On loops, inner children & re-indoctrination

“Man is not only a highly suggestible, but an unusually autosuggestible animal”

This was an insight articulated by Albert Ellis in his (genuinely) game-changing 1962 book “Reason and Emotion in Psychotherapy”, and it formed the basis for one of the foundational concepts of cognitive-behaviour therapy.  That the main reason we continue to suffer, and that our neuroses are maintained is because throughout our lives we actively and energetically keep verbally reindoctrinating ourselves with the unhelpful and irrational beliefs we were taught as children.

Specifically, Ellis considered that sustained, negative emotional states are generally the direct result of irrational, dysfunctional thinking, which phenomenologically takes the form of pervasive, negative self-talk.  So in his view, we are essentially brainwashing and reprogramming ourselves anew everyday with our very own personal, idiosyncratic scripts, glitches and hangups, via the internal dialogue we have with ourselves.

This builds on the observation from radical behaviourism that much external and internal human behaviour is essentially automatic, and the result of interconnected, largely closed, self-regulating loops.  These loops are conditioned by our environment, mediated through our temperament, and once formed tend to be highly stable and autonomous, low-friction and self-maintaining.  We are famously resistant to change unless it’s forced on us, so in the absence of external pressure, these cognitive-affective-behavioural loops will run indefinitely.

This is useful for the purpose of maintaining a sense of coherence and consistency in an organism, and so long as the circuitry – and in particular, the information it’s based on and regulated by - is broadly accurate and functional, everything is fine.  The problem with this automaticity comes when the information used in these loops is no longer adaptive to our circumstances, and becomes actively harmful to our wellbeing.  The scripts still keep running, because that’s what happens in over-rehearsed, low-friction closed loops, but now they’re not working in our favour.

So in a behaviourist’s formulation, humans are at one level accumulations of largely non-conscious, automatic habits and routines.  Our self-talk is a good example – analysis of its form shows it to be repetitive, unsophisticated and inflexible.  We think of our internal dialogue as being complex and intricate, but this mostly isn't the case.  

If we were to see a transcript of what we say to ourselves in our heads, we’d be embarrassed by the pedestrian, pedantic repetitiveness of it.  There are good and bad sides to this – on the plus side, our internal voices are far from the omniscient, nimble opponents they claim to be.  This of course is also the down-side – that we are unfortunately prone to haranguing ourselves in the most implacable, boorish of ways.  Such are the dreary mechanics of the autoindoctrination process.

But why is the content of our self-talk so basic, and the messages we deliver to ourselves so distorted and irrational?  Mostly because they're almost entirely based on things we were told as children, which were then processed and understood by our part-formed, childish brains.  So during the critical developmental phase of early childhood, the data set we’re using as the basis for what will go on to be life-defining beliefs about the ourselves and the world is doubly compromised.

Firstly, it’s based on the overly-simplified, dichotomous, black/white kind of speech we use when talking to a young child, where nuance is sacrificed for clarity.  And secondly, this speech is heard and processed by an immature brain with a limited ability to triage, contextualise and comprehend new information. 

Plus, going back to the transcript of our inner dialogue, if we were to look at the form as well as the content of our self-talk, it’s framed as demands instead of preferences, and catastrophe lurks round every corner. Our internal voice is shrill, insistent and melodramatic, because that's how children are.  This is the inner child – that cliched, frustratingly, maddeningly relevant concept – reimagined as the mediator of our unhelpful, debilitating self-talk.

So in this analysis, we maintain our personalities, and the illusion of consistency and permanence and solidity, in large part by the constant rehearsal of these personal, deeply idiosyncratic articles of faith about ourselves and the world, acquired during early childhood, via the moment-by-moment practice of automated self-talk. 

Unfortunately, not only is the content irrational, warped and incomplete, the intensity and tone of it – how we implement and police our reindoctrination - is overly dramatic, urgent and unreasonable; because these are essentially the thoughts, feelings and impulses of an anxious child.

And this is the defining feature of the day-to-day internal life of almost everyone on the planet. So of course we struggle – how could it be otherwise?