and our clients can do is to be critical and antagonistic. When we are, they shut down and cling more tightly to the status quo. What actually works is modeling and supporting an attitude of love and appreciation toward the inner self, tempered by the willingness and patience to help him or her grow into new ways of responding to life’s challenges. In the end, we are asking a child to try scary new things, and, as we all know, children are naturally cautious about change.

Frozen in time

In relating to the inner self, it helps greatly to realize that the activation of Entrenched Maladaptive Patterns (EMPs) puts us in contact with an inner mind that is frozen in time. It became frozen when it was confronted with some serious, often existential challenge. That’s when the maladaptive pattern was originally invented and when further development stopped. Importantly, that doesn’t mean all development stops. What stops is the thread of development related to the original challenge. In its place we find rigid and less than effective rules and patterns of response. The original response pattern becomes fixed and rigid because the mind doesn’t dare try a new solution. That would be far too dangerous, so the inner mind holds tightly to the original approach. The earlier this takes place and the more serious the challenge, the more resistance to change we encounter and that creates a firm block on development.

What that means, practically, is that therapy will be more effective as we develop a dialog with a part of the mind frozen at a certain stage of development, and that is where the dimension of time comes in.

Time doesn’t compute

For younger children, time has no meaning. Mothers struggle with children’s distress when they go into another room or leave for an evening. They give a verbal explanation, but, for some time, all the child hears is the reassuring tone of voice. I think they learn to be reassured long before they have a symbolic concept of “later” or “a few minutes.” This has clinical importance. Depression feels like it will last “forever.” So do love and happiness. Clients really mean it when they say. “I know I’ll never feel better.” Our emotional life follows patterns laid down early and is largely timeless, at least when it comes to important issues like tragedy and love. With some further development, perception of time can get more specific. A twin was told she was the "first born." She came to her own conclusion that, being older, she was responsible for her sibling at all times. While the younger twin thrived, the first born failed to grow in her ability to know and pursue her own pleasures and interests as her life was dominated by an overbearing sense of responsibility.

We are familiar with black and white thinking, where shades of gray don’t compute. Similarly, the sense of time, for some years, is limited to “now” and “not now.”

Somewhere around age 4 children begin to have a map of time, at least for the short term. The hippocampus seems to be the brain structure in charge of mapping the various dimensions of life. That provides a basis for some sense that time has degrees from short to long. Emotional responses, often extending into adult life, relate more to immediacy versus some vague prolongation of time. While conscious System 2 is learning about hours, minutes, days, and years, emotional responses largely ignore them.

The arc of a lifetime

As I pointed out in TIFT #10, children begin to relate to the arc of a lifetime around age 5 1/2. That is when they become interested in fairy tales, which begin with “once upon a time,” and end with “forever after.” Suddenly, they acquire a new appreciation that life has a beginning and a distant ending. This brings with it a far more powerful way to solve problems, assuring themselves of a solution “someday.” Prior to acquiring time future, they are obliged to find solutions in the present. This means solving the challenge of being small and weak by hold a present fantasy of being “big and strong.” Without time future, costly denial of reality or its replacement by an opposite fantasy is the only way to counteract painful reality. But with the acquisition of the arc of a lifetime, the solution can be, “Someday I will…” That becomes the basis of a plan for life, which, if it remains conscious, often evolves into a career or life path.

As therapists, we need to be aware that inner children’s cognitive abilities evolve. When the inner self we are relating to is an older one he or she can have different concerns and pursue different plans compared to the younger inner child. This awareness is especially important since outer, visible manifestations may not give any hint of their origin. Why do people have “midlife crises?” An important explanation is that the inner self is increasingly worried that the chances of fulfilling a dream are fading. “You had better get on with it, otherwise you will lose the chance.” Or it might be the overdue payoff for years of sacrifice and self-privation. “I accepted this pain because eventually I would be rewarded, but now that seems in doubt.” Distress of these kinds is common and very real. It can cause acting out, depression, and can destroy relationships.

Another important clinical manifestation of the sense of time is inner concern about growth and development. When the grown-ups aren’t doing their job, children take on the sense of responsibility. They are quite aware of their growth trajectory and the conditions they need for success. At a younger age, this may simply be the pursuit of primal love and recognition as an individual. Later, there can be a vision of potential and what will be needed to fulfill it. These underlying concerns can generate intense yearnings and demands along with strategies for fulfilling them. In confirmation of the cognitive sophistication of inner children, falsely assigning responsibility to the self is not uncommon and can even result in harsh self-criticism and punishment, while the true culprits, the caregivers, are excused from responsibility.

Conclusion

It is my belief that the concept of an inner child, frozen at the time of an existential challenge, is an accurate, valid, and therapeutically rewarding way to look at many of the problems treatable in psychotherapy. This way of picturing an inner child captures the power, persistence, and resistance to change of these patterns. Furthermore, pursuing a relationship leads to a more nuanced understanding and the image of a small individual, held in suspension at a particular level of development, especially when it comes to the dimension of time. Finally, much of the therapeutic benefit comes from the natural empathy that arises from visualizing, not a set of distorted schemas, but a lively and willful human struggling to survive and to thrive against the odds.

Jeffery Smith MD

Photo Credit: Analia Baggiano, Unsplash