21. Regression and Revisualization
Catherine Roebuck joins James Christensen to talk about dealing with parental blindness
Transcript
James: Let's just start with what regression is. Regression is a reduced state of brain performance. How would you define it?
Catherine: I think the more common term that fits pretty well is being "dysregulated," but Schnarch is using the term "regression" because he is talking about what's happening in your brain. It's a shift in your brain state and your brain function to where you're not going to be able to think as clearly and you're not going to be able to relate to people kindly. Both your EQ and IQ are taking a temporary dip, where you're just not likely to be effective at solving problems or connecting well with other people. And it can happen anytime there is something with high anxiety and high meaning.
James: So I think about it mostly as a state of decreased brain function, so my brain doesn't work as well. There's also that emotional dysregulation in it too, but I think it's really the brain function that is the biggest problem, where I get less smart, I don't handle things well, and I don't see things clearly.
Catherine: And what we've been talking about is more of the acute regression side, when this comes on quickly as an abrupt change in your brain function. The other type of regression is a steady-state regression, which you could live in for years or decades, not even knowing that you're capable of functioning better because you never have before. That can be more related to the mind-twisting or the conditions in your close relationships in early life, where someone was messing with reality. It was hard to track what was real, or it wasn't very safe to track what was real and to see it clearly.
James: So you would see that as a combination of decreased brain performance and emotional arousal or dysregulation?
Catherine: Yeah, I would say it’s reduced cognitive and emotional function. And people who are living in a steady-state regression do tend to struggle in their close relationships and friendships.
James: And they often feel very anxious or depressed.
Catherine: Right. And even if they're very smart and they're doing well at their job, there are still aspects where if they can come out of the steady-state regression, their capacity is going to go up. They're going to be able to function even better. So there's a lot of people out there living well below their potential.
James: Especially in terms of interpersonal relationships.
Catherine: Yes.
James: So I got regressed this afternoon. I went and laid down outside under a tree, and I just breathed in and out for a while. I could feel the tension ease, and I could feel my brain start to think more clearly, especially along the lines of, "This is going to be okay." This was opposed to a kind of panicky feeling, which is just this undefined anxiety of, "Nothing's okay and I won't be okay," a sense of powerlessness, a sense of helplessness. The unregressed feeling is much more accurate. But throughout the afternoon, I've been drawn back into this regressed state of panic and powerlessness.
Catherine: And that's something I notice when I'm trying to work my way out of an acute regression; it'll kind of happen in waves. I will be able to pull myself up a little bit, and then it's like I'll sink back in. But you're describing some of the indicators that maybe you're regressed. In this case, you had a pretty good sense that you were regressed, probably because you've tracked this for a while and because you knew something really difficult had just happened.
James: And that has been such a gift to me, to have a word for it and to be able to notice it. A few years ago, I had no idea. Sometimes my life would go well, and sometimes it would go really poorly, but I was not able to track my own state of regression or others'. It's so useful to be able to know that in my current state, where I'm somewhat regressed, it would not be a good idea for me to take on one of these difficult marriage conversations that I really do need to have at some point. But not right now. I would wait until I'm doing better, get my head above water first, and then try to do something difficult like that.
Catherine: Well, one of the regression indicators that I track is fogginess, like brain fog. It's both a sensation and just the difficulty of thinking and lack of clarity, but there is sort of a sensation to it for me too, a heavy, foggy feeling in my head. That's one of the indicators for me where I'm just not clear and sharp, and much of the time I am. So when that hits, I don't always know what's behind it, but I handle it as a regression. There are other things too, like a lot of tension, feeling really anxious, or feeling super irritable. If I'm irritable, I'm typically regressed. I'm not super prone to irritability, but it'll come on as part of an acute regression. What else do you look for? How do you track your brain state?
James: I track a lot of physical sensations. It's shifted for me over the past year. It used to be a constant pain in my chest, and that almost never happens anymore. What I get now is a tingling, burning sensation in my face.
Catherine: That’s so interesting. I've actually had a similar shift. I don't have the face thing, but I used to have that pain in my chest that would come on with anxiety, and it was there so much of the time. And it's almost never there now, which is interesting to me too.
James: This is so interesting because Bruce Tift talks about intensity and he has a tendency to shy away from calling intensity good or bad. It's just intense. The tingling in my face happens during good intensity, and it happens during what I would call bad intensity. When I'm anxious, like right now, I have this tingling in my face, which is very similar to what I would feel if I were having a really enjoyable, highly connected conversation with someone. It's more my anxiety right now, but it's so interesting that it's the same sensation. The pain in my chest is so much rarer than it used to be. I used to get this pain in my chest when I drove past my first therapy office. I had a very difficult, abusive boss there, and every time I drove past that building for like a year after I quit, I would get that pain in my chest. I rarely get that pain at all anymore. What I do get is this tingling feeling in the face, which honestly, it feels somewhat more workable than the pain in my chest did.
