1. The past informs the present: This concept should make sense to everyone. Our present experience is colored by our past experiences. In a given situation, my emotional reaction might be primarily caused by a present circumstance (e.g., appropriate grieving when a friend dies), or it might be primarily caused by a past experience (e.g., my mother was emotionally distant, and I tend to feel rejected for very small reasons). Every emotional response is caused by a mix of past and present factors, but often one is dominant over the other.
2. Constructivism: As I mentioned earlier, our automatic System 1 thinking always creates stories to make sense out of our experience. This is the process of constructing meaning, and it generally occurs outside of our conscious awareness. These stories and meanings actually have a bigger impact on us than what objectively happens in our lives. For example, if someone wins a sum of money but interprets it in a negative way (e.g., it means that something bad will happen soon, because nothing good can happen without something bad happening too), that good luck could make the person anxious instead of happy. Our stories can be concretized into core beliefs about who we are and the kind of world in which we live. These core beliefs have a huge impact on the amount of suffering and happiness in our lives.
3. Modularity or psychological “parts”: Many people believe we can only have one thought or feeling at a time, but that is just not true. Looking at our basic neuroanatomy, we know that the brain is a parallel distributed processor (Rumelhart, McClelland, & PDP Research Group, 1995), which means it has many different processes happening in any given moment, including multiple neural networks in the emotion and cognition centers of the brain firing at the same time. All of these processes usually function as a harmonious, well-integrated whole, but sometimes there are problems. For example, the experience of ambivalence can be understood as having different “parts” of oneself in conflict about a given situation. Maybe there’s a part of me that wants to exercise more and another part that dreads exercise. Maybe there is a part of me that hates my father and another part that desperately wants his approval. Either way, we can see that an awareness of modularity, or psychological parts, is vital for understanding how we think, feel, and act.
Again, these parts are largely invisible when they are functioning harmoniously. We only become aware of them when there is conflict.
Basic learning theory tells us that different psychological parts will have access to different information, which is why they can come to different conclusions about a given situation. The part of me that hates my father might have developed when I was a teenager. It is aware that the way he treated me was wrong and has no empathy for him. The part that wants his approval was more likely formed when I was very young, and blames myself whenever he gets angry. There might be another part of me that was formed as an adult and sees how overwhelmed he was when I was young and how badly his parents had treated him, so that part grieves the emotional abuse I experienced but also feels bad for him. If I come to you for therapy, it is likely that these different parts will be poorly integrated at first. They aren’t sharing enough information and might not be communicating at all. They each have different emotional responses to situations in my life, which leads to feelings, thoughts, and behaviors that don’t make sense to me. Each part is likely suffering and in need of compassion, even if I’m not consciously aware of their existence.
Finally, self-sabotage can be considered a special form of ambivalence. Lots of people undermine their own goals in therapy and in life. They either do things or fail to do things that they know will prevent them from achieving their goals. Harvard psychologist Robert Kegan describes this kind of ambivalence as having “competing commitments” (Kegan & Lahey, 2001). We can also just call it self-sabotage. For example, I might come into therapy saying I’m painfully shy and want to gain more confidence. Then a few sessions into our work together, you help me discover that my mother was shy and my father was brash and arrogant. I decided when I was very young never to be like my father. On the one hand, I have a conscious commitment to develop some confidence; that part of me knows it would be a good thing. However, there is another part that was formed when I was young and feels completely differently about developing confidence. It is operating from a core belief that says, “You can either be like Mom or like Dad. So don’t be like Dad.” That part has been fighting my attempts to gain confidence without my realizing it.