Breaking the Avoidance Loop: Why You Keep Repeating the Same Patterns

[MUSIC] Hello and welcome to Being Well. I'm Forest Hanson. If you're new to the show, thanks for joining us today. And if you've listened before, welcome back. I'm joined today as it's frequently the case, but we've had actually a little break from seeing each other recently by clinical psychologists, Rick Hanson. So, Dad, how are you doing today? I'm good. I'm a little jet lagged, so that's my anticipatory apology to avoid guilt and shame. Just a topic we might be getting into here. Very topical here, Dad. I love that. I love your setting up of it. He's been doing a lot of travel recently, so I appreciate you showing up for this one. Dad, jet lagged or no? But before we get into it, I wanted to give a quick reminder about Rick's upcoming online course on changing your mind. It also focuses on ingrained patterns and how to break them. And particularly how to break out of these kind of old, tired scripts of behavior that we're all carrying around. That course starts on August 8th, and you can learn more about it at RickHanson.com/changing and use coupon code being well 25 to receive a 25% discount. So, what I wanted to talk with you about today is that it's really easy for things to feel a bit like Groundhog Day. Like, there's a conversation that we just keep not having with somebody else, or our to-do list has had an item on it that might as well be gathering mold at this point. It's been there for so long. Maybe we keep ending up with the same kind of romantic partner or having the same argument or saying yes to things when people ask us even before we've thought about whether we actually want to do them or not. Maybe we keep on swerving away from different kinds of emotional experiences. I can certainly talk about that in some detail as you're aware. And if we're not aware of these kinds of hidden patterns, they can run our lives. But even if we are aware of them, that doesn't always help us do something about them. So today, we're going to be talking about how these patterns are fueled by avoidance, like you were just saying. We're going to define avoidance coping. We're going to walk through exactly how this avoidance loop works. And then explain why knowing that you do this isn't always enough to stop. So, okay, Dad, what do we mean by avoidance or avoidance coping? Basically, all animals have these two requirements. On the one hand, they need to go out and get resources of various kinds, notably food and mating opportunities. And they also need to avoid threats of various kinds. And success, including passing on genes, the passing on, that passed on genes, has to do with the proper balance of that. Both of these are necessary to pursue goals and to withdraw and avoid and hunker down. Avoidance coping loads heavily on the ladder. In other words, rather than deal with a challenge directly, we deal with it. We cope with it by stepping back from it, freezing in the face of it, delaying action with it, and other forms as well. And common examples include procrastination. Another one is paralysis through analysis, as a form of procrastination. Another version would be to, let's say, intellectualize to avoid getting in touch with our innermost feelings. Now, a key point here is that these are not bad. Sometimes the most effective thing you can do is to go small with draw, go silent, or numb out. Sometimes that's what you need to do. Dissociation, I want to add, as a common stroma response, is a form of coping. The ultimate question is, when you balance the costs of avoiding, which we'll be getting into later, are they greater than the benefits of avoiding? And might there be a better way to accomplish your purposes in this life rather than through avoidance? It's a great rundown of a complicated topic here, Dad. And I wanted to talk a little bit about how this actually works structurally. So if we think about something like procrastination, which was one of the examples that you gave, it's a very, very common one for people. The way that procrastination works or happens for a person is that it actually starts with a mental prediction. And this can be either conscious or unconscious. Most of the time, it's unconscious. And this is a prediction that a kind of experience will lead to something bad happening. So if I sit down to work on my homework, you know, something bad is going to happen. It's going to be hard for me to do. I'm going to be faced with things I don't really understand. It's going to take a lot of mental energy. Ugh, I don't really like that. That prediction then produces some fear or some anxiety. Basically your internal alarm system starts going off. This is a scary thing. I don't want to get close to it. Then that fear or anxiety leads to avoidance. You don't do the thing. You do something else instead. Now really critically, this leads to the next step. The avoidance produces short term relief. When I was doing my homework as a 16 year old or something, or rather than doing my homework as a 16 year old, I went to play video game. I went to play Starcraft because, you know, I'm on my own. That's what I was playing back then. I'm soothed by playing that video game. The avoidance worked. I feel better in the short term. Now long term this has consequences, but in the short term, I feel better. That short term relief then reinforces the avoidance behavior. And that last bit about the relief is really the engine of the whole thing. The big problem with avoidance is that it works for people. There's this basic behavioral principle called the law of effect. And the idea of that is that what's rewarded is repeated and what's punished is avoided. So we're basically just reinforcing our behavior over and over again. Doing something that works for us again in the short term but comes with a bunch of consequences in the long term. This then inherently, in this really cool way, leads to the recreation of our previous circumstances because we're not changing. We're doing the thing that we know that we're comfortable with. We're choosing the devil that we know to put it a certain kind of way. Right? And this can show up a whole bunch of different ways. And I'm sure that you've seen a whole bunch of different examples of this walk into your office, that. What's so striking and what you're saying for us is the kindness in it. In other words, people actually often have a certain amount of shame or they're critical of themselves related to they know that they're swerving away. And they know that they're choosing a short term gain but paying a long term paint over time because of the cost. You're describing very natural and understandable biologically grounded sort of in the programming. Thank you, Mother Nature, you know, that we've been handed. So I think that's a really important point of emphasis here. You're not bad because you avoid. And what the possibility is, is to have greater freedom and choice in terms of what you're doing rather than being swept away by these habits that you're describing here. It makes me think about J. Brewer's reframing of anxiety as a kind of habit, chronic anxiety, as a kind of habit. And the other thing that is present in what you're saying is this emphasis on inner experience. To some extent, we have principles that live in their own right and we pursue goals and we try to avoid certain situations, you know, for their own sake. But on the whole, mainly, what really matters is how it lands on us as beings. That's what we're avoiding. We're avoiding experiences much more than we're avoiding situations. Yeah, we avoid situations because they create dreaded experiences in us. And so then we anticipate those dreaded experiences. We expect them. We swerve into our avoidance behavior. Wala, we're rewarded because we did not experience the dreaded experience. Yes, which confirms our strategies and reinforces this whole package even further. Yeah, so let's talk a little bit more about what this actually looks like for people in practice. And I love everything you said there, Dad, including the bit about the dreaded experience, which was one of the first things that you introduced to me as a younger person. I remember when you were first like cooking up your framing of this idea. You were