Published on July 6, 2024 5:34 PM GMT
Our nervous systems are constantly making and updating predictions about our future environment, our future observations, and our future selves. These predictions are learned automatically, and are difficult to access consciously. (I’m mostly pulling from the Predictive Processing model of the mind here.[1])
These predictions can range from simple physical anticipations, like “If I keep my hand on this hot surface, the pain will increase”, to more abstract social-emotional forecasts, like “If I express my true feelings in this situation, then other people will respond negatively”.
It shouldn’t be surprising that a nervous system running a prediction like that last one might constantly seek approval from others. And because these predictions are mostly unconscious, that person most likely doesn’t even know how this prediction is influencing their feelings and behavior. As such, they won’t know how much they could grow if that particular unconscious prediction (and likely a few others like it) updated.
To be clear, I don’t believe unconscious predictions are the only possible cause of psychological issues, but they’re the intervention I usually find most helpful to focus on in my practice.
What other approaches miss
Many attempts at causing psychological growth often fall short for several reasons.
Most commonly, they fail to recognize how psychological ‘issues’ can have a payoff. For example, social anxiety might be protecting you from perceived rejection, even if it’s limiting your experiences.
I’ve also seen these other common failure modes:
- They only target your conscious mind, while the real drivers of your behavior are unconscious. For instance, consciously telling yourself to “just say Hi” at a party often fails because it doesn't address the underlying unconscious predictions creating your hesitation.They attempt to tell you what to believe, which is usually ineffective when dealing with deeply unconscious predictions. They target only visible symptoms, not realizing it's supported by a web of hidden predictions. For example, addressing only the visible anxiety ignores the underlying beliefs about social interactions.They focus on negative symptoms, instead of focusing on what you do want and working backwards.
The unconscious is essentially a massive parallel computer, constantly making predictions across trillions of neural connections. It’s not one thing, but a billion. In order to improve a psychological issue, you must first find the associated unconscious predictions in your nervous system.
This is why simply trying to change our behavior through internal coercion (aka “willpower”) usually fails — these efforts are almost never aimed properly.
We need an approach that directly engages with unconscious predictions.
How I get unconscious predictions to update
Rapid psychological growth often requires getting unconscious predictions to update.
Here’s an example of how I’ve done this for some of my own psychological problems:
I noticed that I was somewhat emotionally numb, and I wanted to feel all of my feelings. The common advice for this is often "just try to pay more attention to your feelings" or "just accept them!" But these suggestions miss a crucial point: if we’re not feeling our feelings, it’s because there’s a payoff to rejecting them.
Here’s a sketch of the process I used:
1. Find the wanted feeling: I found how the state of “being aware of my feelings” feels in my body. What’s it like? What body part is it in?
In my case, a certain expansiveness in my chest.
2. Find unconscious blocks: I asked the expansiveness in my chest, “What bad thing happens if we’re aware of our feelings?”
I heard:
- "Being aware of my feelings will make us less productive""Expressing negative emotions will make others angry!""Negative feelings will be harmful!"
No wonder I was emotionally numb!
And while these predictions were attempting to help me, I had to wonder, was there a way I could feel my feelings and get more of the benefits and less of the harms?
3. Ask incisive questions:
“Will feeling our feelings make us less productive, or will it help us focus on what’s meaningful?”
The fear dissolved into laughter.
“Do we want to be hanging around people who we’re afraid that expressing ourselves will make them angry, anyway?”
The answer was obvious.
“Is it true that feeling our negative emotions will be harmful?”
It became apparent that negative feelings themselves weren't harmful. They could even be helpful: they could indicate where we wanted to improve the world and our interpretations of it.
And now that there was no conflict, the “we” fused back into “I”.
Conclusion
Ever since then, I feel a lot more. I must assume this is because the unconscious predictions updated, and no longer predicted as much harm in feeling my feelings.
I’ve also used the same process for many other issues:
- After experiencing unrequited love and significant suffering, a skilled counselor helped me uncover and update the unconscious prediction: "I won’t be able to feel loved unless she loves me". We questioned it, and after that one session I nearly never suffered from that incident again.Likewise for my depression and chronic neck pain.
My primary recommendation for how to cause psychological growth through updating unconscious predictions is to work with a highly skilled counselor. Ultimately, though, I’d like to make psychological growth quick and easy, cheap and scalable.
Thanks to Stag Lynn, Kaj Sotala, Damon Sasi, Brian Toomey, Epistea Residency, CFAR, Anna Salamon, Alex Zhu, and Nolan Kent for mentorship and financial support.
- ^
A reference I like: Book Review: Surfing Uncertainty | Slate Star Codex. Also Kaj Sotala’s Multiagent Models of Mind series. Kaj mentors me (but has not reviewed this exact post).
Discuss
