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Brain-Based Transformational Solutions

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

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Apparently, there are some extraordinary people out there who can cure whatever ails us, physically or psychologically. We know this because they excel at self-promotion to the extent that they’re difficult to escape. One of them is the neuroscientist who shall remain nameless and who seems to have spawned a minor genre of professionals debunking his overblown and/or inaccurate claims.

Another is motivational speaker, author, and podcast host Mel Robbins, who can provide us with dating and relationship advice, health advice, sleep advice, explain how we can control our thoughts and feelings, tap into our “limitless potential,” reset our brain, get a handle on stress and anxiety, achieve our goals, lose weight, handle criticism, be happy, confident, and creative, stop getting gratitude wrong (where have I heard that before?), and get along better with our in-laws and other family members. As to the latter, I recommend relocating. It worked for me, so I think that makes me an expert in this field.

She’s the author of several best-selling books, has given a “viral” TED talk, and is a frequent guest on the incestuous self-help circuit. I learned these things by searching online. Prior to the kerfuffle after the December 2024 publication of her most recent book, I had encountered her once, randomly, on You Tube, watched a few minutes of a talk, and moved on, although LinkedIn keeps suggesting I should connect with her. I watched her TED talk and a podcast episode on The 5 Second Rule and read a short excerpt of The Let Them Theory before writing this. I also watched some podcasts and read some posts by others that address the controversy—or I should say outrage—surrounding The Let Them Theory. I’ll put some links at the end.

Prior to her extremely successful stint as a motivational speaker, Robbins was a criminal defense lawyer. This is important.

In a nutshell, The Let Them Theory reminds us that we can’t control others, so we should simply let them do whatever they’re doing. This might sound either obvious or like it could be about our relationships with other people—that it expresses some generosity of spirit—but it’s really not about them. It’s about us and not letting the bad things they are doing get to us. This is questionable advice offered by someone with Green Operating System to other people with Green Operating System. It’s based on Robbins’ interpretation of Let Them, a “theory” that did not originate with her.

No Gratitude for You!

The person who popularized this phrase is Cassie Phillips, who wrote a poem titled Let Them in 2019. This and a subsequent poem titled Let Me became very popular. Phillips gave permission for the poems to be used freely by others. She had “Let Them,” in her own handwriting, tattooed on her inner arm. Many others followed suit.

People familiar with Phillips and her poems were quite surprised that Robbins doesn’t mention Phillips, either in her book or in the frequent guest appearances during which she describes her “discovery” of the concept and the writing of the book she considers to be her “legacy.” It may be her legacy, all right, just not the one she intended.

As if this complete lack of acknowledgement isn’t sufficient insult or injury, Robbins is attempting to trademark the phrase Phillips came up with. If she were to be successful, it would mean no one could use the phrase without her permission, and if anyone did (say some of the many people who have had Phillips’ permission to use it for the past couple of years), Robbins could sue them. Her applications were rejected—for good reason—but she didn’t apply the Let Them theory in this instance. Instead she’s filed for a 6-month extension to restate her case, which means this issue won’t be resolved until later this year. So much for taking your own advice.

Irony Abounds

I’ve seen Robbins give credit to people whose work she couldn’t get away with claiming as her own. It seems especially egregious, given the personal narrative she’s crafted about her rise to success, that she has no problem trampling on people who have fewer resources than she has and essentially stealing from them.

That seems to include her own daughter, Sawyer, who Robbins identified as co-author of The Let Them Theory but whose name was notably absent from the book’s cover. After being called out on this, Robbins recently “gifted” her daughter with credit as a birthday present. (Aren’t you glad you’re not a member of that family?) Sawyer’s name is now included under Robbins’ name, in much smaller print, where it used to say “New York Times Bestselling Author.”

So here is a person, Mel Robbins, who came across a concept articulated by someone else and decided not only to run with it and fail to acknowledge the source, but also to burn the person who had contributed her work to the world in a genuine act of generosity. This is deeply, deeply disturbing behavior. Maybe even pathological.

I would find it odious in any human being but Robbins makes a living advising people on how to live their lives. But it’s important to understand that her purpose in developing a motivational speaker career was to make a lot of money and be successful. She’s tapped into a large audience that is ripe for seduction by motivational hucksterism with little inclination to look behind the curtain. Unlike Phillips, Robbins and her followers—as well as her enablers in the self-help world—are not remotely interested in assisting people in identifying or reaching for aspirational goals. They’re interested in the quick fix, the clever or memorable turn of phrase, the NYT bestseller list, the external signs and trappings of adulation, approval, and material success.