actually listening? I was actually shocking. I was not avoiding it. I was actually listening, yes. And I remember being like relatively young. And this is not a totally novel idea from you or something like that. But it was your packaging of this sort of way of thinking about things. And I just want to reinforce one thing you were saying there, which is that this doesn't have to exist inside of like a really shame driven model. Like not all avoidance is problematic. I want to avoid getting into a car crash. I want to avoid my partner disliking me. I want to avoid adding more to my plate when I'm burnt out. There are perfectly understandable ways to do avoidance, right? It's more about we want to be aware of this as a process so we can intervene in the places where we want to intervene. And help you do that. It's kind of helpful to have a frame of like where does avoidance live. So there's this guy named Matthew McCay. He's a psychologist and professor at your alma mater, the right institute. And he talks about these five different types of avoidance behaviors. I'm going to focus on two of them. The five are situational, protective, cognitive, substitution, and somatic. The first one situational is when we kind of steer clear of places and people in different kinds of settings. At the extreme end, this could turn into various phobias. And I heard this term from your dad pulling the geographic. Would you mind explaining that? Oh, it's a term potentially from AA originally. I'm not sure. I just heard it. I couldn't quite figure out where it originally came from. That's the only source thing that I could get. Yeah, it's in other words where we kind of solve our problem by just moving away from it. And sometimes that works. We leave a job that's got a ceiling. We're just never going to rise above or we leave a relationship that. You know, it's like getting blood from a stone. On the other hand, very often when we pull a geographic, we don't change the underlying factors in our own psychology and then end up looking for and recreating those familiar scripts in that new location. - And one of the reasons that this one is tricky is because it looks a lot like change. 'Cause you're literally changing, right? I went from point A to point B, my life changed, right? And yet we could still have these underlying patterns of behavior that are really driving us even inside of this new environment. The next one I wanna talk about in a little bit more detail is protective, could you give maybe one or two examples of this? - You can think about safety behaviors that differ action. Like paralysis by analysis is a good example. We need to study the problem further. I've worked with people whose natural tendency when faced with opportunities is to over complicate the situation and not just pluck the low hanging fruit and build from there. Because there's some kind of fear they have or an expectation that if they just pluck the low hanging fruit and don't do multiple rounds of analysis, something battle happened. 'Cause maybe it did happen. This is really an important point here. We develop these expectancies due to our own lived history or the observing of others. In other words, of our big sister, let's say, was routinely punished when she was at all, I don't know, stubborn or, you know, - Spokermotions. - Spokermotions. - Yeah, and the family, ooh, then we see right there, a dreaded experience that we wanna avoid ourselves by shutting our own self down. And to some extent, we develop expectancies by just imagining certain situations. Oh, a bad thing would occur if I did such and such. In any case, we develop this way of doing things and I also think about optimal distance in a classic structure in which people avoid full intimacy and they also avoid full individuation and self-expression in a relationship so they end up orbiting as a common term, including from the work of James Master's son, with a kind of orbit other people and are trying to preserve that optimal distance. And you can see them, the dynamic that often results in which you have a pursuer in a relationship and a distancer and the more the pursuer pursues, the more the distancer distances, which makes the pursuer pursue even further. - I have intimate experience with this, as I've talked about in some detail on the podcast in the past, but those kinds of forms of emotional avoidance, I had a full conversation with Terry real about it, that if you wanna go back through the archive, you can find me talking to Terry and we did sort of an impromptu 10 minute therapy session. And to that having a shockingly long tail for me, which gets to, you know, the strength of Terry's work and his ability to get it and they're in a relatively short amount of time. My tendency is absolutely that kind of optimal distance. I, which just as you're saying that, can create both a kind of avoidance or removal from deep emotional connection with other people, which is the part that we see. The part that sometimes we don't see is that it can also have that same effect to yourself, to your own wants and needs, to your own sense of who you are, to a kind of full living of the things that you care about, because by caring about them, you risk certain things, right? That kind of deep connection means that you can be harmed around it, you can be punished by other people, you can not achieve the things that you kind of want to achieve, feel a sense of disappointment or shame related to that. Caring is risky. And so it makes sense to avoid that caring and different kinds of ways. So I've had to do a lot of personal work on it and it's not complete. You know, I just had, I was at a dance event this past weekend and a lot of these themes came up for me in a very real way in a whole bunch of different domains, maybe because I was preparing for this episode. And so it's kind of thinking about them more actively. - Well, you're awesome for us. I mean, how many people are just gonna go there like you just went there right here right now on a public, in public life, you know, it's gonna be, yeah, hurt another couple. Good on you. To me, that's, one of the most impressive things about people in general, the courage to be open-hearted and revealed and vulnerable and self-disclosed. Along those lines, then, you're making me think about kind of two things here. One, the theme of trust and mistrust. In effect, avoidance coping is grounded in a kind of mistrust that often looks like it's mistrust of the world. And sometimes people will enact avoidance coping by seeking endless reassurances, right? 'Cause they seem to mistrust the world. Okay, there's a place for discerning the world clearly and carefully and noticing when the ice is really thin. Or when it's more solid and you can actually take your car out onto it. But in addition to mistrusting the world, very often at bottom, it's a form of mistrusting oneself. And I think that probably relates to some of what you're getting at yourself and your own personal material there. Then, you know, do you trust ourselves to be okay, to be able to manage things and to be fundamentally good and to have our goodness acknowledged and respected and valued by other people? And the two of those things kind of dance together, the external and the internal. What I mean is that it's one thing to trust other people to treat me nicely if I am vulnerable in front of them. But that's something that fundamentally I can't control, right? Yeah. But so the real question then becomes, okay, even if they are the thing I don't want them to be, can I trust myself to be able to handle it? Yeah. The second question that can I trust myself to handle it, including emotional regulation, deepening relationships with other people, that kind of like softened the blow or all the other stuff that we talk about on the podcast. Like that's actually the secret question that's kind of underneath the first one that people tend to fix it on, which is about can I trust other people? That's right. That's so well said. And I think, you know, doing what we can to produce influence, request, reliability and trustworthiness appropriately in our world, it's important. I think of that as kind of the secondary matter, but the primary matter is exactly what you said, because it's