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Brain-Based Transformational Solutions

YOU: A Work of Art in Progress

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As long as you’re alive, your life is a work in progress (unfinished). But is it just work or is it a work of art? And what difference does it make?

The idea of living one’s life as a work in progress is not original. But several decades ago, when I was struck afresh by the rich possibilities of artistic metaphor, I not only looked at my own life in this context, I also queried some friends.

No one had trouble responding, and I was surprised by every one of their answers. A former insurance industry executive said his life would be a multi-media performance piece. A writer described her life as a sculpture, while a musician referred to his as a “junk” sculpture. A computer programmer declared his life was a symphony. Here are a handful of detailed descriptions:

Kathy:

I see myself as a mobile spinning out of control.
I’m not quite put together in a way that moves with the ebb and flow of gentle breezes yet.
I’m unbalanced and jerked around right now.
One or two pieces of something substantial need to be added so I can untangle myself when the forces of nature, or human hand, cause me to spin temporarily out of control.
(This temporary spinning does not inflict permanent damage. It just causes me not to be my usual self.)

Kelly:

The work of art in progress: me covered in layer upon layer of steel, concrete, wood, glass, gunpowder, feathers, year after year and lots of work…maybe some layers come off to expose this work of art…me.
Kinda like a big clump of marble, taking off what is not me and getting to the real David…um, no…Kelly.
Warning: completed works of art are not on our plane anymore.

Lee:

A sand castle, co-structured by a small child.
We came from the sea, I will go back to the sea…
Imperfect, made from tiny pieces and subject to the whims of nature…
Able to be tall and strong, ridged yet soft…
Able to be shaped by the people and the world around me…
Formed by wet sand dripping from a child’s hand or sculptured by forms and expert hands.

Linda:

I think of MY LIFE as an oil painting. Starting with a clean canvas I splash some paint on, just to see what it will look like.
After experimenting, I decide that it would be better to Have a Plan.
I draw out in pen what I want to paint. I add some color.
If I catch the paint before it dries I can change it or scrape it off entirely.
The memory of what has gone before is still there, but it is not entrenched in who I am.
When I wait too long and the paint dries, it becomes a part of the canvas.
I draw a new plan.
As I build up the layers of paint, adding depth, my canvas thickens with layers of paint.
I realize that I do not have to have a plan for everything.
I realize that my painting looks better when I have gone outside the lines of the plan.
My canvas now has years and years of paint added, paint that has dried, colors that have changed or been scraped off.
I’m really starting to like what I have painted.

Nicole:

Well, it would be a whirlwind in places spinning lots of reds, fiery and out of control, deep yellows, oranges, spinning AUTUMN colors. And then over where the BLUE starts to outnumber the red you will find other places: neatly categorized and presumably alphabetical little BLACK stacks. Each one placed with precision, stacked up to the ceilings in wavering stature, suggesting that they might fall at any moment in time.

Steve:

My life has always been a film, with music rambling in my head, the stimuli being “things passing by/me going forward”—motionless.

The Play’s the Thing…

Once upon a time, I saw my life as a play. There’s an inherent discipline in living life as a play in progress that’s different from the discipline involved in living life as a sculpture or a symphony or a painting. Staging, timing, and pacing are crucial. Significantly, in a play the props and scenery are vital—but only to the scenes they belong in. It makes no sense for an actor to become attached to any particular props.

I was aware of things as background props and of people, including myself, as characters from an early age. I wrote plays, read plays, hung out with the local drama group, and thought up names and descriptions of characters, as well as elaborate decorating schemes, to entertain myself.

At some point I noticed what I was doing and decided it was an odd way to think about myself and the world. Whereas other people seemed to make choices almost instinctively, I could consider a range of alternatives: a final choice would depend on the requirements of the scene or the plot line. Choosing otherwise seemed arbitrary. In spite of considering my view of life somewhat idiosyncratic, I continued to operate within that framework. When a major plot twist offered the opportunity for me to reinvent myself, I had no difficulty doing so. It was just a play, after all.

Although I probably appreciate the value in that point of view now more than I did then, I wouldn’t use the same metaphor to describe my current life. It often feels more like a surrealistic jigsaw puzzle: challenging, colorful, so much to look at, still not put together (still creating), and not at all what you’d expect.

There’s value in experimenting with styles and forms, imagining and reimagining our lives through different lenses and perspectives.

So, if your life were a work of art in progress, what metaphor would you choose to describe it? What shape would it take? What colors and/or sounds would it have? What process or media would be involved in its creation? What emotions would it evoke?

Would it be a painting, a sculpture, a black and white photo montage? A novel, a short story, a play, a poem, an essay? Would it be a song-cycle, a symphony, an opera, a collage, a Rodgers and Hart musical, a movie? Or…something else altogether.