Catherine: I've had this shift several times on what the primary physical, sensory-level indication is. I think there's something to it. You learn to work with the sensation and you learn to relax it on purpose, and then you find another layer that maybe just wasn't as loud. I've had that shift a few times, and I also have more awareness of positive sensations during positive intensity. I'll actually feel a pleasant warmth in my heart sometimes during positive intensity, and that is a newer thing for me. So there's the sensation level. One of mine is if I'm talking fast, and what I mean by that is if I am cutting somebody off a lot.
James: That is a huge indication of regression.
Catherine: If I'm jumping right on what my partner especially is saying, and I'm just jumping in there fast and hard, I'm regressed.
James: It's hard for me to think of you doing that because my experience with you is you're usually so thoughtful about what you say.
Catherine: When I'm not regressed. I guess I don't see you regressed that often.
James: I can imagine. I definitely struggle with cutting people off, and that is definitely a sign of regression because there's not really a good reason usually to cut someone off, as opposed to waiting the extra five seconds for them to finish their sentence.
Catherine: Well, I do interrupt, like if a client starts veering into what seems like a long, unproductive venting story, I'll say something, but it doesn't have the same energy to it at all. This is more of an aggressive move that's like, "I don't care what you have to say," like immediately dismissing. I'm always regressed when I'm doing that. It's never the right way to talk to somebody. Another one for me is ruminating, like thought spirals that go round and round. But some of this takes real practice to learn to track. Some people have much easier access to interoception and body sensations than others. It's something I've been able to improve with practice, but if you're starting out and you don't have easy access to that, Schnarch's advice is just assume you're regressed until proven otherwise, at all times.
James: So how would you prove otherwise? How would you know you're not regressed?
Catherine: I think until you can recognize your regression, you can't.
James: So you would have to recognize what it means to be regressed, and you would know you're not in that state. Like what we're talking about now. I feel somewhat regressed right now, but if I feel better tomorrow, I'll be able to notice that. I think otherwise, general indications are if I care a lot about someone, then I'm not regressed.
Catherine: That’s tricky.
James: Well, if I'm concerned for another person's well-being. So if your thriving is really important to me, that's a sign of not being regressed.
Catherine: I think you just have to watch for the ways that we can tell ourselves we're caring about someone when what we're trying to do is control them or something more like that.
James: That's why I talk about, "Is your thriving important to me?" You kind of have to be more precise because we do manipulate that word "caring."
Catherine: So I think if you can slow yourself down on purpose, calm yourself down, tune into sensations—it doesn't have to be in the way we were talking about. It could be doing some kind of breathwork, or I will just go through the senses. If you're able to do any of those things, you're at least pulling yourself out of a regression. You're not just staying in one. One of the aspects of regression is not feeling very agentic about what you're doing and not being very connected with reality and with close contact with other people.
James: So you're stuck in your feelings. There's a lot of fear, some helplessness, a sense of powerlessness, like "I can't do anything about this," as opposed to "What can I do to make the world a better place? What can I do to make my life better?"
Catherine: Despair and paranoia are things that show up for me in a serious regression. You know, "Everyone's out to get me," "This will never get better,"—variations on those thoughts. Schnarch talks about relaxing your body on purpose. He talks about going through some of the major muscle groups, you know, "Relax your thighs," and "Relax your jaw." There are a lot of different meditative and bodywork practices out there that guide people through that kind of thing.
James: I was regressed a couple of months ago and I called a friend. He said, "Can you see a tree?" I said, "Yeah, there's a tree." He's like, "Look at the tree." I love that. And so I just looked at the tree and I took a few deep breaths and I thought, "It's working. I'm feeling better." There was something about looking at a tree, something natural. It’s really just about getting more involved in taking stock of where you are, like your physical surroundings. Using your five senses, for example. So returning to the here and now. Regression has a tendency to move you away from reality and into abstract thought. I've often thought of life in three layers where the top is thoughts, the second is feelings, and the bottom is sensory information.
Catherine: Okay.