we who take ourselves with us wherever we go. And sometimes when the world falls apart and there was a huge lesson around this with the COVID epidemic, when the world falls apart, what are you left with? You're left with what you've grown and developed in your innermost being. I wanted to quickly run through these other three forms of avoidance just so people can start to see themselves as a little bit more of a different event maybe if one of these is a little bit more you or understand other people. The third one is cognitive. So forms of avoidance could be rumination like you were talking about that. Daydreaming and dissociation is another form of cognitive avoidance. Then we have what's called substitution. This is a little bit trickier to understand, but it's basically when we replace one feeling with another that's easier for you. So person might feel anger instead of feeling sadness or despair. That's a kind of classic example. That is somatic forms of avoidance. So this is avoiding body sensations themselves, perhaps because they remind you of a certain painful experience. And you were talking for a second there, dad, about how this stuff gets into us. Like why do we do this? And the simple answer is that we learn to do it. Something happened to you in the past or like you were saying, you saw bad stuff happen to another person. So you say, okay, of course I'm not going to do that in the future. There's another form of learning that's a little bit more subtle. I've heard you talk about this a lot as the invisible cage. I don't know if you want to maybe explain that. And then I can give this very visceral real life example or if you want to kind of fuse the two of them together. Yeah, what's so insidious in a way about avoidance coping and the learning, the acquisition of avoidance coping is that after we acquire it, we often don't even recognize that we're doing it because we're just not doing certain things. And grossly, it starts to become as if we're living inside the bars of an invisible cage. We just presume that, oh, I have to stay inside this territory and sometimes what happens and Freud was an early pioneer on this is that we avoid even having the insight into our own construction of avoidant forms of living and being in this life. And more broadly, I think that it's easy to think about avoidance and says, oh, I'm just not gonna date anymore. I'm not gonna ask my boss for a raise. Yeah, there's some gross forms of that. But avoidance coping broadly can become a kind of way of life, a way of being and the way of being, which becomes very familiar and taken for granted and we habituate to it so we don't really have insight into it. That way of being can be quite constricted, bottled up, numb, kind of spacey, dissociative. And we start feeling in our way of being that we've really throttled down our own life force. We're living in a very kind of washed out sort of pale beige tepid bathtub kind of way. And well, it's familiar. I will never forget the Luke Warren bath analogy that you gave me when I was like 19 years old or 20 years old or whatever it was. I basically, I've told the story on the podcast in the past, but just really quickly here. It was a moment where I just felt like I was kind of listless in life and I had some decisions to make about what I wanted to do in the future. And the phrase that you gave me was, well, for us, it sounds like you're kind of sitting in a lukewarm bath. And sure, it's not good. It's not bad standing up from the water. You feel colder initially, but the bath is getting colder by the second. And here you are, you're kind of stuck in it. And just that way of thinking about it, you know, what's the avoidance in that moment? It's the pain of standing up. feeling the cold air, but long term, that's what helps you just not be in the bath anymore and expand the scope of your life, right? And there are some very visceral examples of this from real-world research. So I bumped into this incredibly interesting study where there was a group of researchers who studied a group of chimpanzees at the Johannesburg Zoo. And the housing of these chimpanzees was upgraded from this very cramped 100 square meter enclosure, which is just clearly way too small for a group of chimpanzees. And I'm very glad that zoos are doing these kinds of naturalized upgrades to facilities. They changed the enclosure to this very large 2500 square meter naturalized outdoor enclosure. Big, beautiful, fantastic, so much space for these chimpanzees to roam. But what happened? Well, five years later, about 98% of the subgroups inside of that big chimpanzee band still spent most of their time in the spaces that were within the dimensions of the previous 10 by 10 meter enclosure. They stayed within the bars of that invisible cage. They had learned to be there, and so they stayed there. And this gets to some of the most absolutely interesting stuff in neuroscience that you probably know actually better than I do here, Dad. But I've done a lot of digging into it over the last little while, and I just found it so cool. You probably know it better now than I do. I don't know. We'll find out. We'll find out. Well, first of all, I just want to acknowledge that thousands of parents of adult children are felling with sympathetic joy for me to have a son like you who actually listened once, fluffed me up so much. At least, when he was 19 years old. So I want to thank those people for their reactions, and maybe you too will have that opportunity. Occasionally, children do listen to their parents. It happens every once in a while. We try to avoid it, but we can't help ourselves. We'll be back to the show in just a minute, but first a word from our sponsors. Managing your health can feel pretty stressful, but sometimes you have the wonderful experience of walking out of a doctor's office and actually feeling better about yourself. The right doctor can make you feel lighter, more hopeful about the future. I found a great primary care physician recently, and it really can help you feel better. That's where our sponsor, ZockDock, comes in. 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This is slightly embarrassing, but a while back I was looking through my bank accounts, and I found a subscription that I had completely forgotten I was paying for. It wasn't much on the surface or on its own, but it had been auto renewing every month for longer than I would really like to admit. And these days it feels like everything is a subscription. It can be difficult to say on top of all of them, and they can really add up. Our sponsor RocketMoney makes all of this easier to handle. It tracks your subscriptions, and if there's one you don't want anymore, you can cancel it right inside the app in just a few taps. They have saved users over $880 million in canceled subscriptions. Beyond dealing with your subscriptions, it's a great app for keeping an eye on all of your finances. You can set budgets and goals, get personalized insights and regular reports, and the app consolidates checking, savings, loans, and investments into a single dashboard to give you a clear view of what's going on. That RocketMoney helps you reach your financial goals faster. Join RocketMoney.com/beingwow. That's RocketMoney.com/beingwow. RocketMoney.com/beingwow. Now back to the show. So I've got a question for you. Yeah, God. When you hear these accounts of chimpanzees or elephants, I actually heard a similar example of I think it was tigers or lions in the Berlin Zoo, a similar kind of story. When you hear about those beings and then you think of the version of humans and the application there, what do you feel? What comes up for you? I just want to acknowledge, I feel anger. That's what came up for me. I felt a kind of anger at living inside a cage and living smaller than when needs to live. I think it's a healthy anger actually, as a kind of outrage or protest against being trapped. You know how much I don't like being trapped. And so I just kind of wondered what happens for you emotionally. Maybe other people can ask themselves here. When you imagine those elephants or chimpanzees or tigers or humans in similar situations. Well, I think that part of this can be really motivating for us to feel those emotions for someone