Let me apologize at the start. We are about to go swimming in some complex waters and what follows is as simple a description of the difficult and complex nature of the human psyche as I am capable of providing. Please make good use of the accompanying diagrams, they can be a real help. In the section on Balance we examined the major areas of life that, if well maintained, contribute to refreshed living. In this section we explore the subject of stress on a much more personal level, looking at the elements of the self that, if similarly well maintained, further contribute to a relatively stress free and balanced life.
What I mean by the self is the sum of all of our actions, beliefs and physical processes. We are our physical state, our conscious and unconscious thoughts and the sum of our interactions with our environment. This is not the frame in which we are use to thinking of ourselves. Carl Jung believed we had a "persona", a social face we showed the world (like the masks the actors wore in Greek dramas) that served to hide our real inward face. Similarly we have been taught that people are not their roles (Robert is not just a father; Jane is not just a businesswoman). These seem reasonable distinctions to make. A child molester for example, can play the role of the kindly grandfather; a grandmother can tell her daughter that baby-sitting is no bother while furiously resenting the imposition inside. The grandfather, we say, was really a monster, the grandmother, really resentful.
But all of this obsession with what is real just leads to a great deal of confusion. Are the hours the grandfather spends just helping his granddaughter colour pictures unreal? Is the grandmother really not generous with her time? On the contrary, the grandfather is kindly at times and a vicious child molester. The grandmother is generous and resentful. We are all that we are. No less and no more. Just because there are contradictions between what we say and what we do doesn't mean that one aspect is real and the other not. We are contradictory, indeed we are the sum of our contradictions; nor can our contradictions be used to excuse us. Because the grandfather could be kindly does not make him any less a child molester. We are what we do and our motivations for doing it. We are the whole package--and it is us.
My intent in this article is to help un ravel this confused and contradictory and frustratingly entangled package that is our self. I want to untangle the different stands and lay them out in an orderly pattern so we can see what is going on, take ownership of all that is going on, and having understood, know better where to intervene to refresh our lives.
Have a look at the top part of figure one, a representation of the self in all its essentials. As I've said, we are our interactions with our environment, the thoughts that go on in our mind, our biochemical processes and our emotional responses to these three factors. We are analogous to a mathematical equation in which our environmental interactions plus our thoughts and beliefs about those environmental interactions and our physical state equal the kind, quality and quantity of emotional response we have. Our partner tells us they are leaving, we think "I can't live without out you", and we become physically tense and develop a splitting headache. This combination of factors produces (in this specific example) a feeling of despair. But because this process works akin to a mathematical equation, change any one of the factors to the left of the equal sign and you change the outcome on the right hand side. If your spouse then laughs and says "April Fools", or if you think "Thank god, I'm better off without her" or if you feel like a heavy weight has been lifted off your shoulders, any of these will change the kind, quality and quantity of the resulting emotion. This is the machinery of the self at work.
In the example above I've represented this process as beginning with an environmental change but, tangled ball of yarn that we are, the process can begin anywhere. An increase in the level of ephinipherin secreted by the adrenal glands leaves us feeling restless and physically irritated, we search for an environmental cause to explain these sensations and notice all the little mannerisms in our spouse we normally overlook, think "You're just doing this to torment me!" and suddenly feel very angry.
In the section on self-esteem, I spoke about a threshold, as we ascend the stress scale (figure 2), that separates stress from distress. When our environment plus our cognitive evaluation of that environment plus our physical state combine sufficiently to push us over the threshold separating stress from distress, then we experience the kind of emotions I have been talking about in these two examples--the kind of emotions listed on the right hand side in figure one: anger, sadness, fear etc. Experiencing any of these powerful negative emotions means we have crossed the threshold and are now in a state of distress. Once these powerful negative emotions get caused, the really insidious stuff is what takes place at the bottom of figure one. These powerful negative emotions create a feedback loop impacting on our physical state (if we are feeling anxious, our anxiety could well keep us from falling asleep increasing the physical contribution to our distress which further increases our anxiety and thereby generates a vicious cycle). These powerful emotions also feedback to the psychological level, fueling any negative thinking we may be doing and leading to our thinking more negative thoughts and believing in them more implicitly heightening the emotional product to the level of panic (generating a second vicious cycle). And these powerful emotions feedback as well to the physical level, impairing our ability to function socially, anger encouraging us to do and say things that could make matters worse, fear keeping us from doing and saying things that could make matters better (setting up a third vicious cycle).
Welcome to human nature!
In the above description, I hope it is obvious how my view differs from the Cognitive School of Psychology which believes that only our psychological evaluations of events (schemas) matter, and from the Behavioral/Systems school which sees us as helpless tools of our environment and from the Pharmacological School which reduces us to nothing but the ebb and flow of our biochemistry. At least I differ from them in their belief that they alone have the key to human psychology. On the other hand, in many ways, I agree with all of them. They have done brilliant work in their own areas and have each uncovered an important piece of the puzzle. They are correct about everything except their belief that their piece is the complete explanation for the whole of human nature, that they alone have found the real truth. Reality is bigger than its subdivisions. Human nature is bigger, richer and more complex than all of these theories put together. And, fortunately (he says with trepidation), human nature undoubtedly holds many surprises for me as well.
But, by virtue of their specific focus, each school offers us a way out of the vicious cycles of distress in which we may occasionally find ourselves. Change the way we think and we change the way we feel. Change our interactions with others and we change the way we feel. Change our biochemistry and we change the way we feel. Change the way we feel and we disrupt the feedback mechanisms that maintain the three vicious cycles we've just been examining. Any change in the equation changes the emotional end product and offers us an opportunity to do what we must do over and over again as difficult circumstances come our way, continually re-balance and re-fresh our lives.
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(c) BER Fraser msw,csw. (1998) Reprint only with attribution and, if on-line, with appropriate link..