It's a Jungle in There - Page 5


The illusions constructed by our brains of living in the present moment and being in control of our behaviors have their own survival advantages, however, the foremost being the ability to be assertive and doubt-free in the face of a complex and confusing world. At the same time, this adaptive capacity to tamp down our own, probably realistic, self-doubts has a serious drawback: we can become so confident in our personal perspectives and beliefs that we're unable to consider alternatives to them. The woman described above, for example, may come up with a list of irrelevant, yet personally persuasive, reasons for fleeing the relationship, because she has no access to the true source of her fear—hidden, so to speak, in the more primitive regions—and isn't able to open up to her partner's thoughts and feelings about their life together.

It's an odd paradox of therapy that we can help our clients become more consciously clear-sighted about themselves by helping them become aware of the unconscious, irrational impulses arising from the older regions of the brain. That's why openness to questioning one's assumptions—particularly when they're incorrect and self-defeating—is a key aspect of psychological mindedness and a predictor of a positive outcome in psychotherapy. We encourage clients to talk about their impulses with the hope that doing so will integrate the calmer, more reasonable, inhibitory cortical input of their brains with the regions organizing primitive urges. Psychotherapy takes a skeptical perspective when it comes to the "reasoned" output of our brains, understanding that our conscious thoughts, emotions, and self-imageare based largely on reactions and feelings totally outside of our awareness and often out of sync with our actual circumstances.

The Bias toward Anxiety and Fear

As we've seen, human survival, like that of all animals, is based on rapid and accurate decisions to approach what's safe and avoid what's dangerous. Therefore, we maintain some common anxieties—fear of spiders, snakes, open spaces, and heights—which appear to be hard-wired and linked to the survival requirements of our tree-dwelling ancestors. Because vigilance and rapid approach-avoidance reactions are central mechanisms of survival, cognitive therapist Aaron Beck postulated that evolution favors an anxious gene: natural selection probably weeded out our past relations who were too "laid back."

The core of the neural circuitry involved in fear and anxiety is the amygdala, a structure we share with our ancestors who only had to navigate their physical environments and basic social interactions. Unfortunately, these primitive fear circuits deep inside our brains still have a lot of power and are unable to tell the difference between real and imagined danger. We now have the capacity to experience anxiety associated with just about anything—from public speaking, to existential despair, to the thought of an asteroid striking the earth.

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