or something else. So we can then also direct them to ourselves on our own behalf a little bit here. So I think there's real value in getting in touch with that more emotional frustration experience. And yeah, for me, it's on two levels. The adaptations that those chimps went through in order to get used to that 100 square meter space. It's just kind of depressing to think about, right? And to think about this tendency that our brains have to revert to the known and comfortable, even when the known and comfortable is actually quite painful and quite uncomfortable, but we've just adapted to it. And so we get really, really used to that adaptation. And this then gets to some fancy neuroscience around what's called predictive processing. And you can kind of paste it a little bit on to maybe how we see those chimps acting or how we see ourselves acting when we're procrastinating or avoiding an emotional experience or all the stuff that we've talked about so far. So okay, if we kind of go back to the avoidance cycle that I talked about earlier, in the episode, you'll see a prediction. And here's what I said. I said, there's a mental prediction, conscious or unconscious, that an experience will lead to something bad happening. We tend to think of the brain as a receiver of information from the world. And that is certainly a big part of its job. But it turns out that your brain is probably constantly making predictions about the future in order to guide your behavior. So there's this kind of dance between the information that it's receiving and the predictions that it's making. And part because it's trying to save energy, you don't want to have to remember how to open a jar every time that you go to open a jar or remember how to walk down the stairs every time that you need to go and walk down the stairs. So the brain fills in this information, makes predictions about like, okay, what's going to happen if I open up the jar, what's going to happen if I walk down the stairs. And then the one that really matters for us, predicting what kinds of experiences you're likely to have if you do something or if you go somewhere or and so on and so on and so on, right? How food will taste if you make a salad rather than a sandwich. And your brain's job is to get stuff right enough most of the time to help you avoid dying for starters from a passing on gene standpoint while also operating as efficiently as possible because your brain wants to save energy and save calories. It is incredibly helpful to see how the stuck patterns that we're talking about are typically based on predictions. If I do X, Y painful thing will happen to me. If I say what I really think, people won't like me anymore. If I leave the house, bad things will happen. If I try, I'll fail and it'll confirm something terrible about me. The tricky part of all of this is that sometimes those predictions are true. Sometimes bad things do happen when we leave the house. But these predictions can become very static and very over generalized. And this is where avoidance becomes such a powerful and sticky and difficult thing to deal with, right? Because to update a prediction, what do we need to do? We got to test it. And then we got to really watch it be incorrect or be true or whatever it is. But avoidance stops us from doing that. The avoidance prevents us from getting the learning that we need in order to update the system. And this is the cognitive half of the avoidance loop. The behavioral half of it is that feeling of relief that we were talking about earlier that tends to positively reinforce avoidance. And this is also one of the reasons that insight alone isn't enough to actually help us. We need information, not just insight. We need to test and then revoke this negative prediction or feared prediction of what will happen if we try to do the hard thing. So that was a bit of a run there, dad. Is there anything that you want to poke on or talk about or comment on? That was phenomenal. People could listen to that. I wish that that little five minute or three minute clip would be played in high school or adolescence, maybe even in junior high. because I think you would serve people so much. I just want to underline a few things, okay, and kind of add to the-- - Great. Yeah. One of the ways that I learned about this that's a very concrete example has to do with early childhood development and imagine the action of reaching for a glass and lifting it. And let's suppose that the glass was opaque, so we don't know how much water is in it. So as the child, the toddler, reaches for the glass exactly like you said, his brain, her brain, is predicting how heavy the glass will be and is getting ready to bring the appropriate amount of muscular effort to bear. And then as the child lifts the glass and perceptually detects accurately how heavy it is, then it modifies the predicted or planned level of muscular activity. And we've all had the experience of reaching for a glass that we think is empty and then it's kind of full and we lurch or reaching for a glass that we think is full and we've got to bring some muscle to it, but it's only half full, so we bring a lot of force to it and water splashes out of it. So that's really routine and in the process of that, to underline a key point, is the gradual formation of a sense of self, that it was a self that had a volitional effort and anticipation and it's a self that lives with the feedback of what actually happened. So in all this is the question of identity and the ways in which people develop an identity with the internalized cage, which is now the invisible cage. This is just who I am. And that is particularly insidious because it's hard to see your own eyeballs. Correctly, you can't see them directly and if avoidance as a broad style or way of being is more who you are, the who you are, as a hard time seeing who you are if you follow me exactly there. And then I know we're going to get more into how to challenge these predictions and risk dreaded experiences. I thoroughly agree with you about the importance of cognitively disconfirming your previous predictions and in addition to that, as you well know, actually internalizing the rewards, the good feelings, the good experiences of succeeding at risking the dreaded experience. So that then starts to create a different kind of habit. I'm glad you mentioned that identity piece because I think it's such a big part of this whole thing. And it gets to this other idea called a high confidence predictions. Sometimes the brain is very, very confident in something, generally because of the dead past experiences that were salient. These are the kinds of predictions that become a part of who we are. They become a part of how we view ourselves. And in these high confidence situations, we often actively ignore counter examples. And this is where you'll hear somebody say something like, sure, I said something and it was fine, but it was because it was filled in the blank. It was the way it just happened to be that one time, I lucked out, maybe that one person is okay, but people in general are bad, so on and so on and so on. The brain is so confident that the bad thing is coming that it barely registers when it doesn't. Or maybe you feel some relief, but you certainly don't update the actual view that you have about that prediction itself. And it was really cool for me to start to see this like expectation prediction thing that the brain is doing and tie it to a whole bunch of popular frameworks that we've talked about on the podcast in the past. Attachment templates are in a sense predictions about how different kinds of relationships will go. I think my relationship with this person will look like ABC or I think I will have certain kinds of experiences if they get closer to me or further away from me. As schemas, we've talked a lot about schemas recently on the podcast. These are kinds of predictions about the self and the world and other people. IFS, big popular topic these days. Protective parts are behaviors that can guard a prediction about what happens if a more vulnerable part, an exile, gets kind of contacted or touched or led out of the basement depending on the language you like. Then there's of course repetition compulsion as the original version