We Need to Get Beneath the Story

Why Understanding Ourselves Doesn’t Necessarily Change Anything

Most of us who have spent any significant time engaged in psychological or spiritual work have experienced a rather frustrating phenomenon. We recognize a pattern, understand how it developed, see the difficulties it creates in our lives, and may even explain it with considerable sophistication. Then something happens, someone pushes the right button, and there we are, doing exactly what we’ve been doing for the past fifty years.

Apparently, the nervous system hasn’t read our autobiography.

I’ve become increasingly interested in why personality keeps operating in familiar ways long after we’ve come to understand them. We ordinarily think of personality as a collection of traits, attitudes, and characteristics that define who we are. Yet when we examine our immediate experience, we begin to see that what appears to be a stable identity is continually maintained through activity. Our nervous system regulates tension, our emotions organize around familiar responses, and our mind provides a running commentary that makes the whole arrangement seem perfectly reasonable.

The interesting thing is that much of this organization was established before we had any capacity to understand what was happening.

Three Levels of Self

Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio describes three levels of self: the autobiographical self, the core self, and the protoself. These aren’t separate compartments in the brain, but interacting dimensions of experience that emerge through the organism’s development. They offer a useful perspective on why understanding ourselves doesn’t necessarily change our deeper patterns.

The autobiographical or narrative self is the one we’re most familiar with. It organizes our personal history, memories, beliefs, expectations, and the ongoing narrative of who we believe ourselves to be. This self explains why we behave as we do, constructs our psychological identity, and tries to make sense of our lives.

It’s also where much of our psychological and spiritual work takes place. We recognize a pattern, link it to childhood experiences, understand its consequences, and decide we want to respond differently. We may even develop a fairly sophisticated understanding of our Enneagram type, attachment patterns, defenses, and developmental history.

We can become experts on ourselves while still behaving in ways that confound us.

The core self, in Damasio’s model, concerns our immediate experience of ourselves in relationship to what’s happening. It’s closely connected to the organism’s changing bodily states, and for our investigation, it offers a useful entry point into emotional experience.

Someone questions our competence, and we immediately feel a tightening in the chest, a surge of irritation, or an impulse to take control. Someone approaches us emotionally, and we may feel a contraction, a desire to withdraw, or a longing for contact accompanied by an equally strong resistance to receiving it.

We may understand these reactions perfectly well, yet the emotional charge remains convincing. Something in the organism is responding to an experience that feels immediate and real, regardless of what our narrative understanding tells us.

The protoself or preverbal self refers to a more fundamental level of bodily organization, grounded in the nervous system’s ongoing representation and regulation of the organism. It provides a foundation for the more developed experiences of self and operates without the personal narrative we ordinarily associate with identity.

The organism adapted to its environment long before it had a coherent sense of being someone. The infant was already responding to contact and separation, comfort and distress, regulation and overwhelm. Patterns of physiological response developed before there was enough language, autobiographical memory, or self-reflective capacity to explain what was happening.

This is especially relevant to personality development. Repeated adaptations become preferred adaptations, and preferred adaptations gradually become habitual organizations. Over time, these patterns acquire continuity and eventually contribute to what we experience as ourselves.

That doesn’t mean we can identify a particular childhood event by examining a contraction in our stomach or tension in our shoulders. Our bodies aren’t little historical archives waiting for someone to decipher the secret messages. We can, however, investigate how our body/mind is organizing itself in the present, including patterns that may have developed before we possessed the capacity for conscious reflection.

The Nervous System Has Its Own Priorities

Stephen Porges‘ work on autonomic regulation offers another perspective through his concept of neuroception, the processing of safety- and danger-related cues outside conscious awareness. His work highlights how the nervous system helps organize our readiness for contact, defensive mobilization, and immobilization.

Imagine being in a conversation when someone’s tone suddenly changes. Before you consciously decide anything threatening is happening, your jaw tightens, your breathing becomes shallower, and your attention narrows. You may begin preparing to defend yourself or find a way to leave the conversation. A moment later, your mind supplies an explanation: “This person is being unreasonable,” or “I need to get out of here.”

The explanation may be perfectly reasonable, but your defensive organization is already underway.

Now suppose you’ve spent years investigating this particular pattern. You understand your sensitivity to criticism, recognize how it developed, and know that the present situation doesn’t warrant such a strong response. You can explain the entire sequence, perhaps with a few references to attachment theory and the Enneagram thrown in for good measure.

Meanwhile, your jaw stays tight, your breath stays constricted, and something in you keeps preparing for danger.

The narrative self understands. The organism is still responding.

This doesn’t mean our conscious understanding is powerless. Thought, attention, and learning can influence physiological regulation, just as bodily states influence how we think and perceive. The difficulty is that intellectual recognition alone often leaves established patterns of organization substantially intact. We know better, yet something in us keeps responding according to an older understanding of what we need.

Equilibrium and Dynamic Inertia

I’ve been using the term dynamic inertia to describe the tendency of an established psychological organization to perpetuate itself. The organism develops familiar ways of regulating tension, emotion, attention, and physiological activation, and these patterns acquire a momentum of their own.