James: So the bottom is what I can pick up with my senses. The middle is what I am feeling, which seems distinct from thoughts to me. And then the top one is just thoughts, which I think is the most abstract. I think there's utility in coming out of thoughts into feelings, and out of feelings into sensory perception. And maybe it's useful to catalog, "Okay, what am I feeling right now? Am I feeling alone? Am I feeling scared? Am I feeling angry?" There's going to be more than one, but I think it is useful just to acknowledge that I'm having an emotional experience that more or less fits this classification.
Catherine: I think the agility to move on purpose between those layers is really helpful. And that's one of the things your brain is going to drop when you get regressed: agility. You get locked in.
James: And you get specifically locked into thoughts.
Catherine: Yes, or emotions. Sometimes people get really locked into an emotion.
James: I think people mostly get locked into thoughts. Even to the extent where I ask someone, "Well, what are you feeling?" and it usually comes out as a series of thoughts.
Catherine: There'll be an emotional intensity to it that is kind of unrelenting, is what I'm talking about. One of the examples that Schnarch gave was Elizabeth, who, when she'd get regressed, would go on a rant about the housework and people not helping.
James: Yeah. So she would go on this story where she's telling a victim story. I see that as my brain feeling uncomfortable intensity, and I need to come up with a story. It's almost like creating a dream. I need to come up with a story about why I am feeling this intensity. I need to explain it. And I think she was explaining the intensity she was feeling by saying, "I'm the only one who does anything around here, and you guys never help me." She's basically portraying herself as a victim. One thing I see happen is after an affair, the person who got cheated on will often respond to any kind of uncomfortable intensity by saying, "I'm upset because of the affair." The most extreme case I've seen is 10 years later.
Catherine: I think you're right. And I've seen this apply to betrayals other than affairs as well. Anytime there's a serious betrayal, it just becomes an easy target to point at when you're upset and when things are difficult.
James: I think the brain goes for that. I compare this to when I'm sleeping. If I have some sort of physical sensation, my brain will wire that into my dream in some way. If there's an unusual sound in the home, then the sound will become part of my dream. If there's a smell, the smell will become part of my dream. So my brain is taking my sensory data and incorporating it into the story it's making up. If I go to bed with a lot of anxiety, I'll have a stress dream about these very anxiety-provoking situations. My brain is making sense of the emotional state that I'm in. I think that happens when we're awake too. We make up stress dreams when we're awake. So right now I'm pretty anxious and my mind is going to make up explanations for why my anxiety is justified, which are not very reliable. And I think that's how you arrive at a daydream or a day-stress-dream that's about the affair my partner had many years ago. To be honest, I don't think it's the best explanation for why I feel anxious today. There are many reasons that are more valid than my partner cheating on me years ago. But it's an attractor. The brain likes simple solutions that tie everything up nice and neat with a bow. "Oh, I feel abandoned. I feel anxious. Well, it's 'cause I got cheated on years ago."
Catherine: So this is interesting because if you're working with a steady-state regression, one of the things you're going to work with typically is re-visualizing traumatic events from many years ago.
James: Yes.
Catherine: And so, even through Schnarch's lens, difficult traumatic experiences from many years ago can have a profound effect on your brain function today. It is different from an acute regression, but I guess I'm wondering, how are you thinking about the difference between the impact of traumatic memories from years ago and the impact of thinking about the affair or something?
James: The line I draw in my head is that things that happen to me when I'm very young have a much more permanent effect on me than things that happen when I'm older. If I had a fear of abandonment when I was young and I was neglected, and then my partner cheats on me when I'm older, I think what happened to me when I was young explains a lot more of my regression and my intensity than what happens to me when I was older. I have a somewhat extreme view on that, where for me, childhood experiences weigh much more heavily in the makeup of the mind than adult experiences do.
Catherine: I was just thinking about it in terms of the reason you go and re-visualize a memory to try to treat a steady-state regression. It would be that there's something about it that you're not clear on, that's not hanging together, and you're trying to get much clearer about it so that your brain can let it go. And I think that could apply to an affair as well. I'm confident that applies to an affair or a different betrayal. If your brain is still ruminating on it years later, often there's actually something about it that you don't understand, that would be helpful for you to understand. And so it's true, people can just get stuck in a victim story and have a hard time letting it go. But I've often seen there be something that legitimately needs to be clarified and resolved to be able to let it go.
James: That makes a lot of sense. So the way I put it together is if something really difficult happened to me a long time ago, my mind made sense of it the best it could. I like imagining it as two kinds of memory: your sensory memory and your interpreted memory. And so my senses took in this experience, and then my brain created an interpretation. That interpretation was somewhat accurate, somewhat not accurate, depending on how old I was and how regressed I was in the moment. So when I go back and do a re-visualization, I'm trying to go back to the sensory data to create a new interpretation based on my full adult capacity, based on what I know now. By making that new interpretation, it makes the memory less active. If I'm getting triggered by this thing, it means that my mind has been applying this threat to many current-day situations that don't actually fit the profile very well. For example, me driving past the therapy office. There's no real significant reason for me to go into fight or flight.