of this whole thing. And I don't intend this as like a critique. I think that it's fine for there to be a lot of different models talking about the same thing. And when you've got a bunch of different systems that are landing on the same idea, it highlights how important that idea is. And dad, you've had a much longer relationship with psychology than I have, including seeing all of these different models and ideas bounce around over time. I'm wondering your thoughts on this as a kind of feature that tends to unify a lot of these different approaches. It's so unifying and so valuable. Yes, of course, there's more to human motivation than avoidance coping and so forth. But it's a very unifying framework. And to add to the emphasis here, you're making me reflect on one of the three primary forms of attachment that was identified, that were identified a long time ago by the Buddha in his analysis of human psychology. And he talked about attachment to pleasures of various kinds in a kind of visceral and direct way. Then he talked about the attachment to becoming, which is very much related to this prediction stuff. And then he talked about attachment to not becoming kind of in a broad sense, you know, those aspects that can sometimes arise in people even be careful here to the point of suicidality that we just want to end it all. But let's highlight the attachment to becoming, the clinging to what we are becoming to the predictions we are making in the attachment to becoming. You can just watch the mind. It's continually generating who I'm going to be in the next second, who I'll be in the next minute. And this attachment to becoming, this process of becoming distinct from simply being is very involved with identity and with the sense of self. So what happens when people, whether it's a meditative moment or more broadly, start coming out of or disengaging from the machinery of becoming the investment in it, the attachment given to it, and rest more in simply being, you know, being here now, the sense of self also reduces as well as suffering. And related to that, we see the value, again, pointed out in the contemplative traditions in the world of not knowing. Beginners mind. In other words, we're not trying to necessarily, as a first step, replace one prediction with another prediction. We're allowing a kind of space around the current predictions and an allowing of maybe so, not so sure, perhaps beginner's mind don't know. And these are very, very deep and ancient actually forms of wisdom that are very resonant with the modern analyses that you're you know, sharing with us here. One of the things I heard you talk a lot about that is how these kinds of avoidance behaviors themselves end up reproducing the conditions that lead to the painful emotions that the person is trying to avoid in the first place. So that sounds a little bit like a tongue twister. I'll give you a few practical examples here. Anxious attachment. So you're talking about pursuer distance or earlier, right? The anxiously attached person seeks reassurance, often in ways that overwhelm other people. Those other people can respond by pulling back, which then confirms the abandonment fear that causes the anxious person to seek reassurance, right? So they've got this kind of behavior, this clinging and craving that ends up pushing people away, which is why they're clinging and craving in the first place, right? Avoidant behaviors. We see the same thing withdrawing when intimacy gets close leads other people to chase that intimacy harder, which then leads to more withdrawal. I'm very familiar with that one. Certain kinds of fonding behaviors or a million other behaviors we can name, but fondings the one that comes to mind for me here. People appease because it works. It's a really great way to get other people to like you, at least in the short term, which then reinforces the sense that the more authentic self, the part of you that you're not performing, the part of you that's like beneath the water line, is not as acceptable or interesting to people because when you act from that authentic self, you don't get the kind of immediate positive feedback from others that your fonding behaviors might elicit from them. And it tends to perpetuate and even reinforce relationships in which one experience is being dominated or subordinate to others. So now we understand all this. Why is understanding not enough? I think this is a really important question because it's a little bit of a criticism of the self-help industrial complex as a whole. To be frank, so I would have I would be a little careful with how I talk about it, but I think that there is this way where people can fall into the trap of developing insight without actually exposing themselves to the new experiences that would challenge these kinds of predictive processes that we're talking about. Right. In other words, insight without exposure can become a more sophisticated form of avoidance. Understanding myself can be an incredibly clever substitute for actually feeling the thing that I'm avoiding right now. And I don't go ahead, Dad. Oh no, you are just reminding me of both the reality and the cartoon version of cocktail parties with a bunch of therapeutically inclined people. While do they have the talk, but I don't know so much about walking the walk. I think about my some of my relatives and other people I've known who don't have any kind of sophisticated psychological knowledge or frameworks or lingo and yet in how they walk through life, their open-hearted, vulnerable, real, direct, authentic and not living on the basis of an invisible, internalized cage. You're assembling. Totally. I think that some people essentially use self-exploration as a form of procrastination. This is the kind of framework collecting that you'll see people do yesterday. They were intamiras-briggs next month. They'll be really into IFAS, whatever it is. Collecting more frameworks that generate self-understanding doesn't necessarily lead a person into more direct testing. Maybe the person develops a belief that they can only move into action when they've figured themselves out, but there's always something else to learn about themselves, so they never end up figuring themselves out, so they never actually move into the action. I've fallen in pressure some of that myself. I think back on my entry into college, young guy and contracted, scared, did not feel good about myself, did not trust myself. But, routinely, what I would do though is 1% of me would know that it would be good for me to join that encounter group. 99% of me was screaming for the hills, but still I would act on the basis of that 1%, and then put myself in that situation in which I was risking many dreaded experiences, and I would have some dreaded experiences. But like you said, I got through it, and I could develop trust in myself that I could weather those storms and move on, and I think that's one of the most powerful ways to grow, and we'll talk more about it in the following episode here. It's two in graduated ways, actually risk the dreaded experiences, and then when the results is usually, and set yourself up to succeed, be careful about those inner traders inside us that function to perpetuate the system because they think that's what needs to happen for you to survive as a being all together. So, make sure you're setting up risks that are realistically going to be successful. When they're successful, you know, and the expectation of, you know, "Oh, horrible pain," dreaded experiences, is disconfirmed. It's really important, and you're going to tell us more about the details of this, to help that learning really land inside and change your brain from the inside out. Back to the show after a quick break. So when I was digging into this stuff, one of the things about it that I thought was so cool is that it was a contemporary validation of a lot of stuff that I've heard you talk about for years and years and years, essentially. It was. What a relief. I'm just so relieved. It was sort of a flip side take on the heel bottle. It was kind of a way to put it, except rather than focusing on internalizing positive experiences, it was more like noticing when negative experiences don't happen. It was kind of the inverse of it