No (emotional) pain, no gain

Why you keep repeating the same patterns, and how to break them

It’s easy to experience our thoughts and feelings as things that happen to us. We’re basically a spectator that’s been invited to the cinema of the mind; sitting in the front row, sure, but without much control over what’s being shown on the big screen. We can change this and start to feel at choice rather than at effect - like the cue ball, not the eight ball - by developing more psychological flexibility: the ability to respond to a wide range of situations, including by changing how we’re thinking and feeling.

Psychological flexibility is one of the primary targets of modern approaches to therapy, and to get to that target we need the ability to take a step back and get some separation from our thoughts and feelings. They’re things that are happening inside of the mind or in our body, they’re not who we are. When we do this, when we decrease how identified we are with our thoughts, feelings, or beliefs about the world we can start viewing them more critically. This gives us the space to explore their underlying motivations.

The next time that you’re wrapped up in a thought or feeling, see if you can ask cui bono: who benefits? Where is this thought or feeling coming from? Why am I doing this? Why am I getting so mad? Why don’t I want to talk about that? What is this protecting me from? Simply: what’s the function this thought, feeling, or behavior serves? What end is it a means to?

Why we do what we do

Our brain is very good at creating coping behaviors that “protect” us from perceived harm. Those defensive behaviors often come with plenty of their own issues, but it’s helpful to think of our behavior in motivated terms. Your brain is doing the best it can to solve a problem.

It can be both hard and helpful to look at the behaviors that frustrate us in this way. Maybe you’re a bit withdrawn because your parents, peers, or an overbearing boss teased, mocked, or criticized you whenever you put yourself out there. Maybe you drink too much because it was a way to get through social situations that created an overwhelming feeling of anxiety. Maybe you take up a bit too much space in group because your intelligence or extroversion were praised when you were younger, and you learned this was a good way to get the healthy narcissistic supplies you needed. Maybe you didn’t have a lot of influence over your external environment growing up, so you retreated into your thoughts.

Whatever the source, our behavior isn’t random. It emerges as a natural response to the thoughts and feelings that flow from our experiences, which themselves lead to new sets of thoughts and feelings. In the first of my recent series of posts I talked about the Law of Effect, which is the simplest way to explain our behavior:

What’s rewarded is repeated. What’s punished is avoided.

When faced with painful thoughts and feelings, we have two options for managing them:

1. We can feel them.

2. We can avoid them.

Neither option is perfect. Feeling painful feelings hurts, and marinating in those feelings without the coping skills to manage them leads to its own wide array of problems. But many of the problematic behaviors we see both out in the world and in our own psyches are, at the root, forms of avoidance coping. Feeling the painful feeling seems an awful lot like a punishment, so we try to avoid it.

Avoidance coping occurs when we deal with stressful thoughts, feelings, or situations by avoiding or escaping the situation rather than actually addressing the underlying issues. This can lead to short-term relief, but it usually means we’re kicking the can down the road. Over time, avoiding things just leads to more anxiety, decreased self-esteem, and a shrinking of our experiences. We start to steer clear of anything that might trigger all that material we’ve pushed away, and avoiding more things just causes us to push more material away, so your life gets smaller and smaller.

A common example of this is cognitive bypassing, which is when someone avoids uncomfortable feelings or difficult issues by over-relying on cognitive processes. Instead of addressing their problems directly or feeling the underlying emotions, someone who cognitively bypasses tries to “think their way out of it.” This could include:

Overthinking: Getting trapped in a cycle of analysis without action. “If I just think about this enough, I’ll be able to solve the problem.”¹

Intellectualizing: Using complex language or theory to explain or justify how they are feeling, rather than actually feeling and expressing their emotions.²

Minimizing and Denial: Downplaying the severity of problems by minimizing feelings or telling themselves things “aren’t really that bad.”³

In a broader cultural context that puts a lot of emphasis on big shiny brains, hyper-rationality, and a “debate me bro” approach that often ties a person’s rightness to the ability to say a lot of words quickly, cognitive bypassing might not seem like such a bad thing. But it’s a nightmare, because it prevents us from addressing the underlying issues that cause our problems while masquerading as something that’s helping us out. The solution to our problems isn’t more avoidance, it’s feeling the feelings and experiencing out the stuff we’ve been avoiding.