A metaphor is always a framework for thinking, using knowledge of this to think about that. —Mary Catherine Bateson, author of Composing a Life

A focus on creating yourself is the opposite of a focus on fixing yourself: the motion and the action are forward rather than backward. Thinking about your life as a work of art in progress can shift your view of what you’re doing in life—and of what you’re capable of doing. Creating art is compelling and juicy and expansive. It is an ongoing process of bringing something—in this case you—into being.

It is that dimension [our imagination of ourselves] whereby we are not merely living our lives—passively, as it were—but are actively giving them shape: ceaselessly interpreting and inventing ourselves afresh. It is that dimension whereby we do not receive a life as much as compose a life—as we might compose a story. As we appreciate the extent of this dimension, it becomes impossible to see how any aspect of our lives can escape our self-creative touch. —William Lowell Randall, The Stories We Are

Storying: It’s a Lot Like Breathing

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Just as breathing is automatic, and you can’t decide to stop breathing, storying is automatic, and you can’t decide to stop storying.

Your unconscious (System 1) monitors and manages your physical functions such as alertness, arousal, breathing, circulation, and digestion. Actions you take, including many of the lifestyle choices you make—as well as the circumstances of your life—can affect these functions.

You can consciously attend to some of them—breathing, for example—some of the time. But you can’t attend to any of them all the time. And you can’t consciously control them because you don’t have enough System 2 bandwidth to handle the job.

In addition to maintaining homeostasis by managing physical functions, System 1 also manages things like your sensory perceptions, your awareness of being located in space and time, your immediate reactions to events, and the vast majority of choices you make each day.

You can consciously attend to some of these functions, too, some of the time. But you can’t prevent System 1 from managing your mental processes and your real-time reactions any more than you can prevent it from managing physical functions. Although you might wish to have more say, moment-to-moment, it’s good that you don’t.

Storying Is Automatic.

One of the mental activities System 1 regularly engages in is weaving your experiences into coherent stories. I call this storying, because there doesn’t seem to be a better word to describe it. Storytelling and narrating both describe relating a story in some manner: either something that already happened or something that is—or is being—made up. Your brain is neither relating a factual account of past or present events, nor is it fabricating your stories out of thin air. Editing may be a more accurate term, but that implies the preexistence of a story to be edited.

The process of storying includes interpreting events and experiences as they occur for meaning and relevance, deciding which details are worth remembering, adding or subtracting for effect and coherence, reorganizing sequences, if necessary, and incorporating the resulting story into your ongoing life story based on your current beliefs and model of the world. Your brain is so good at this and does it with such speed that you aren’t even aware it’s happening.

Just as breathing is automatic, and you can’t decide to stop breathing, storying is automatic, and you can’t decide to stop storying. (Your brain is you, so you are storying, whether or not you’re conscious of doing it.)

There’s No Such Thing as a True Story.

But just as you can consciously focus your attention on your breathing to calm yourself or remind yourself to be present, you can consciously focus your attention on your brain’s storying, at least from time to time. You can learn to be skeptical of the stories your brain spins. You can allow for the possibility that your stories are often interpretations, explanations, rationalizations, and justifications. No matter how satisfying, they are not true, not fact, not an accurate reflection of reality. Your unconscious may be more or less biased than another person’s unconscious, but everyone is biased to one extent or another.

We are the great masterworks of our own storytelling minds—figments of our own imaginations. We think of ourselves as very stable and real. But our memories constrain our self-creation less than we think, and they are constantly being distorted by our hopes and dreams. Until the day we die, we are living the story of our lives. And, like a novel in process, our life stories are always changing and evolving, being edited, rewritten, and embellished by an unreliable narrator. We are, in large part, our personal stories. And those stories are more truthy than true. —Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal

Storying doesn’t just help you make sense of your own world; it also helps you make sense of the rest of the world. And you’re not the only person storying. Everyone else is doing it, too. Consider the implications.

What’s New, Pussycat?
Novelty and Your Brain

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Are you curious and adventurous, constantly looking for new sensations and experiences? Do you tend to get bored easily? Are you quick to lose your temper? Extravagant or impulsive? Do you make decisions before you have all the information? Take risks? Enjoy being in the middle of chaos or disorder? Maybe a bit of an adrenaline junkie?

If you answer yes to most of those questions, you’re probably a neophiliac, but don’t be surprised if you’ve never heard of the term (which has nothing to do with dead people, by the way). Neophiliacs are people who not only enjoy novelty, they actively seek it out—sometimes going to extremes to experience it.

Is That a Good Thing or a Bad Thing?