in a funny way. So throughout the episode, we've pointed to this avoidance of painful feelings that are predicted, right, dealing with predictions. So how do we do about any of this? What's the modern science of how change actually happens? Well, we need to update those predictions. How do we do that by moving out of avoidance and into testing? There's a fancy word for this that we have used a million times on the podcast. It is exposure. We are essentially talking about exposure therapy here. Elizabeth likes to joke that exposure is the main and sometimes only club in my bag, but you got to admit it's a pretty good club. Exposure can get kind of a bad rap. Part of the reason that exposure gets a bad rap is because people used to do exposure really poorly, including in some of the early experiments at bad exposure, which were very traumatized. Re-traumatic. Re-traumatic. Re-traumatic. The main way to put it is calling it ethically complicated. The less kind ways to put it could just be like they were traumatizing. People left and right, not good. So the traditional account of how exposure-based work changes somebody's patterns, this is called the habituation model. Basically said that you stay in a situation you fear for long enough until that fear declines. And then how much your fear declines is the primary marker of change. As I often say on the podcast, I'm not a therapist or a psychologist. This is me reporting what other people have said. That model has now been substantially updated in large part due to the work of Michelle Craskey and her colleagues at UCLA. And this is now called the inhibitory learning model. And it's more in line with what we've been talking about. And this episode was a little bit inspired by me learning about this model. So the basic idea is that the old fear association that we have, we're going to risk that dreaded experience. We're going to get out of the house or we're going to say the vulnerable thing or move into a different kind of connection with another person. That old fear never actually gets erased. And it certainly doesn't get erased through a successful exposure. It sticks around. But what changes is that we build these new competing associations alongside it. The existence of this new material then inhibits the old material. And that's why they call it an inhibitory learning model. This is the big point that we've been building to throughout this whole episode here. What predicts long term outcomes for a person isn't actually how much fear went down during the exposure. It's expectancy violation. This is a person's ability to notice and internalize the fact that they started with a prediction. That's something bad would happen. And instead, something else happened that wasn't consistent with the prediction. And the bigger the gap between the prediction and the outcome, the stronger the new learning. Now we can look back over 500 episodes of being wow and find that we've been talking about this all the time. Essentially, updating beliefs about yourself can be a big example. You need to really see the gap between the prediction. I'm a lazy person. And whatever happened. Oh, wait, I just spent all that time working on that thing. Huh? Is that really consistent with my pre-existing view about being a lazy person? I do talk a lot about this sense of self of being this kind of small, weak, nerdy, wimpy person. And I actually wait a second. I'm spending all this time out in wilderness. I'm going on these extravagances to Iceland and hiking around the countryside. And actually, I'm spending like 14 hours a day with my butt in the chair writing this book. It's hard and I'm working. And huh, is that really consistent with the frame that I have of myself as this kind of cringing individual? Well, maybe not. We kind of update that frame based on seeing this gap. And I thought that this idea was just so freaking cool. So that I want to give you an opportunity to get in here before I just monologue. Well, there are two parts to this. And thank you for bringing that back to me. It's actually really true. That's where experiences I had, including an early experience, literally on my first Boy Scout camp out, and suddenly discovered that I could move like a kind of big nimble animal through the boulders and rocks and do bold things that the other boys in my troop were afraid to do. That was a dramatic disconformation of my view of myself as you're an half-ever the most people routinely picked last in sports teams and things like that. And this goes to, you're going to hopefully love this part, based theorem and information theory. And the basic idea is that the more that the new input, the new information diverges from our expectations or in a sense is unlikely the more informative it is. Information is in a sense a difference that makes a difference to quote Gregory Bateson back in the day. And therefore the bigger the difference that the new information makes, the more informative it is. And so we're looking for experiences that are dramatically informative to us that our old predictions served us back in the day, but are just not true anymore. So Buhah based theorem. Second, the whole thing about identity again. The biggest disconformation is around identity. Who are you? What kind of a person are you? What are your depths? What are your breaths? Who are you? And when we start having experiences, they give us a broad shift of identity. So much change flows outward from that single origin point because it's so central. Right on. Totally agree with you. And part of what I loved about this model is that it helps us understand and it helps us explain all of these things that people often struggle with throughout the exposure process. And I've talked with many people in the podcast, Kimberly Quinlin, anxiety Josh, or two people immediately come to mind who focused more on OCD. These kinds of issues are very, very present and formal clinical treatment for OCD. But again, this is kind of the fundamentals of how we really changed the shape of our lives when we've gotten habituated to these kinds of stuck patterns. So for anybody, there's a lot of relevancy here. It helps explain why people can do something that looks like an exposure and not improve for starters, because the point isn't doing the exposure. It's really internalizing that expectancy violation. Maybe the person was just distracting themselves throughout the exposure. So they didn't really notice that the things that they feared didn't end up happening. Or maybe they made these vague predictions. that couldn't actually be falsified. Maybe they focused on a particular feeling they were having, as opposed to again, the events that were supposed to create that feeling. So, sure they saw, I feel bad, but they didn't see that, wait a second, the thing that I was worried about, that was going to make me feel bad, that didn't actually happen. I just felt bad. And, apart because we almost get used to feeling bad in different kinds of situations. And this is essentially how triggering environments work. We get used to having an association with a situation, and in order to change that association, we need to really notice when the environment isn't quite as bad. Now, of course, there are a lot of environments that really are bad and make sense that we're going to feel bad in them. But that's a different category of thing, right? It also has a lot of really interesting implications for the treatment of this stuff. One of my tendencies, when Elizabeth is really worried about something, is to kind of pre-lower her fears. When she's scared about something, I try to talk her down from it. It probably won't be the bad. What's the worst thing that can happen? All of that. That can help a person get into the pool. Maybe it's still kind of important because if it's super, super scary, you're not going to want to try the thing. But it turns out that those kinds of tactics actually shrink the gap between your prediction and the outcome. You've pre-lowered somebody's attention on that big gap. And so the suggestion here from Dr. Krasky and other people who do this kind of work is to do those kinds of CBTS cognitive restructuring techniques after you do an exposure not before. So that way the person really has this big