Why feel something that hurts?

The concept of experiencing out is based on the theory from psychoanalysis that psychological material is indestructible. To simplify, Freud believed that we never truly forgot anything, and that all of our experiences were held inside of the unconscious mind. The more painful an experience or emotion, the more likely it is to be pushed down into the unconscious through a process Freud called repression. But driving those undesirable feelings into the unconscious mind doesn’t make them go away; they just lurk in the basement, exerting an invisible influence on our behavior. Sometimes this material leaks out of us through “Freudian slips” and the repetition compulsion: our unconscious desire to repeat an event or its circumstances over and over again. Freud defined it as “the urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things.” If you find yourself seeking out the same kind of problematic romantic partners, landing in familiar social roles despite your best efforts, or falling into addictive cycles, you might be experiencing the repetition compulsion.

I do want to take a second here to name that Freudian slips are probably better explained by normal stress or language processing errors than some kind of deep psychological mechanism based on repression. Freud was wrong about an incredible number of things – but I do think he kinda nailed repression. In practice, repression rarely looks like a single dramatic moment where you blurt something out because your repressed material is just boiling up out of you. More often, it shows up as the subtle ways our past keeps influencing the present. Someone who grew up in a volatile household might repress their fear of conflict, only to find themselves freezing or fawning when tension shows up in their relationship. A person who learned that anger wasn’t acceptable might become chronically “nice,” unable to assert themselves or speak their needs clearly while resentment about not having those needs met slowly builds. Others might experience the residue of repression as vague anxiety, chronic guilt, or a sense that something is “off” without being able to name why. Repression can show up as overreactions to seemingly minor events, or as even more wild, out-there stuff: dreams, intrusive thoughts, or even somatization, which is when physical symptoms start showing up without an obvious cause.⁴

So how do we get rid of this indestructible content? By actively processing it. Freud noticed that when his patients started to share their life experiences, and particularly the painful experiences they suffered in early childhood, their symptoms disappeared. Patients moved from denial and repression to acceptance and ownership of what had happened. Once they experienced in the present the event or emotion they hadn’t been able to fully process, the patient was able to complete a disrupted emotional cycle – they could get to completion, and finally digest what had happened. This process was often accompanied by catharsis, a release of pent-up emotions.

To give another example, some people have a really strong grip on their sadness or anger, perhaps because it’s a dreaded experience for them. If that person entered therapy, their therapist might focus on helping them get to a place where they can experience and express the repressed emotion safely, maybe through safe, thoughtful forms of exposure. Doing that, and getting in touch with the psychological material that lies beneath that emotion, can make a person more comfortable with its inevitable presence in their everyday life and reduce associated coping behaviors that create their own problems (e.g., substance use, a common avoidance mechanism).

Top-down and bottom-up

To paraphrase James Joyce, I spent a large chunk of my life “a short distance from my body.” This isn’t to say I didn’t experience my emotions, on the contrary, the sensations associated with them were incredibly strong - which was exactly why I didn’t want to experience them! I’d experience an emotion, it would be associated with a strong physical sensation, I’d let it get up to about my throat, and then I mostly didn’t let it get past there. I didn’t “let the fizz out of the bottle,” and this then led to a tightness in my interactions with other people that mirrored the intensity with which I repressed my own sensations.

As I’ve aged, I’ve found some of the most healing, cathartic practices to be ones where I increasingly tune into the experience of my body and allow those sensations to flow freely. As those sensations have been permitted to flow, they’ve become less intense. As I’ve gotten more comfortable being honest with myself - and safely vulnerable with other people - I’ve become less attached to the defense mechanism of excessive cognizing. If anything, these days the body is a refuge for me rather than a place of stress. It’s probably not shocking to hear that I’m still a pretty heady person, but it’s balanced by a comfort in and with the body. That’s then made it easier to face difficult emotions without defaulting to avoidant behavior.

This was the fourth part of my (somewhat) Short Guide to a Good Life. Next time we’ll focus on exploring our personal history, forming a coherent narrative, and changing the beliefs we have about ourselves.

1. I was a big fan of that one.

2. That one too.

3. Weirdly, also used to do that one a lot.

4. Somatization is a relatively new addition to the DSM, and is not without its controversies.