Recursive Traps

 

"It is often possible to discern a structure to people's difficulties,
in which internal states and external events
continually create the conditions
for the recurrence of each other."

 — Paul Wachtel

Blushing is an example of a recursive structure. If blushing is embarrassing for me, then any feedback that I am blushing enhances the physiological reaction. The more obvious the blush, the more embarrassed I feel, and the more embarrassed I feel, the more I blush.

Recursion, in mathematics and computer science, is a method of defining functions in which the function being defined is applied within its own definition. The term is more generally used to describe a process of reciprocal feedback; for example, when two mirrors face each other a recurring sequence of nested images appears in each.

Positive Feedback

When the mirrors are parallel, the nested reflections do not go on forever, because real mirrors are not perfectly reflective. Pathogenic structures have no such limitation. In fact, some produce amplification or positive feedback—analogous to a microphone that has gotten too close to a speaker causing a rapid and relentless magnification of the sound to the extreme.

Positive feedback of the fight-or-flight response to threat is the cause of panic attacks. Specifically, the symptoms of fear, such as rapid heartbeat, are perceived as threatening ["Maybe I'm having a heart attack" or "What if noticing my heart rate speed up causes it to continue to speed up relentlessly?"], and so trigger the body to secrete more fight-or-flight hormones, which exacerbate the fear reaction, thereby causing increased heart rate, and so on.

Recursive Cognitive Structures

Some of life’s problems are self-correcting. You catch a cold, and the body’s immune system learns to recognize the pathogen and eventually defeat it. A child learning to ride a bicycle may fall a few times but will ultimately get it. People who have developed a pattern of self-sabotage may never self-correct, because the source of their emotional reaction is a belief within themselves that is often confirmed by the way things play out.

Some beliefs are special because they cause you to act in ways that confirm the original belief - even when it was not initially valid.  The belief that you will perform poorly tends to impair performance and so becomes a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy. Because such Pathogenic Belief tend to be self-confirmatory, they can continue to diminish the quality of a person's life indefinitely.

Barry the Fortune Teller

Barry is a clever but socially anxious engineer. He can be very funny but tends to be inarticulate when he feels like a loser. The appraisals: “I’m a loser,” or “I am a witty guy” exist only within Barry’s mind and not in the objective world. Nevertheless, his beliefs influence how he actually performs in social situations.  Whether he reacts to the snide insult at the office party with a witty come-back or with a humiliating silence depends to a large extent on his subjective reality at that moment.

There is a battle between the creative fictions that will determine Barry's psychological state at the critical moment. On one side is his intention to be the cool and clever Barry, on the other is his expectation that he will be tongue tied.  The winner of this battle will determine which version of Barry gets to be part objective reality.  From our dispassionate perspective we can see they are both Barry's creations. Neither are true or false until Barry actualizes one of them with his performance at the party.

He wants to bring on the clever version of himself and enjoy the benefits of his clever wit, but he expects to be intimidated. Observers who know Barry have their own predictions, which are creations of their minds.  Barry's overt performance is what become part of world history; all the possible alternatives will fade into oblivion.

Because Barry's self-fulfilling prophecy has a recursive structure, it can persist indefinitely. This kind of recurring pattern of self-sabotage not only ruins a moment but continually recreates the conditions that diminish the quality of an entire life.  

Barry’s limitations do not come from outside of him, nor are they due to a lack of ability.  He is handicapped by his own self-sabotaging suggestion.  In contrast to injuries that tend to heal with time, the source of Barry’s misery comes from accepting as true a fiction he has created. Since childhood he has been acting as if he was socially inept in stressful situations—that is, he has been using this creative fiction as a hypnotic suggestion.

Another example of a self-fulfilling prophecy is the fact that Bernie, who believes that everyone is trying to screw him so he better screw them first, is surrounded by people who are, in fact, trying to screw him. If you knew Bernie, you'd probably be trying to screw him too. In fact, Bernie does not want to be a bad guy. It is just that his beliefs about other people's motivations tend to elicit antagonistic behaviors toward them, provoking them to behave in ways that confirm his expectation that they are trying to screw him.

Reification & Self-Fulfilling Prophesy

Like Barry, Bernie unintentionally gives himself a Hypnotic Suggestion by treating his abstract belief as if it was the same as concrete reality. The technical name of this fallacy is, Reification. To remember the definition, I pronounce the term to myself as "real-ification," because it means "to make real."

The ironic consequence of reification is that the creative fictions often do become real. For example, because Bernie acts as if his beliefs about other people's motivations was the realit he behaves antagonistically toward them, provoking them to act in ways that reify his negative beliefs.

Bernie Learns a Lesson

Bernie's unfortunate tale: “During a chaotic situation at an airport ticket counter someone kicked me in the back of the leg. When I turned around to confront the ass hole who did it, I saw a handicapped girl in a wheelchair. The wheelchair had evidently rolled, out of control, down a ramp and into me. She was terrified by the rage on my face. It broke my heart to see the fear in her face.”

The fact that Barry often behaves incompetently is social situations, and that Bernie is continually surrounded by people who are angry at him show the self-confirmatory effects that result from reifying pathogenic beliefs:

  • Fortune Telling [the belief that you know what will happen in the future] —  for example, "I will fail" or "They are not going to like me"—  ironically become self-fulfilling prophesies.

  • Mind Reading [the belief that you know what the other person is thinking] can have relationship-enhancing or -destroying effects depending upon the motivations you attribute to the other person. "She does that because she loves me" versus "She does that because she wants me to suffer."
    • Note: Even when you feel certain that you know what another person is thinking or what is driving their actions, you are probably wrong and almost certainly missing some key elements of their experience. Nevertheless, attributing negative intent toward you by a lover can do permanent damage  — even when the belief was initially incorrect! 
The bogus belief that I can read people's minds or can foretell the future are examples of the sloppy thinking that cause unnecessary suffering. Follow this link for a more complete list of  Popular Thinking Errors.

The Recursive Trap of Addiction

If you can identify a recurring pattern of self-sabotage, it is probably the result of a recursive trap. (If you have developed an addictive relationship with a substance [such as food, alcohol, drugs] or an activity [such as gambling, sex/pornography, gaming, device use, etc.] take this self-test to discover the nature of your particular trap and how to escape it).

To give you an idea of a recursive trap that maintains an Addictive Disorder, consider how the pleasurable activity of eating is used to escape the unpleasant feelings of being overweight and feeling like a failure. However, the eating episode [giving in to the desire] is interpreted as a failure, which strengthens the entrapment mechanism.

Bonnie hates being fat

Whenever she thinks about her obesity or sees herself in the mirror, she thinks self-critical thoughts and experiences shame. She can escape these unpleasant subjective phenomena by becoming absorbed in the pleasurable experience of eating. Once she stops eating, her awareness shifts to the perspective of the critical observer, she perceives the episode from a different perspective. She is no longer the creature driven to escape the pain of shame, she is now the self-critical observer who supports the self-loathing. The worse the self-criticism and shame, the more she seeks relief from self-awareness through escape into mindless eating. The more she follows this sequence the more she accepts it as the way things really are: "I am a shame-worthy failure." The more this concept is reified the worse grow her problems.

Self-awareness comes with consciousness. People find that thinking about themselves is irresistible and yet unbearable.

 

The Imp of the Perverse > >

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