gap in mind. I just thought that the implications here were so cool. What do you think disrupts learning from the violation of expectations? I'm just thinking of people I know who, let's say, social anxiety, they'll have an expectation that people will react poorly to them. They go into an event or something and everything's fine. Actually, people really like them. It's all fine. And they'll even report like the next day. Oh yeah, they're really liked me. And they'll even have some positive affect around that. But then within a few days, that old equilibrium has reestablished itself. It's funny how there are these beliefs that are hurting us. They're not true also. But we can be weirdly attached to them. We almost don't want to disconfirm them sometimes. Oh, a version of that, you see politically that there's been a lot of commentary on this in which people believe in a politician who makes various claims. And over time, it's increasingly clear that those claims are completely bogus. And the particular politician is really misbehaving in all kinds of ways. But wow, they will not give up on that. And you see versions of that as well in these sort of end of the world predictions in various cults. Prediction is made, but the earth did not end. The world did not end. But okay, they still believe in the cult. So I think there are ways in which people definitely can get attached in those ways. And what's really helpful, I think, in a way, it goes back to that, don't know-mind. Maybe so. I think you're right on here. Yeah. This is going to be a huge piece of what we talk about next. That's awesome. I really like that. And I want to shout out a collection of reef talks from Suzuki Rochi. I think it's called maybe so or not always so. And it's just fantastic. You know, related to this whole idea of, you know, beginner's mind is he also coined the phrase. The other thing that strikes me about this is the degree to which it really helps a person to have the attitude of, I want to break free of my inner cage. I want to break free of the limiting beliefs, the self-doubt, the negative expectations, the catastrophizing about the future, that is burdened some in its own right and leads me to living much smaller than I need to live. And I think that attitude that you- I'm here to change my mind, you know, I'm here to push on my belief systems from the inside out in an active, agentic way is really helpful for people. It's bad enough that they lied to us. It's bad enough that in certain settings an actual cage was enforced that was adaptive and prudent to operate within. And even act as if there wasn't any cage at all, but you knew there was a cage in your family and your school and your job in that relationship. Okay. Bad enough that that happened even worse when today we keep reinforcing and concretizing the cage inside ourselves on our own when we don't actually need to do that. We're going to save a lot of this for part two in terms of the practical how-to that I hope to also answer a lot of common questions here. One of the most common is essentially what do you mean see the expectation gap whenever I try stuff bad things happen like what do I do about that we kind of spoke to that a little bit in terms of this moving away from a focus on feelings to a focus on events sometimes that can already help. But I don't know what exactly the right way to put this is but just to make sure that we're all in the same page about one piece of this. Of course, sometimes you're having bad experiences because your circumstances suck. Sometimes you're depressed because your life is depressing. This is just true. It is not always about how you are showing up in a certain kind of situation. And there are a million examples of somebody who has dotted every eye and crossed every tea. They've done the stuff that's there to do. They've they went to the thing they tried to develop the hypothesis and they go and guess what their hand gets slapped man. The other people really are dickish and mean to them. The other person in the relationship really is abusive like that is real stuff. And so part of what we're trying to do here is create a kind of balance which is we're trying to be grounded in reality in the right now of it all so that that past history that conditioning is not infecting us in the same way. And we can be conditioned in either direction. We can be conditioned to avoid a bunch of stuff that is actually fine or we can be conditioned to avoid a bunch of stuff that is really problematic. We want to hold on to that or we can be conditioned to approach a bunch of stuff that we probably shouldn't be approaching over and over. And maybe even in doing that we're kind of avoiding these other things that would be better for us. So there are there are issues on every side of the spectrum here and the problem with doing a podcast like this where we're trying to talk to however many people are listening to an episode is all of your problems are individual but we need to do a lot of generalizing and how we speak right. And that kind of dance is one word we're trying to do well all the time and we're trying to include as many people's experiences as possible while understanding that we're not going to be able to speak perfectly to any one of them. That's well said. I mean that could be kind of I don't know. I almost want to put that little bit at the end there at the front end of every episode that we do because I think that it would we'd get fewer emails. Let's put it that way. Yeah. And in a way I know we're wrapping up right there you were demonstrating some of this. You know the way I would put it is that what's our identity? What is our being? Which is the origin of becoming and can we trust our identity as well intended inevitably going to make mistakes and being willing to be held to account and motivated to learn and grow and repair and improve like that's an identity of sorts and what's our identity here is speaking to an audience and doing the best we can a fairly large audience and there's a lot of responsibility that goes without and can we develop and you know be trustworthy in our identity and how we manage that and to me you were speaking to that and it's something we've grown into as we've sometimes you know person can have expectations that are understandably really small and then you start becoming successful as something and it gets bigger and bigger and you need to sort of expand your expectations and your related sense of identity as a result. Been a big part of our journey as a show I would say in a lot of different ways and certainly my my journey as an individual like learning about this stuff as I along the way by doing it and so next time we're going to talk a lot about what it takes to get step into that dreaded experience to actually risk the thing that we've been avoiding over time would help somebody hold a specific prediction in their mind about what will happen and then how do we gather evidence about what really ends up happening whether that prediction comes true or if it doesn't in other words this all a complicated way to say how do we go from insight to action and that's what we're going to be talking about next time really thanks so much for doing this would be that. Oh thank you really appreciate it thought this was a great one and always appreciate your insights. This is one of my favorite episodes that we've done in a while I loved talking with Rick about avoidance, avoidance coping and the ways that we are constantly creating these predictions and expectations inside of our mind of what is about to happen and how that process fuels avoidance. So the avoidance loop goes something like this we have a prediction that an experience will lead to something bad happening that prediction then produces fear or anxiety the fear or anxiety leads to an avoidance of the experience and that avoidance produces short term relief we avoid stuff because it works at least in the short term and that short term relief then reinforces the avoidance. Now over time the consequences of this is that we start well avoiding a lot of different kinds of experiences and because we're avoiding these new and different experiences our life starts looking the same maybe we're selecting the same type of partner