Robbins is a prime example of someone who is in a position where both the experience and the expression of gratitude are wholly appropriate. She ought not to have to be told to publicly acknowledge Cassie Phillips and her daughter, Sawyer. But as I mentioned in a previous post, people like Robbins may talk about gratitude and have much, in theory, to be grateful for, but they aren’t the ones developing a gratitude practice or even expressing gratitude on a personal level. They want to succeed. And it’s more important to them that their success be perceived as a function of their work, their talent, their insight than it is to acknowledge the contributions of others. They need to maintain the narrative. As a result, they don’t just fail to add value to the world; they subtract value from it.

Some links:

Cassie Phillips on Instagram
Sage Justice on Substack
Andy Mort | The Gentle Rebel podcast
angyl can’t read

Previous posts in this series: Should You Practice Gratitude? ~ The Cosmic Gift & Misery Distribution System ~ Always Look on the Bright Side of Life

Always Look on
the Bright Side of Life

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Monty Python’s Life of Brian is a British movie but Always Look on the Bright Side of Life could easily be America’s theme song. Barbara Ehrenreich covered the pitfalls of what some call toxic positivity in her book Bright-Sided, which I read shortly after it was published in 2009. It probably goes without saying that I have never been on the positive psychology bandwagon so I welcomed her blistering critique of compulsory optimism.

As one reviewer of Ehrenreich’s book said, “There’s no need to try to sugar-coat the world; reality is far more interesting.”

But what better way to keep our attention focused on the bright side than to get us to compulsively itemize the things we are—or ought to be—grateful for? In fact, many of the benefits cited by a majority of articles and videos promoting the development of a gratitude practice are aimed at generating or increasing a sense of personal wellbeing.

The question is why one should be so inwardly preoccupied at all. Why not reach out to others in love and solidarity or peer into the natural world for some glimmer of understanding? Why retreat into anxious introspection when, as Emerson might have said, there is a vast world outside to explore? Why spend so much time working on oneself when there is so much real work to be done? —Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided, How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America

The primary purpose of counting our blessings, in the view of many, isn’t to make us better people. It isn’t to fortify us to go forth and help create a more equitable or humanitarian world for everyone. It’s to make us feel better about ourselves.

Gratitude is touted as a coping mechanism, an alternative to “junk food, self-medication, shopping, etc.” Some so-called coping mechanisms may be inherently less harmful than others, but all coping mechanisms are intended to modify a perceived negative emotional state: to change the way we feel without addressing the circumstances or situation.

When we practice gratitude, we shift our attention from what’s wrong or missing to what is here. —Rev. Connie L. Habash, LMFT

Putting attention on “what’s wrong or missing” is assumed to be counterproductive to this aim. Yet some who have explored the gratitude practice phenomenon have discovered a dark side to trying to drum up gratitude. One negative side effect is invalidating difficult or unpleasant emotions. Emotions provide us with information, so trying to avoid some and only experience others disconnects us from that stream of information.

I suppose that 20 years ago when my partner died suddenly, I could have focused on being grateful for the decades he and I had spent together or for the fact that I still had Tashi, our cat, or that I could remain where I was living. But thinking about what I still had would not have diminished the enormous chasm in my life. He was missing. And that meant something to me. When I think about identifying what I was grateful for in that instance, it feels at the very least dismissive and shallow.

Making ourselves feel better, or trying to, has limits—at least if we want to retain our humanity.

It’s impossible not to conclude that the emphasis on looking for things to be grateful for, no matter what angle we come at it from, serves to—in some cases is even intended to—maintain the status quo. It keeps us focused inward, on ourselves. It chips away at our sense of agency. It requires us to be beholden to someone or something else: the giver who bestows gifts based on criteria we are unaware of and have no influence on. It admonishes us to be satisfied and content—to not wish for more.

It’s an extremely powerful barrier to creating transformational change.

When I said “more,” above, I wasn’t referring to accumulating material goods or status. I mean “more” in the sense of aspiring to be more, to have a more satisfying and meaningful life, and to achieve the objectives that make that possible. The brain is an insatiable wanting machine that will seek immediate gratification unless we train it to help us up our game and our aspirations.

Living = Acting in the World

Essential to creativity is a ferocious dissatisfaction with the status quo. —Roger Mavity, How to Steal Fire

Focusing our attention on what we have is an attempt to inoculate us against dissatisfaction, especially ferocious dissatisfaction, along with anguish, discomfort, sadness, longing, tragedy, confusion, loss, or just a bad mood. There are numerous problems with this trajectory, one of which is that it also inoculates us against joy, exuberance, desire, curiosity, and aspiration.

