MindSense – A Practical Approach to Understanding Yourself and Others
The Psych 101 You Always Wanted - About YOU!
So, here we are, the inaugural piece on ShrinkRap, getting MindSense out there.
For the longest time – about two decades actually, I’ve been tweaking a framework of ‘self-psychology’ that I began developing when I was practicing clinical psychiatry.
The reason for the publication derailment is worth a book of its own and I won’t go into the crazy burnout and then whistleblower journey here. But let me say here – this MindSense framework saved my life, not just figuratively. I mean psychologically, vitally. Keeping me mostly psychologically balanced as I traversed a treacherously challenging time. It’s gotten the “acid test.” And as I’ve led workshops on it and shared it with many others in talks I’ve given, I know it’s given others a whole new way of understanding themselves and of navigating some tumultuous times.
It got started on a hunch. As a clinical psychiatrist, I was working with a young man who would suddenly have fits of anger and immediately felt embarrassed about them after he blew up at or in front of another person. He had no idea where they came from.
Now, he did have a neurological basis for having the immediate release of the anger. Numerous brain-based syndromes can cause a condition known as disinhibition. It’s most frequently related to something affecting the brain’s frontal lobes. These remarkable sections of our brain control what’s known as our “executive functions,” our ability to think conceptually; to imagine doing something in the future; and to weigh the rights and wrongs of something in-the-moment.
Both frontal lobes monitor our way of being in the world and regulate our social behavior, reigning in our raw impulsivity. They are the disciplined adult to our childish behavior, continuously reminding us to exercise social decorum. Interestingly, they don’t just “remind us,” they have a way of screaming internally “stop! don’t say it” or “whoa, don’t throw that punch.” Were it not for these grey jello blobs sitting above our eyeballs, we’d all be all be just a bunch of reactive brutes spewing forth our vulgar invective at the merest slight.
Yes, I bet I know what you’re thinking. “Hey, isn’t that already going on? Just look at all the drive-by verbal assaults in the digital world!” And yes, you’re right. One heck of a lot of vulgar reactivity and disinhibition going on. But that kind of reckless impulsivity is more likely the result of an untrained, unrestrained mind which has been given full permission (even rewarded for it) to romp around in naked disinhibited excess.
(Not all disinhibition is frontal lobe pathology-based; but, we’ll save that debate for another neuropsychiatric musing.)
Rather, what I was interested in better understanding in this otherwise wonderful, eminently likable guy was not so much why he “lost it” periodically. I was curious “why so much anger?” It’s one thing to get angry when somebody throws a punch at you. You may respond with equally intense anger (or fright) as the provoking stimulus was intense and caused a correspondingly intense reaction.
But going ballistic because the barista forgot to add two packets of sugar? Surely there’s more anger there than 2 teaspoons of sucrose.
So the question occurred to me “where else was this anger coming from?” Was it coming just from one previous recent event? A series of events?
Consultants often ask a series of five ‘whys.’ After each response, you ask “and why’d that happen?” and then again to the next response and the next. And you start to establish a sort of chain of causality or at least a linkage of how things are related.
Similarly, I asked “what was going on 10 minutes before? An hour before? Did something bother you?”
Turns out, no one event was of major consequence. But each recalled event had a dollop of anger. That parcel of anger may have risen to the surface, or not. But what I noted was that each dollop was likely getting stored somewhere, building up, so that what we were actually seeing was a “straw that broke the camel’s back” phenomenon.
And this was a real ahha moment for both of us. The anger excursion that occurred was not just a reaction to the crime of sugar packet negligence (“crucify, crucify” yelled the patrons, venti lattes in hand). No, that was just the icing on top. There was the dealing with the parking ticket and not having money, and getting wet from a puddle splash before coming in, and the boss making a mean jab at you last week and … and …. All that anger, little and not so little packets of it. All sitting there in the unmetabolized anger bucket like a powder keg.
Wow, I thought, I bet that happens with other emotions too, like anxiety, and sadness, and … and of course that led to thinking about what really are our primary emotions? Do we have positive ones? And if so, what would that buildup look like?!
And off I sailed on this odyssey of exploring emotions and deposits of emotion into buckets, and sudden toxic discharges … and what’s it look like if you add a bucket of sadness, and throw in some worry, blending these three powerful emotions in “affect pools?” Oh my, indeed. Cesspools of toxic negative emotion.
This led to my wanting to understand what exactly produces emotion, and how the body itself shows emotion. And how our behavioral responses are tied to this cascade.
Perhaps the biggest discovery in this exploration was how we unconsciously bring in issues and events from the past and how that significantly alters the emotion mix (almost invariably making it more toxic). And how that was directly related to what in psychodynamic theory is referred to as a “theme.” We’re all familiar with them, maybe just not by that name. “Rejection.” “Unattractiveness.” “Unlovability.” “Victimhood.” There’s a slew of them. But there’s not a person alive who doesn’t have one or more maladaptive themes that are playing a negative role in their life. We all have them! Even if we’ve psychologically worked on them!
I put together a brief overview of the core components of the MindSense model and what I believe it can do to help us understand ourselves better.
In addition to a diverse table of contents, ShrinkRap will serve as an ideal platform to share the overarching framework and each of the components of the MindSense model. I’m putting the final touches on a MindSense fundamentals e-course and plan to roll it out in the next month. And as I’m doing that, I thought it’d be great to share each of its parts here, in digestible bites. Because I’m really excited about what the approach offers, not only in heady understanding, but in actually helping us better manage our emotions and our overall psychological lives.
“Know Thyself”
Now, I won’t be so grandiose to say that it is the be-all and end-all of psychology, the penultimate tool to “Know Thyself.”
But, I’d like to think that if the wise ancient Greeks had it available then, maybe Aristotle would’ve written a glowing forward to The MindSense Scrolls.
Do check out the MindSense video - it’s less than 30 minutes and it’ll give you the gist of what the model’s about. Because once you have that framework down, the big picture of the working parts, then you’re ready to see exactly how your mind – jumbled and tossed about as all of ours are – is actually inviting, begging, for you to learn how to harness its strengths and gain a deeper understanding of yourself and of all others as we find our way along this challenging human journey.