over and over again maybe we're putting themselves. into the same role in groups, avoiding the same kind of emotions or situations. And as we do that our life gets smaller and smaller. And the reality is that the pain that we feel from avoiding the thing, whatever it is that we're avoiding, over and over again, that pain is usually greater than the pain of the experience itself. There's this line that I didn't talk about during the episode, but I like it an awful lot. It's the coward dies a thousand deaths, but the hero dies but one. Avoidance can take a lot of different forms. We talked about the five forms of avoidance. These are situational protective, cognitive, substitution, and somatic. And we particularly talked about situational and protective, situational because it's a very kind of obvious example. And then protective because frankly that's my personal drug of choice. When it comes to avoidance behaviors, I can definitely wander into different kinds of emotional avoidance, particularly when we're talking about things that I feel very strongly about or feel very vulnerable about. Maybe this is a form of showing my authentic self to other people. Maybe it's about being revealed, about caring about something. These different kinds of experiences open us up to emotional risks and emotional risks are dangerous. So we tend to wander away from them. And we do this because we learned stuff. We had experiences and the cost of those experiences is our behavior today. Bad stuff happened when you did something in the past. So yeah, of course you're not going to do that thing in the future. And there are a lot of examples of this that we can then see if we look at research, including research on animals. Situations where maybe a group of animals was held in a zoo in a small pen, then they were moved to a much larger space. And they just kind of stayed in the original small pen space because that's what they were familiar with. In this then took us to predictions and the expectancy gap. Predictive processing is this really cool concept from neuroscience. It is the dominant model these days in cognitive neuroscience and it's commonly associated with Carl Friston and Andy Clark. And if we go back to that avoidance cycle, you'll see that it starts with a prediction. Your brain is expecting you to feel bad when something happens. And the brain is not just a passive receiver of information. It is doing this active process of predicting what's about to happen over and over again. These predictions are often only loosely based on what's actually going on around us. And we can see that by looking at things like these optical illusions where there are dots that occupy some of a circle. But it looks like the dots are actually everywhere inside of the circle. The brain is so confident in its predictions that it fills in reality to match those predictions. And to update a prediction, the system has to really test it and internalize that that prediction was wrong. That's the only way that we update our view of the world around us. But in order to do that, we need to have new experiences. We need to actually go out and test those predictions. And avoidance stops us from doing that. And this is why avoidance is such a difficult thing to work with. Rick talked throughout the episode about one of the things that makes it even additionally hard, which are the ways that all of this can get into our sense of self identity. The bars of that invisible cage can be the thoughts and feelings and beliefs that we have about ourselves. I am a film in the blank type of person. And therefore, I will struggle in this given situation out there. Because those beliefs are so tightly held, we need to get a lot of new information in order to update them. But getting that new information requires us to expose ourselves to situations that aren't necessarily totally comfortable for us. And I used a word there, exposure. That's how we go through this process practically. We then spent the rest of the episode talking about this new model of learning, the inhibitory learning model. That was developed by Michelle Krasky and other colleagues at UCLA. It is a really cool concept. The basic idea is that what predicts somebody's ability to change or to update their beliefs is whether or not they're able to focus on an expectancy violation. This is the person's ability to notice and internalize. The fact that your system had one prediction and what happened was something else. And this model then has a lot of interesting ideas and implications. It helps us understand why updating beliefs about ourselves can be so difficult and how to do that maybe a little bit more effectively. It explains why people can do things that feel like an exposure and not improve. For example, somebody who's white knuckling their way through it, like I talked about during my conversation with anxiety Josh. This is when somebody doesn't exposure, but the whole time they're just thinking to themselves, well, I hate this, I hate this, I hate this. So even though whatever the bad prediction was, even though that's not happening, well, they still feel very uncomfortable. And that focus on the feeling in the moment is itself maybe a bit of a mistake. One of the big questions that people have about this territory is, you know, what do you mean? See an expectation gap. I try things all the time and every time I do it goes poorly and I feel awful, why should I keep on trying? And this gets to a really important clarification predictions usually shouldn't be framed in terms of emotional experiences. Because people are very attuned to painful feelings, but the prediction your system is making isn't that you have a feeling that's that some other event will occur that will lead to that feeling. So for just focused on the feeling, but not the event, we can't actually see the expectancy gap because it's really easy for us to go to a situation like going out of the house, going to a party, going to a social event, whatever it is that we're doing, trying something that's hard for us and feel bad during it because we've internalized that we should feel bad in this kind of situation. We've set that expectation, right? So we just don't even notice that the experience itself is actually not as bad as we thought it would be. And this is why a lot of these methods really focus on getting to a testable prediction, something that you can write down ahead of time and return to afterwards. This is also not to say that we should keep on bashing our face into a wall. If that wall is just not moving for us, including if we're if we've changed our behavior and meaningful ways or we're doing the best we can to move that wall, some walls are just walls. It doesn't matter how many times we hit them with our face, it's not going to go tremendously well for us. So I just give that as kind of an obvious caveat here. Next time we'll talk a lot more about the how-to of all of this, including how to figure out if it's a movable wall or maybe less of a movable wall. We'll talk about that. We'll also talk about how to do these kinds of processes more effectively. I'm going to try to answer some specific practical questions. One of the ones that really came up for me during this process was if you can't reassure yourself before you try an exposure and you can't distract yourself during an exposure and the prediction needs to be held at this like really high strength for it to work. How do you get somebody to actually try in the first place? And that seems like a tough one. Fortunately, there are a lot of smart people who have spent some time thinking about that question and hopefully they will have some answers for us. So until next time, really appreciate you taking the time to listen today. If you'd like to support the show, you can subscribe to the podcast that is through YouTube or Spotify or Apple wherever you listen to your shows on. You can also find us on Patreon. It's patreon.com/beingwhilepodcast. Quick reminder about Rick's upcoming course on changing your mind. It starts on August 8th and you can learn more at RickHanson.com/changing and use coupon code beingwhile25 to receive a 25% off discount. So until next time, thanks so much for listening and I will talk to you soon. [BLANK_AUDIO]