Catherine: There's zero risk to you at that point. Zero risk. You never have to interact with that person again, at least not in that capacity.
James: Zero risk from driving past the therapy office. And so if I went through and re-visualized what happened there, then my brain could get a more specific idea of, "This is a very specific encounter. The difficulties were limited to this particular time and place." I think this is even more powerful when we go back and visualize childhood situations because the differences between my life now as an adult and my life as a child are so severe and so extreme. And so when I go back and visualize childhood, I can make sense of the reason I was in such a pickle as a child was because I was a child. And there's also use in getting more clear about if someone was treating me poorly as a child based on the sensory data that I have access to, mostly visual memories. Does it make sense that that person was as innocent as I portrayed them? Because children have a tendency to portray people who treat them poorly as much more innocent than they really are.
Catherine: And the main thing there is that you'll drop from your memory your awareness that they were tracking your suffering, your awareness that they knew about their impact.
James: Yeah. And you give them this pass, where it's like, "Oh, they didn't know what they were doing," or "They had my best intentions at heart." So the whole picture doesn't hang together very well because it cuts out their intentions and knowledge. You know, there's a lot of people who are perfectly okay with causing children to suffer.
Catherine: Yes. Well, that doesn't have to be coming from a sadistic place. Sometimes it is.
James: Sometimes it is, sometimes it's not. But that could be part of the picture.
Catherine: I think that the top thing that brains need to function well is reality. So sometimes when people ask me what crucible therapy is, I say it's reality therapy. And it's fine if it's a painful reality; that's actually not a big problem for our brain. We're very resilient and we can handle a lot of dark, painful things, but we need to more or less understand our lives to be able to function well and live at capacity. And so, when somebody talks to me about being really upset about an affair from many years ago, for example, I'll hear them out. I'll ask them, "What was the worst part of that for you?" and I'll often have them visualize that memory. Then, often kind of accusatory questions arise, things like, "How could he do that? How could she lie to me?" I've found it very helpful to take those on as real questions and answer them.
James: That's really interesting because that's what people ask a lot in the wake of an affair.
Catherine: Yeah. And they're putting it out in an accusatory way, but I'll turn it back on them as, "Let's look at it. You know, what was going on? Let's try to put this together. What was actually going on in your partner's mind?" Because I think that's part of what's keeping the brain hooked, and that when you get an answer, even if it's upsetting, you can let it go.
James: And part of why the answer doesn't come is if I'm holding onto some need for my partner to be more innocent than they were, like, "Oh, they didn't know."
Catherine: It's an upsetting answer. Well, it can be upsetting in two ways. One of them is what you're talking about, this lack of innocence thing. But the other way it's upsetting, I think, is to confront the shared lack of capacity. A really common empathic rupture in couples is when the first child was born, and the husband was not present and supportive for the wife through labor, birth, and early infancy stages. When I get into that, I very often find a husband who was freaking out about the financial responsibility he felt to provide for a family and just had very little capacity, wasn't functioning well, and hadn't had a good model. They were young. And so I'll often find a picture of two people who were flooded and overwhelmed, not one. And then you can have an answer. It's not exactly about, "He didn't care about you that he wasn't there." It could be like, "He was really at the edge of his capacity too." And the sad truth is just that neither of you had the capacity to do better at that time.
James: Mm-hmm.
Catherine: But I think this often applies with affairs too, that if you really look into it, if you look at the cheating partner's upbringing, you'll find how this came to be normalized for them, how they grew into a person who was secretive or had bad boundaries or lacked integrity. You know, I think people make sense when you really look at them. And for me, that's what gets you out of a steady-state regression: looking at your life enough that it makes sense to you.
James: Do you find it a lot harder to work with clients who do not want to look at their parents?
Catherine: Uh, yeah. In general. I think there's a relationship between not wanting to look at your parents and wanting to avoid really looking at yourself.
James: Hmm. Interesting.
Catherine: Have you had clients who are unwilling to look at their parents but really are willing to look at themselves up close?
James: No, I haven't encountered it and I'm not sure it's a thing.
Catherine: Because I think it's probably the same blockers, and that's going to make it hard to make progress.
James: It really is. Tift and Schnarch both said that they were content to work with people who didn't want to talk about their past.