The most useful—and the most human—way to proceed is to be grateful when we’re grateful, dissatisfied or uncomfortable when we’re dissatisfied or uncomfortable, sad or confused when we’re sad or confused, and joyful, happy, or exuberant when we’re joyful, happy, or exuberant.

And then to be curious. What is it we’re grateful for, dissatisfied with, uncomfortable or sad about? What is the source of our confusion? What is making us happy, joyful, or exuberant? What are we longing for?

Lastly, is there something for us to do about what we’re experiencing? We are not stuck with any status quo. We are not required to accommodate ourselves to our circumstances. We have an ability to create positive, intentional, significant, and sustained change. That’s what we are built for.

There is one more post to come in this series.

The Cosmic Gift & Misery
Distribution System

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Yesterday morning I looked out onto my patio and discovered a red Mylar balloon in the shape of a heart lazily floating to and fro in the breeze. Today it’s gone, carried away by a gust of wind.

This is New Mexico, after all: the wind giveth and the wind taketh away. The wind routinely creates “fugitive dust,” for which there is a system of warnings in place. The wind is at the top of my list of things I dislike about living here. The light is at the top of my list of things I love.

Sometimes delivery people drop off food I didn’t order, leaving it on the mat outside my front door because they only notice the letter designation of my apartment and not the number of the building. There’s no one to call, no indication of who the food was meant for. Rarely, do these delivery people ring my doorbell or knock on the door, so I have no idea how long the food has been there. I carry it across the parking lot and deposit it in the dumpster.

According to one of the articles I read on developing a gratitude practice, life owes me nothing and all the good I have is a gift.

When I entertain this notion, I’m faced with a disquieting cascade of questions I’m sure philosophers, ethicists, and religious scholars, among others, have been ruminating over for centuries.

I tend to imagine a couple of possible general scenarios. One is that someone or something is determining how “the good” should be parceled out to living creatures. (I include animals here, as it’s obvious the circumstances of their lives vary as greatly as do the circumstances of humans.) Someone who enjoys more good circumstances than bad might find this notion comforting. They wouldn’t question it, thus avoiding looking a gift horse or force in the mouth. They might feel deserving, as well as “blessed.” Maybe their good circumstances make them feel kindly toward those less blessed. Maybe they don’t.

Perhaps kindliness is what a gratitude practice is meant to foster, but there’s no indication that the extremely fortunate comprise the target audience for lessons in gratitude. In many cases it appears that the better one’s circumstances are, the less likely one is to want to share and the less grateful one is. There’s a belief, especially among the most materially fortunate that they alone are responsible for their success. So this method of distribution does not seem to be an overall plus for humanity as a whole—at least if the distributor (let’s just call it that) or distributing force might be expected to have an attitude of good will or good faith toward earth’s living creatures.

The other, equally dubious, scenario is that someone or something is indiscriminately tossing around Mylar balloons or take-out food or IQ points or loving parents or stock dividends. Maybe this distributor or distributing force isn’t paying close attention to the delivery address and isn’t concerned about whether the recipient of such a “gift” wants or needs it; what anyone ends up with is entirely random. This seems less inherently comforting than the first notion but a lot more in line with both experience and observation.

The most relevant definition of gift seems to be this one: something bestowed or acquired without being sought or earned by the receiver.

Gifts, by nature and by definition, are in the control of the giver not in the control of the receiver. We are wired to want things: that’s the definition of motivation. So it’s no easy task to persuade people to be satisfied with their lot in life—not just satisfied, but also grateful!

It’s quite natural that we would want to try to game this system. What can we do to get more gifts? If we can influence the distribution of gifts to get more, are they technically still gifts? Is this a zero-sum game or are there an unlimited number of gifts to be bestowed?

While I agree we aren’t owed anything in particular, it doesn’t then logically follow that all (everything good) we have is a “gift.” First, if this is true for one person, it’s true for everyone: everything anyone has is a gift. So: so what? Presumably everyone gets something. This is just the way the system works. We didn’t set it up and we don’t operate it. It’s literally out of our hands.

The Misery

Second, if this applies to “the good,” it must also apply to “the bad,” unless that’s a different distribution system. What, then, is the appropriate response to the bad that has been delivered to us? There’s a fad in some circles to look at difficult circumstances as “a gift,” too, but those advising us to do so are usually not the ones upon whom such misfortune has been bestowed. I think it requires a certain amount of both privilege and ignorance to adopt this attitude, and espousing it for others seems rather callous.