We might think of this as psychological equilibrium, although equilibrium doesn’t necessarily mean relaxation or comfort. Someone can maintain a remarkably stable organization through chronic tension, vigilance, agitation, or withdrawal. What makes it an equilibrium is the organization’s familiarity and relative continuity.

A person who habitually maintains control may experience relinquishing that control as threatening. Someone who maintains distance may find increasing intimacy overwhelming. Another person who has learned to endure difficult circumstances may experience asserting a personal desire as disruptive. Each has become accustomed to regulating experience within a particular range, and movement beyond that range can create additional tension.

We may also discover opposing tendencies operating simultaneously. We may feel a desire to relax alongside an equally compelling impulse to remain vigilant, a longing for contact alongside a contraction that maintains distance, or an impulse to express ourselves held in check by an anticipation of rejection.

The organism continually adjusts within these tensions, maintaining an organization associated with stability. Even when our conscious understanding changes, the underlying pattern may continue responding as though the original conditions still apply.

This is one reason personality can remain remarkably consistent across decades. Its continuity depends upon ongoing regulation, much of which operates without our conscious participation. We may think we’re simply being ourselves when we’re actually doing considerable work to maintain a familiar organization.

And the effort can be exhausting, even when we don’t recognize that we’re making it.

Getting Beneath the Story

Suppose I notice myself getting irritated because someone questions my judgment. I can explain why their criticism is unreasonable, why my position is justified, or why their behavior reminds me of something from my past. I might even recognize that I’m defending an identity organized around competence and authority.

All of that may be accurate, but what’s actually happening in my immediate experience?

Perhaps my breathing has narrowed, my shoulders have become rigid, and pressure is building in my chest. Beneath the irritation there may be anxiety, vulnerability, or a sense of being exposed. Beneath those recognizable emotions, I may encounter something more fundamental: a wordless contraction, an impulse to brace, or a physical urgency that doesn’t require explanation.

Here we begin approaching the preverbal dimension of our organization.

At this level, our capacity to interpret experience may have relatively little to contribute. The organization is occurring through bodily sensation, physiological activation, and habitual response. We can begin to become familiar with these processes by experiencing them directly, letting the sensations reveal themselves without immediately assigning meaning.

We may discover that our bodies continue preparing for something even when the present circumstances offer no obvious reason for that preparation. We may also discover how quickly the mind attempts to explain, justify, or change whatever we encounter.

The desire to get rid of our tension can become another form of tension. Our determination to relax can become another form of control. Even the effort to be present may be recruited to maintain the familiar identity of someone working on themselves.

Personality is remarkably resourceful. Give it a spiritual practice, and it can become another self-improvement project, complete with goals, standards, and an internal supervisor tracking our progress.

What Becomes Possible Through Presence?

After more than fifty years of investigating consciousness, I’ve become increasingly convinced that understanding ourselves can take us only so far. We can explain our defenses, recognize their developmental origins, and identify how they limit our lives. Meanwhile, the organism keeps doing what it learned decades ago.

At some point, we have to become willing to experience the organization itself. The tension, the contraction, the emotional charge, and the uncomfortable sense that something terrible might happen if we stop maintaining our familiar position.

At the emotional level, this openness can gradually expand our capacity to remain present with experiences that previously seemed intolerable. Fear, vulnerability, anger, and longing become available without our immediately resorting to the defenses that have ordinarily managed them.

At the preverbal level, the investigation becomes more subtle. We cannot simply instruct an established physiological organization to relax because we’ve finally understood its origins. We can become familiar with its expressions, including the tension and opposing impulses that maintain it, and remain available to the experience without demanding a particular outcome.

This is where the Diamond Approach® has been particularly meaningful in my investigation. As identification with personality loosens, the qualities of Presence and Essence may begin revealing themselves. We may discover that what we have taken ourselves to be is an organization occurring within a more fundamental reality, one that doesn’t depend upon maintaining our familiar psychological identity.

Two recognitions have become increasingly important in my life: I can’t change, but I can be changed, and I can let True Nature have its way with me.

The first came from recognizing the limitations of the psychological self attempting to reorganize itself through its familiar methods. The second emerged through experiences in which something deeper than my ordinary sense of identity became available, bringing changes I could never have produced through understanding or effort alone.

Both have required a willingness to stay with experiences my personality would much rather manage, explain, or avoid. I’ve discovered I can understand something thoroughly while remaining almost completely unavailable to the experience itself. The understanding itself can become another way of maintaining distance.

There’s a tremendous difference between knowing that we’re holding on and actually experiencing the holding. And there’s an even greater difference between trying to let go and discovering what happens when we stop interfering.

Consider a pattern you’ve understood for years, perhaps one you’ve explained so many times that the explanation has become almost automatic. The next time it arises, let the familiar story stay in the background while you bring your attention to what is actually happening in your body. Notice the charge, the contraction, the impulse to act or withdraw, and the tension involved in maintaining your familiar position.

You may discover that the organism is doing considerably more than you realized to maintain what you’ve always thought of as simply being yourself. The most interesting question may be what happens when you become willing to experience all that activity without trying to do anything about it.