Catherine: Yeah, but that's not the same as saying, "I won't talk about my parents," because, unless you have no contact with your parents now, you could talk about your parents in the present.
James: And that would be just as useful.
Catherine: I don't think you have to talk about childhood. And I do have clients that don't talk about childhood and still make real progress.
James: I find that talking about parents in the present, if you have current contact with your parents or have had contact recently, is more useful than talking about parents in childhood. Especially if I could talk to you about how you interact with one of your parents as an adult. I find that to be very powerful.
Catherine: Yeah, I agree. If there's a way that you're having a hard time stepping into your own agency and authority and being good to people, it'll show up in your relationship with your parents now, because that's where we're most easily pulled back into childlike patterns of helplessness and defiance and all that stuff.
James: How do you use re-visualizations? Do you do them in sessions? Do you do written visualizations? How do you use that tool?
Catherine: I sometimes do them in sessions. It depends on the client. I find some are more willing because I think re-visualization involves kind of a trance state or a meditative state. You have to be willing to slow down.
James: Can you walk me through one, with something from my own life? We could do the rental car story I told earlier, or we can do something else. I'm just curious to see how you do it. It's not a tool I use a lot and I'm curious to see how you use it.
Catherine: So, if you're thinking about this rental car experience, think about the most intense moment in there. What's the worst part of it?
James: The worst part of it was when my oldest son tried to soothe me. That was the worst part because that was just like, "Oh no." It's emblematic of all the burdens I put on him over the years.
Catherine: What's happening when he tries to soothe you? Where are you?
James: So I'm sitting in the driver's seat. We are waiting to exit the rental car lot. I'm trying to set up the map before we exit, and there's a rental car employee about 20 feet away, kind of glaring at us for blocking the space we're in.
Catherine: You've got an authority figure mad at you?
James: Yes. And so he's in the right rear passenger seat, and he's just totally keyed into my energy. I'm just running through, over and over, connecting and disconnecting the phone, trying to make it work, going through all the settings on the car and Googling stuff. I can't remember what he said, but then my daughter is offering to hold the phone for me while I drive. They're both just actively taking care of me, the parent, feeling compelled to become caretakers in that scenario. And that was just so sad to me. I hate putting that kind of burden on my children, and there's a reason they reacted that way.
Catherine: Can you see your oldest son's face when he is trying to soothe you?
James: Yeah, I can see him, just barely.
Catherine: What do you see in his face? What's beneath the words he's saying? How's he feeling toward you or what's he thinking about you?
James: He just wants me to be okay so he can be okay. He's just not okay with me being anxious. He's anxious about my anxiety is the way I put it together.
Catherine: If you look at his face and you put it into words, what is he thinking about you as he's looking at you?
James: If I look at his face, it's concern. Concern and, "I want this to stop. I want this to go away."
Catherine: And what were you feeling while this was happening? Were you connected to sensations?
James: I was tense. All my muscles were tense, my jaw was clenched. I had this burning in my forehead and my face, and I was probably chewing on my lip or something because I was so full of anxiety.
Catherine: And then look at the attendant in this memory. What are they thinking about you?
James: So I tried to exit through the wrong lane, and then I backed up, and then there was this empty space I pulled into. I thought, "I'm gonna try to get CarPlay to work one more time." And she was standing there, and I was partially blocking her view, and she just wanted me to move on and go. She wanted me to go away. I couldn't see her very well, but what I imagine is her just glaring with disapproval and being annoyed that I'm there, not in a parking space.
Catherine: Put that into a sentence. What's on her face? What's she thinking about this guy that's tried to exit through the wrong lane and is holding up traffic?
James: She's thinking, "What an idiot."
Catherine: Yeah. So you've got an authority figure looking down on you, judging you, thinking you're an idiot and a nuisance. And you've got your whole family watching you, unable to solve this problem. And you've got your oldest son relating to you like, "I'll take care of you, as long as we can make this stop."
James: Mm-hmm.
Catherine: So for me, re-visualization is like you go back to where it happened, and you go through the senses. So you look at what you can see, and especially pay attention to faces. I find it helpful to put into words that facial expression, "What's this person thinking about you?"
James: No, that's beautiful. Yeah. That's awesome.
Catherine: And then depending on what the memory is, you can pull in as many senses as makes sense. Schnarch talks about it as re-visualization, but especially because my visual skills were not that strong at first, I had easier access to auditory. So what are you hearing in this? Can you hear your son's voice? You hear your daughter's voice trying to soothe you and trying to offer to help? Is anyone honking their horn at you? You just go through the senses, whichever ones seem relevant.
James: Let's do the car crash from today.