Yes, each of us may have our personal misfortunes to deal with, but no one reading this is hungry and tired, living in a crowded, torn tent in the winter amid rubble, dead bodies, and unexploded ordnance, wary of snipers trying to shoot us in the head should we venture out to find food for our family.

Are we supposed to be grateful for that? And if we are, what are the ramifications?

One more gratitude post to come.

What Are So-Called
Secondary Emotions?

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It isn’t exactly news, but the evidence that we are all walking around, unaware, inside our personal fog of vagueness is becoming hard to ignore. We not only lack clarity, but we are also unable to pin down (be specific about) what’s important to us. We use words, we engage in verbal communication, we consider and think about things, but we are often in the dark about the meaning of our own words, let alone the words of others.

So it is not such a surprise that much like investigating the ephemeral concept of empathy, investigating what is meant by secondary emotions leads to less clarity and more confusion. Empathy, as I previously discovered, is not a thing. The same can be said about secondary emotions.

Psychologists, psychotherapists, and other wellness-minded individuals don’t agree on what constitutes secondary emotions in the first place. In other words, the meaning is vague.

“Secondary” as a Characteristic

Some of them believe “secondary” is an attribute of particular emotions, meaning that those emotions labeled as such are never “primary.” But they do not agree about which emotions are secondary and which are primary. Nor is it easy to determine what this theory is based on or how it serves us in terms of survival.

There is a commonly-held belief that secondary emotions “mask” other emotions, but that would actually defeat the purpose of emotions, which is to provide us with information. Emotions are generated by the brain to keep us apprised of our current state of affairs. We may consciously attempt to hide our feelings from others or to change our emotional experience (for which we can’t blame emotions, since they don’t have intentions). But it’s one thing for us to want to keep that information to ourselves; it’s another thing altogether to want to keep it from ourselves.

The brain is attempting to tell us what it perceives we need to know (11 million bits of information condensed into a 40-bit stream); nothing more and nothing less. It’s not playing games with us or actively attempting to mislead us. If, for example, you’re feeling guilty, your brain generated that emotional response based on the circumstances and your personal mental model of the world. The conscious you may not enjoy feeling guilty. Your brain doesn’t care. It’s giving it to you straight—and automatically. It’s telling you that you violated your own moral code in some manner or to some extent. You get to brush it off, distract yourself, examine the situation and/or underlying beliefs, or rationalize it away. That’s on you, not your brain.

The same goes for psychology’s favorite secondary emotion, anger, which I’ve also written about. In that post from two years ago, I mentioned being unsuccessful in my attempt to determine the source of this concept of secondary emotions. I also considered that people who are uncomfortable with expressions of anger might be motivated to view it as a secondary emotion:

I suspect the secondary emotion idea is an attempt to cut anger down to size, so to speak. So-and-so isn’t really angry; he or she is actually sad or anxious or depressed or afraid or hurt: wounded in some manner. They’re not threatening; they’re vulnerable. 

Of course, people may also apply this reasoning to themselves.

At this point, I’m more inclined to view the reaction from a broader perspective, though: less as discomfort with expressions of anger and more as discomfort with discomfort. Discomfort with expressions of anger is situational. Discomfort with discomfort is existential.

“Secondary” as a Sequence

Others believe secondary emotions are those that immediately follow the initial, primary, emotion. In that case, “secondary” is not an attribute of the emotion: any emotion can be either primary or secondary depending on where it shows up in an apparent sequence of emotional responses. But is that 10 seconds later, 10 minutes later, 10 days later, or 10 months later?

If you don’t understand that the brain is focused on what to do right now, then it seems conceivable that an emotion you’re experiencing today is a result of an experience you had two days ago. Your brain uses past experience to determine current action, but it doesn’t live in the past. The emotions you’re experiencing now are a response to what is going on, externally and internally, in the present.

I don’t know what makes a secondary emotion, in this context, significant. Are there always secondary emotions—emotions that are a reaction to a previous emotion? (If not, why not?) If so, aren’t all emotions secondary emotions given that there was always a prior emotion? But then the term is meaningless because there are no actual primary emotions. There are just emotions, one after another. Which, as it turns out, happens to be the case.

