Unlocking the Emotional Brain - Page 5


By our third session, that retrieved schema was well established, so it was time to begin the process of depotentiating it. This process consists of guiding the client into an unusual kind of experience in which he or she is vividly in touch with two different things simultaneously. The first is the schema's feelings, knowledge, and meanings, richly evoked just as they are. The second is some other living knowledge that also feels perfectly true, yet utterly contradicts the first material. This side-by-side juxtaposition experience of those two incompatible yet compelling ways of knowing is what induces transformation. The client feels that both cannot possibly be true, yet both feel true and both are present together. This odd, edgy experience is a specialized, experiential form of cognitive dissonance. Likewise, Galluccio's study of infants found that a both-at-once experience of old and differing new knowledge is required for erasure of an existing schema and the behavior it produces.

I had to guide Jason to find and feel some vivid personal truth that strongly contradicted his deep, lifelong knowledge that staying in one career would be lethal to his spirit. I began scanning my notes and memory of our sessions, looking for signs of a contradictory knowledge useful for juxtaposition. What jumped out at me was his passing comment of strong admiration for the teachers in the special-needs school where he volunteered once each week. Perhaps here was a vivid experience that had personal significance enough to disconfirm his expectation that a one-career life inevitably puts a person in purgatory.

I said, "I wonder if we could revisit something you mentioned about the special-needs school. I got the impression that you see something in some teachers that you like. Could you tell me a little more about what that is?"

"It's how involved they are in what they do," Jason began. "Or maybe it's the way they're involved in it. They're turned-on—that's clear. You can tell they want to be there, doing what they do and doing it well, and knowing it helps these children. That's great to be around."

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