Catherine: Okay.
James: So I'm driving up a dirt road, and the road is turning to the right. I'm driving a white minivan, and I'm not going very fast, luckily. I'm just kind of hugging the inside of the turn, looking around to make sure nobody's coming. And all of a sudden, these two minibikes just come roaring around the corner. There's one on the left and one on the right, so there's one coming straight at me, and they're going fast, like 40. Minibikes only have back brakes, no front brake, so very little stopping power. We see each other, I slam on the brakes. He slams on the brakes, but he just skids and barely slows down at all. He skids straight into and impacts the right front of my car. His bike flips up and his head smashes into my windshield. He has a helmet on. So, you know, I stop the car and I get out and I walk around and I look at him and I start calling 911. I was afraid that he was seriously hurt because he was just kind of laying there moaning. I'm talking to the dispatcher and she can't hear me because the cell phone signal's bad. And he's laying there, and then finally he's like, "I'm okay. Nothing's broken. I just got the wind knocked out of me." Luckily, he was wearing full motocross gear, which is what saved him. I had three kids in my car. There were two other cars with family members pulled up behind me.
Catherine: Who's in the front seat with you?
James: My niece, who's very sensitive and about to get her driver's license.
Catherine: And so when his helmet hit the windshield, it's right in front of her?
James: Right in front of her. Yeah.
Catherine: What's the worst moment of this?
James: The worst moment is when he hits the car. When he comes around, I'm like, "Okay, he's going to be able to stop." A normal motorbike would've been able to stop. If he had a front brake, he would've been fine. But because he didn't have a front brake, he just kept going. The worst moment was when he just kept sliding and sliding and slid right into the car at a decent clip, enough to dent the car. The bike was well over 200 pounds. So yeah, the worst part was when he hits the car.
Catherine: And where's his friend through this?
James: His friend is coming down, riding on the right side of the road from my point of view. And his friend stops his bike a little bit past, parks it, walks over, and starts checking on his friend. The only other cars are my brother and my sister behind me. They pull up a couple minutes later with tons of kids in their cars, and they were all there and they were obviously worried, especially my sister.
Catherine: What kinds of thoughts were you having while this was happening?
James: I'm mostly worried about the kid on the bike. I was super worried that he'd had some sort of serious injury. I was afraid that he had some sort of internal injury or had broken a leg or something. It was kind of amazing that he was okay. He's just laying there moaning. And then I start to worry about all the logistics of dealing with it, the rental car and all that stuff. So then the operator's like, "Well, should I send an officer out?" And I'm like, "Well, I don't know." I was so regressed. I had no idea. If she would've just said, "Okay, an officer's on their way," I would have been like, "Okay, great." But she's asking me to make the call. At that point, he was standing up and saying he was fine. And I'm just like, "Well, I don't know what a police officer's going to do."
Catherine: So as you were talking through the memory, it seemed to me that there's a point where you dissociated emotionally from it. You were in the sensory memory for a while, but it seemed to me that the point where you dissociated from your own memory was not when he hit the windshield, but it's when you get out of the car and he's on the ground moaning and you don't know what kind of condition he's in.
James: A lot of my fear in this is around having done something really bad. That's it. It's this feeling that "I did something really bad," and that just tanks me.
Catherine: I'm just going to say where my brain would go in this scene, which would be, "Did I just kill him?" You're not saying that part, but I actually wondered about that when you get out of the car.
James: He wasn't going fast enough to die. My worry was broken limbs. By the time I got out of the car and saw him lying there, I'm like, "Oh, his leg might be broken." I wasn't really worried about him dying. Maybe that was in the back of my mind, but I tank when I feel like I've done something really bad. It's really hard for me to see myself as a normal person who makes normal mistakes.
Catherine: So it's like if he had a broken limb, then that would mean something terrible about you as a person.
James: Yeah. Well, sometimes I am a somewhat reckless driver, and in this instance, I was driving a very reasonable speed around a corner and I was basically doing everything right. But I don't always drive that way. Sometimes I'm kind of reckless, and I have this deep sense of guilt and shame around not being perfectly cautious all the time. It's been with me for a long time.
Catherine: So I think the main thing you're trying to connect with, with re-visualization, is mind-mapping data. You're trying to get into, "What did I understand about another person's mind in real-time that I have not included in my interpretive memory?" With these incidents, I don't know how much there's interpersonal mind-mapping going on that is unresolved for you or unclear. There's definitely some, but you seem reasonably clear on it. The purpose of the re-visualization seems to be to get those two kinds of memories to sync up with each other.