Categorizing Emotions

There are many different ways one could classify or categorize emotions. The brain categorizes things in order to get a quick grasp of what something is and how it pertains to us so it can figure out what to do about it. Speed is of the essence if you’re pursuing rewards but even more so if you’re dodging threats. Classifying emotions as primary or secondary is completely unhelpful to this process. In my opinion, it’s nothing more than psychobabble. Classifying emotions as good or bad may be easier to justify (potential reward or potential threat). But it’s not fail safe given that context and personal neurochemistry play a bigger role in determining how we experience an emotion than these black or white categories suggest.

What I’ve learned from those who specialize in researching the origins and functions of emotions is that there are many benefits and few, if any downsides, to getting granular (specific, not vague) and to getting comfortable experiencing a wide range of them.

Where Are We Going, Walt Whitman?

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A couple of weeks ago, I read an article by a philosophy professor, Karen Simecek, who said that conceiving of our lives as narratives is a bad idea. She thinks it’s a bad idea because some narratives are negative or have a negative effect, presumably on the narrator.

She didn’t mention the brain in her article, which led me to wonder how she thinks these narratives come about. Maybe she believes humans all got together at some point in the past when there weren’t very many of us and took a vote on whether or not to conceive of our lives as narratives. The ayes won. Or maybe she thinks each of us comes up with this idea on our own or we pick it up from the zeitgeist.

In any case, this narrative process is not optional. It’s what brains do. Ask a neuroscientist. Or read The Storytelling Animal by Jonathan Gottschall.

As to bad narratives or those that have a negative effect, that is content, and content can be modified. I would imagine that a philosopher who can’t make a distinction between concept and content might develop some odd perspectives. She doesn’t disappoint.

It’s true that there is no such thing as a true story, something I’ve been pointing out for the past 11, almost 12 years. But that is a fact, not an indictment of narrative. It’s also true that our narratives exert a powerful influence over us that can get in the way of our ability to create transformational (positive, intentional, significant, and sustained) change. So I laud her effort to look for a way to deal with this dilemma. But our narratives are crafted by the unconscious part of the brain and reflect who we’ve been up till now. They provide the brain with a way to determine how to process the sensory data it encounters. As such, neither can our narratives be easily dismissed nor is it even a good idea to try to dismiss them.

Existential Poetry

Our philosopher prefers poetry to narrative, so she suggests we replace our autobiographical narratives with poems.

I mentioned this in a group meeting where everyone present is wise to the already existing difficulties we have communicating with one another. A participant looked up poetic forms on the internet (one of the benefits of Zoom meetings) and found a site that said there were 28 different forms. Writer’s Digest beats that by a mile, however, listing 168 different forms. WD isn’t overly serious about describing this (I hope) exhaustive list. For example:

Chant: if it works once, run it into the ground

Some other forms are haiku, villanelle, sonnet, madrigal, roundelay, epic, and sestina. There are many forms attributed to the Welsh, the French, and the Japanese, and a surprising number are named for how many lines or stanzas they contain. We (in the group) entertained the notion of communicating in poetry and how doing so would compound our communication issues, in multiple ways, since we don’t just have a narrative about ourselves, of course; we communicate with each other via narrative.

I like poetry. I’ve read quite a lot of it. I’ve even written a fair share. I’m trying to imagine the possibility of substituting poetry for narrative—and I’m someone who isn’t particularly committed to my own narrative. My personality is such that my personal narrative is more episodic than continuous. But my unconscious doesn’t write poetry, so poetry is never going to replace my anecdotal narrativity.

A virtual acquaintance, Donald Fulmer, created an email course on learning to write haiku, which he found (I’m putting words in his mouth here aka interpreting) to be an agreeable form of self-expression. But no matter how familiar the form of haiku became to him, I doubt his brain ever got to the point of substituting haiku for narrative. (Perhaps he’ll read this and let us know.)

We Are A Work in Progress

We could develop our own poetic language. It’s not a bad idea. It’s another way—like art or music—to capture and/or express our experience. But it won’t replace our inner narrative.

In addition to the inherent difficulty of attempting to craft our experience into a poetic form, there’s another problem, which is that poems are finished things. I once wrote a poem about that. I said that writing poetry was like reconstructing myself on paper, that I was resetting the words in my sentences like the bones in my body. It can be laborious, but sometimes necessary.

Our narrative, however, is not finished until we die; and it is always changing and can always be changed.

Now if I could capture my life à la the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, I might reconsider my position. Here’s the first stanza of A Supermarket in California, free verse written in 1955 and published in Howl and Other Poems in 1956.

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.

In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!

What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!—and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?

Later he asks:

Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour.

I ask myself.

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