February 2018

By Ian Goldsmith, Psychologist On occasions I see people who report that they react to certain situations in an automatic way. They often say they “can’t help it”, wish they were different and berate themselves. Sometimes people do not see any alternative to their reactions and want others to change. At other times they scold themselves for being weak, fearful, talking too much or whatever. How can we understand this and help the person to have choices about how they respond? My approach to this difficulty is to talk with the person about when such behaviour was valuable or useful. Often their initial response is to look at me in a puzzled way and retort that “it’s never useful”. However, exploring some past experiences, say when the person was a child, can begin to reveal a time when reacting in the way they now dislike was sensible. An adage I find invaluable is that “every behaviour is useful in some context”. If we take the example of, a person who has been bullied or abused as a child either at home or at school. As a child they will not have had the wisdom or maturity to understand that the bully’s behaviour is reflective of some need of this person. The child, in order to make sense of the situation, may blame themselves, keep their thoughts to themselves, become compliant or whatever limits the distress of the situation. In this circumstance their behaviour is adaptive. Here I introduce the following idea about our “unconscious”. It is: smart about the things that it is smart to be smart about; dumb about the things that it’s smart to be dumb about; and sometimes smart about things that it is dumb to be smart about. It is the last explanation which, it seemed to me, can often be useful to understand. Putting it simply, it means that sometimes we react to situations or other people in ways which were useful and appropriate at an earlier time, but now seem to be not so useful in the present context. It is as if the previous pattern of adaptive behaviour now asserts itself, even when, on reflection, the present situation is, in other respects, different. Hence the person who, as a child, learnt to devalue or keep hidden their own opinions because this was an adaptive way to deal with a critical parent, may do the same in their marriage if their spouse even mildly offers a different opinion and hopes for a discussion. The value of these ideas is that the troubled person can be helped to escape from their self criticism and instead value their behaviour or reaction as being sensible or useful at one time. This then allows them the freedom to choose alternative responses – which they may have to practise – and to understand their old responses in a respectful way. There are many applications of this approach. It can be particularly helpful when working with people who have been sexually or physically abused, since the childhood strategies useful for survival then are not always rewarding now.