James: So the interpretation matches the data. And that's why you focus so much on facial expressions because they are very important for mind-mapping. So what happens is, when the event happens, my brain perceives and records the facial expression, but then when the interpretation gets made, it doesn't line up with the facial expression. The mind-mapping gets divorced from the interpretation, which is where we end up with things like, "Well, I don't know whether my parent knew this," and, "I don't know what my parent's intention was." So this mind-mapping data gets hidden, and it's important to sync that back up and put it together in a way that makes sense.
Catherine: Yeah.
James: All right. Take me through one from adolescence, then. From school. So I am a sophomore, end of my sophomore year of high school. I was going to public school in France, very strict. French schools don't have athletic fields or grass or anything like that. And so I bring a Frisbee to school and I'm tossing it at lunch with a friend, and some teacher or administrator comes along and confiscates the Frisbee. And it's in this very French way where they're incredibly condescending and just like, "Can't believe this." You can imagine how a French person would handle this. You have offended their sense of propriety. "How dare you, you miserable creature." So he takes the Frisbee. Confronting authority figures is very difficult for me. I just crumble in front of authority figures. So on the last day of school, I'm like, "I am going to go get my Frisbee back." I go into this person's office and I say, "I would like my Frisbee back." And he just looks at me with this withering stare, and he didn't give me my Frisbee. I don't remember what he said, but it was just this whole thing like, "How dare you presume that you deserve to have your Frisbee back?" He's looking at me like I am so far out of the way the world should be, so far beyond the pale of what's reasonable and good that I should be ashamed of myself. And that memory is burned into my brain. I should do one from third grade too, but take me through that one.
Catherine: So just focus on his face. Can you see it?
James: Gosh. It's so interesting. I can see the office.
Catherine: Is he standing or sitting?
James: He was sitting behind his desk. That helps. You know, I can't really see his face. I can just kind of sense his body language, just his posture and the way he was moving.
Catherine: And you're standing?
James: Yeah, I was standing. I can't remember if my friend was with me or not.
Catherine: How far from the desk are you?
James: Uh, maybe three or four feet.
Catherine: Okay. What's he seeing in your face?
James: Ooh. I don't know how well I knew how to mask by that age. If it was now, he would be seeing nothing because I put on a good mask. But at that age, I was 15. If he sees anything, it's fear. Fear, a lack of confidence, insecurity.
Catherine: Why were you asking for the Frisbee back? What was important to you about that?
James: It was almost like a sense of propriety for me. If he doesn't want me to throw the Frisbee at school, that's fine, but there's no reason for him not to let me take the Frisbee home at the end of the school year. It was the last day of school.
Catherine: Did you have other Frisbees at home?
James: Probably, yeah. I don't think I was really that worried about having the Frisbee. It was on principle.
Catherine: So you're scared, but you're taking a principled stand?
James: Yeah.
Catherine: Do you think he can tell that?
James: Probably. Yeah, probably. If that was the way I was coming in, I would've phrased it that way. I was very respectful to him, but who knows? But I'm seeing what you are drawing me to here is this clash of my sense of propriety versus his sense of propriety. What he thinks is right and wrong. He's like a Javert-type character. And my sense of propriety is just, "Is it reasonable for me to ask for my Frisbee back?"
Catherine: When you're talking about being respectful to him, the way you're describing him, I think he's probably someone that expects deference.
James: Oh yeah. And it was very intense. This whole meeting has this deep sense of him just condescending and scoffing at my ludicrous temerity, my willingness to step into his office and just ask for my Frisbee as if I mattered, as if my personal property had any importance.
Catherine: So he's tracking that you're challenging his authority. And you're being respectful about it, but that's what you're doing.
James: Yeah. He probably saw it that way. And I was American, and it was an international school, but American students, I'm sure, had a reputation for being scofflaws. We definitely had that reputation in France, for not observing the French ways.
Catherine: I find it helpful to take what you can track on a body language and facial expression level and put it into, "What's he thinking that he's not saying?" And not just the abstract idea of it, but if he were to say out loud what's in his mind...
James: I mean, what's in his mind is like, "You little shit." That's exactly it.
Catherine: That's the mind map.
James: Yeah. "You little shit." Yeah. That's it.
Catherine: Yeah.
James: That is the mind map, isn't it?
Catherine: That's what it is. That's what you're looking for.
James: Yeah. So it's useful to put it into words because I have it in this very kind of loosey-goosey, right-brain memory that's made up of body language and stuff. But I've never put it into words.
Catherine: But the impact it's having on you is "you little shit."
James: Yeah. But I feel better after having said that.