Early research into the novelty-seeking personality trait found it to be associated with conditions like attention deficit disorder and antisocial behaviors such as alcoholism, drug abuse, compulsive spending, and various other risky, unsafe, and illegal activities. So from that perspective, novelty-seeking is definitely not good.

But more recent research suggests that novelty-seeking actually keeps people healthy and happy and may even be the quintessential human survival skill* that helps us adapt to and cope with changes of all kinds and degrees. So now novelty-seeking is viewed in a much more positive light.

But trying to classify novelty-seeking as either good or bad doesn’t make a lot of sense. Since its reputation has improved, many people who should know better have been advising us to make a point of including more novelty in our lives by, for example, taking a different route to work. If your life is so lacking in novelty that taking a different route to work is the only way you can get it, you may have bigger problems to worry about.

Does Your Brain Like Novelty?

The fact that your brain responds to novelty doesn’t necessarily mean it likes it. Your brain pays attention to new things because it has to figure out what they are, whether they’re potentially pleasurable or harmful, and what you need to do about them. Novelty wakes up your brain’s reward system, which is involved in learning and memory, and the amygdala, which processes emotional information.

So you become more alert, aware, and emotionally aroused. Because dopamine has been activated, you are motivated to explore the situation in search of a reward. But the purpose of this amped up state is not to make you feel good; it’s to ensure your survival. It uses making you feel good to help you remember what you did and what you learned.

Is It Actually Novelty You’re Seeking?

The real question is: Do you tend to seek novelty for its own sake or is what you’re seeking providing you with novelty?

There’s a purpose for your brain’s response to novelty. When you encounter it in the course of doing or learning something new, undertaking a challenge, or accomplishing a goal, what you experience has relevance to your life. So focusing your attention on it and remembering it is meaningful.

Simulated or vicarious novelty may be pleasurable and emotionally arousing in the moment, but it’s superficial—a replica of the real thing.

If you’re up to something, you’re bound to encounter plenty of novelty along your path. And when you do, it will enhance your cognition and your experience, it will increase your well-being, and it will motivate you to do and be and want and contribute more. That’s one of the best aspects of being human. And that is good!

*Winifred Gallagher, New: Understanding Our Need for Novelty and Change

A Neuro-Mythical Creation Story

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First I have to dispense with the Monty Python meme: and now for something completely different! Nearly 20 years ago, I took a mythology class right after I finished Biological Psychology. Lots of writing was required in the mythology class, one of the assignments being a creation story. At the time, I described what I wrote as “very loosely based on Buddhism and quantum physics’ theory of the unified field.”

I didn’t yet know about the distinctions of System 1 and System 2 because they were just being made. And although I knew what dopamine was, I wasn’t aware of the important role it plays in so many areas of our lives. When I read the piece now, it seems to be “very loosely based on” dopamine (which is desire), the relationship between wanting and liking, and by extension, System 1 and System 2.

The Yearning of Desire

In the beginning, All was One, and the One was nameless and without form. Within the One existed All Things. But there were no distinctions within the One: no thing was separate from any other thing. Countless aeons passed, yet there was no experience within the One of the passage of time. Gradually, from within the center of the One, arose the beginning of Desire. At first Desire was like a small bubble rising to the surface of a perfectly still lake. At first Desire was only the softest whisper of the wind. Desire wanted to give form to the formless and to name the nameless. Desire yearned for forms to touch and to surrender to.

As more aeons passed, Desire continued to grow within the One. Desire pulsed within the center of the One, louder and stronger, and the pulsing of Desire gave form to Spirit, that which inhabits all and everything. Spirit allowed himself to be inspired by Desire and to contemplate all the possibilities that form could take. Spirit saw that formlessness needed form, just as form needs formlessness. Spirit saw that formlessness needed form to complete itself. Spirit then dreamed the dream of the universe taking form, from its beginning to its end, which was not really an end but only a return to formlessness. As Spirit dreamed the dream of creation, Desire allowed herself to be infused with Spirit, and as she did, she took the shape of a large, graceful bird, covered in the palest of green iridescent feathers. Spirit was the air that she breathed.

Spirit longed for the forms that he had dreamed of. And Spirit longed to be inhaled by Desire, just as Desire longed to breathe Spirit. With each inhalation of Spirit, Desire flapped her pale wings. As the flapping of her wings increased, the colors of her feathers deepened into verdigris and copper, turquoise and silver, aqua and gold. She spread her wings and flew in a wide, lazy arc, and she sang the purest, most exquisite songs, whose haunting echoes trailed behind her. She coasted on the currents of air that were Spirit.

As Desire breathed in more of Spirit, she too began to visualize the forms that Spirit had dreamed of. As her yearning increased, so did the flapping of her wings. Her tail feathers grew longer and their color changed from pale green to deep red. She swooped and glided through Spirit, inhaling more and more of his visions. The feathers of her body turned crimson and saffron. Desire felt something growing inside her, in the same place where her yearning had first begun its delicate pulsing so many aeons ago. She flapped her wings again and soared upward. An indigo band formed around her neck. Her singing became louder, more rhythmic, and more intense. It filled the entire universe with its insistent, rapturous vibrations. Spirit was enthralled by the songs of Desire and continued to fill her with the countless forms he had dreamed of.

Desire was full of a longing so powerful that she thought it could never be filled. The feathers of her head changed to amethyst and violet, and a royal purple crest took shape along the top and back. She opened her mouth to cry out but no sounds of any kind emerged, neither cry nor song. Instead, when she opened her mouth the countless forms of the universe began to spill out into the air, into Spirit. Each time she opened her mouth more forms issued forth until everything that Spirit dreamed had been given its form. Spirit was satisfied because he was everywhere, inhabiting all of the forms of the universe. But Desire, without whom no form could exist, could not touch them, could not fully satisfy her yearning.

It is the nature of Desire to remain unfulfilled. And we, too, who were given birth through Desire, know that no matter what we have, something is always missing. Though Spirit fills us and gives us joy, there is a place in our hearts that it cannot touch. Desire is the permanent longing in our hearts for home, for the One, for formlessness.

Desire animates us, motivates us, and energizes us. It’s a powerful, creative force. Dopamine propels us toward what we are missing because:

Our brains were not designed for us to sit around contemplating what we already have. —Dr. Loretta Graziano Breuning

You Can Call Me (Antisocial) Al

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Al was one of my substance abuse clients at the methadone clinic where I used to work. I knew he was a Type 5 because I managed to persuade every single one of my clients to complete an Enneagram questionnaire. With his shaved head (usually covered by a baseball cap) and multiple tattoos, Al was a little off-putting, appearance-wise. He had spent more than one stint in San Quentin where he joined an Aryan Brotherhood gang. As he—and several other ex-con clients—explained to me, you had to belong to some group in prison in order to survive. He never seemed very committed to the white supremacist thing, and being a 5, he certainly wasn’t part of any gang on the outside.

Somewhere along the way, Al had encountered a psychiatrist who diagnosed him as having Antisocial Personality Disorder. I’m not sure what the psychiatrist was thinking. Did he believe that because Al had committed antisocial acts, he must therefore have Antisocial Personality Disorder? I don’t know. And I wouldn’t have cared, except the doctor was so convincing Al took on the diagnosis as part of his identity. It was almost as if he introduced himself by extending his hand and his diagnosis, “Hi, I’m Al. I have Antisocial Personality Disorder.”

Meow!

The disconnect for me was that Al was unfailingly prompt for his counseling appointments and far more considerate of me than many of my less-sinister-appearing clients. He’d knock softly on my door and stick his head into my office after the client ahead of him had left. “I just wanted you to know I’m here,” he’d say. “Take your time. If you need a break, I’ll wait.”

He knew I was a big San Francisco 49ers fan when Steve Young was the quarterback (possibly because of the red jersey with the huge number 8 I wore to the clinic every game day). So when he came across a used set of 49ers sweats at a thrift store, he got them for me.

He once spent a few months in an East Bay correctional facility, during which he wrote me several droll letters. He also sent a card with a kitten in a wicker basket on the front. On the inside it said, “Just want you to know how much I miss you!” In pencil (the only writing implement allowed), he’d added, “I’m out before you can say ‘meow!’”

After months of weekly counseling sessions, I figured that if Al had a mental health diagnosis it was probably Avoidant Personality Disorder. Although I’ve never been in prison, joined a gang, gotten tattooed (something I’m still threatening to do), or committed any felonies, based on Enneagram type alone I’m a much better candidate to develop Antisocial Personality Disorder than he was.

Avoidant Al

Eventually, I pulled out the DSM IIIR (a version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), and during one of our sessions we read through both diagnoses. It seemed clear to me he met the criteria for Avoidant Personality Disorder—which also fit with his Enneagram type—and he agreed.

To some extent, it was a matter of exchanging one label for another. What difference did it really make? Well, it was subtle at first, but once Al started to see himself in that different light, he began to open up more. He developed some insight into his behavior and especially into his feelings. Before I left the clinic, he got involved in a relationship with a woman who had a young daughter, and I saw him access the healthy side of Type 2, which is part of his triad. It was a wonder to behold.

The Enneagram gave me another lens to look at my clients through—ultimately one that was more humane and more useful than some of the other lenses through which they’d been seen.

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