Catherine: That's because it's lining up those memories.
James: One more, similar. Third grade. So I was homeschooled until third grade. Third grade, I go to school. I am way behind in reading and social skills, and I'm very awkward. I didn't get severely bullied or anything, but it was hard. I was always behind on assignments, I never completed them. We'd have classwork and she'd give us 20 minutes to do something, and I never finished it in time. I struggled to fit in, and that was really hard for me. But part of my identity was that I was one of the good kids. It had always been important for me to see myself as a good kid. And so halfway through the year, we're putting on this class program of some kind. All the girls had brought in their Cabbage Patch kids. This is the eighties. They bring in the Cabbage Patch Kids for this program, and all the dolls are stacked against one side of the classroom. I had become sort of acquaintances with one of the "bad kids" in class. He's a little devil-may-care, a little rebellious. He and I had started talking a little bit, and he's like, "James, come here. Look at this." He takes one of the Cabbage Patch Kids—they have a very delicate mouth that's made with just a thread—and he pulls the thread and the mouth disappears and it just ruins this doll. Cabbage Patch Kids in the eighties were these prize possessions, and they were very expensive. And then he's like, "Now you do it." And I reached out and I pulled the thread on the mouth, and just then my teacher looks over. This is literally the first bad thing I'd ever done in school. I was very compliant in general with rules and stuff. And she looks over, and there's this look of like, "You little shit," I guess, but it's like she's angry and she's categorizing me and she's labeling me and she's looking down on me.
Catherine: Well, my guess is that there's a difference between how she's looking at you and the other person from the other memory. The reason I think there would be a difference is you're laying this out as she'd have one impression of you before this moment—that you're a good kid—and this is the moment that her view of you changes.
James: I think she was frustrated with me because I never got my schoolwork done and I was probably a messy kid, and my clothes were probably not clean. My hair was never combed and stuff like that. Here's my map of her: I was not one of the easy kids in her class. I wasn't rebellious, but I wasn't learning very much and I wasn't progressing. I was one of the kids that was not making her look good as a teacher. One of the kids that she would probably rather not have in the class would be my guess. But this was different. The core of this memory is she threatened to call my parents, and that struck so much terror, just this intense terror into my heart. It's so interesting telling the story now because I used to be so activated by the story and I'm not anymore. It was just this idea of her calling my parents and telling them that I was a bad kid, that I'd done this horrible thing. She looks at me and she's like, "That's it, I'm going to call your parents." And that's all she said. So I got home that day and we never talked about it, but they knew. I got home and dad gets home and mom and dad look at me, and I map their minds and they know.
Catherine: What do you map in their mind?
James: It is almost like this disappointment. Man, that is a hard thing to guess. I don't know.
Catherine: So I'd take them one at a time and look at their face and think about it. You get home and you're anticipating this. So you're looking for it. You're definitely looking at them to see what's going to happen, and you've got one idea about what's going to happen, which is what you're scared about, but that's not what happened. So this whole time you're going to be paying close attention to them.
James: You know, my fear is mostly about them disapproving of me. Them seeing me as one of the bad kids. That's really the core of it. I'm not really worried about getting hit or anything. It's the fear of them categorizing me as a bad kid.
Catherine: And so that's what you're looking for when you look at them? Which category am I in now?
James: Yeah. It's almost like, "Am I good enough?" And it is like, it's like I lost my sense of personal sufficiency in that moment. Somehow I had had this idea that I was good enough, and it's like it got taken away. Part of being "good enough" was that you have to not do stuff like that. It's like I fell from grace in that moment. It's like I was cast out of the garden.
Catherine: Why wasn't anyone saying anything to you about it?
James: I don't know. So I don't have a clear memory of Mom's face.
Catherine: Schnarch says to map the mind of the person in the hole in the memory. So the missing face is the one that matters.
James: Yeah. Well, let's start with Dad's face. Okay. So Dad's face, there's like this moment of meeting where he knows that I know that he knows. And that was it.
Catherine: How does he feel toward you?
James: I really don't know. It could be just like no big deal. It could be... my guess is that I've fallen in his estimation, like I've become less worthy.
Catherine: But that's not how he'd say it to you if he was saying out loud what he's thinking.
James: He would say, "That's one strike against you." That's what he would say because he said that to me later on when I was in high school.
Catherine: You're allowed three mistakes. Three bad choices.
James: That's one strike against you. Yeah. As far as Mom's mind, I have no idea. I only remember making contact with Dad.
Catherine: It's possible he's the more important person in this.
James: Yeah. All right. Should we end there?
Catherine: Sure.
