Daughter Detox

by Peg Streep

  Even after visualizing a difficult person and encounters, the action-oriented people could pick out a happy face in a crowd and identify with positive traits; the priming didn’t affect them. The researchers hypothesized that the unconscious self-affirming processes of the action-oriented deactivated the primes. Not surprisingly, the state-oriented were affected by priming a difficult relationship, couldn’t pick out happy faces, and felt more negative about themselves. Not surprisingly, negative priming makes all the deficits of state orientation worse.

  Stop and think for a moment whether this is the case for you. Does stress make you feel worse about yourself, or are you able to rise to the occasion and pull down positive self-images?

  Now to the other half of the experiment—visualizing an accepting person. Interestingly, action-oriented people weren’t affected by visualizing an accepting person either, but—and here’s the important part—state-oriented people not only felt better after visualizing a calm relationship but also identified with more positive traits. And this wasn’t the only experiment to show that positive primes might help someone who was normally brought low by negative cues.

  The takeaway: Visualizing someone who accepts you in times of stress will increase your ability to manage the situation.

  EXPLORING THE POWER OF PRIMES

  Research suggests that insecurely attached people (or, using the other terminology, the state-oriented) can actually use priming to stabilize mood, self-soothe, and manage negative emotions more productively. For example, researchers Sander L. Koole and David Fockenberg had participants in an experiment either recall a stressful and demanding period in their lives in great detail, or a calming and relaxing one. The researchers then primed the participants with an equal number of positive and negative words. As expected, the action-oriented dealt with the negative primes the way water glides off a duck’s back, but the state-oriented who focused on a calming time in their lives were able to defuse the effect of the negative primes better than the action-oriented! Just thinking about a happy period in their lives—fully visualizing it—helped them to regulate their emotions with more skill and to be less reactive to negative primes.

  Other research has explored how insecure attachment styles can be altered. As you know and researchers point out, your attachment style isn’t formed by a single encounter with your caretaker but many, many experiences over a long period of time so that a single intervention or moment in time is unlikely to change it. That said, researchers continue to look at what can be done to change the unconscious reactions of the anxiously and avoidantly attached. One is “earned” attachment, which describes what happens when a person is in a relationship—it could be with a love interest, a therapist or mentor, or some other close person—which effectively breaks down those older mental representations and replaces them with ones of secure connection. We’ll discuss that later in these pages, but first, let’s look at how you can use priming in the day-to-day.

  While some experiments using primes—security- and love-related words or scenarios—have changed participants’ reactions in laboratory settings, the changes have been short-lived, lasting only hours. That was not the case in an experiment conducted by Katherine B. Carnelley and Angela C. Rowe, which found the effects of secure priming to last for days. They primed the participants by having them visualize someone with whom they felt secure, had them write about these individuals on two separate occasions, and also had them imagine a scenario in which they were helped by sensitive people when they confronted a problem they couldn’t deal with on their own.

  In their discussion, the researchers note that simply thinking about secure interpersonal experiences may help everyone, regardless of their attachment style, when they are under stress. (In my experience, that’s certainly true.) For the anxious or avoidant, recalling people and interactions in their lives that belied their primary experiences may strengthen these secure mental representations and make them more accessible. The hope is that, through repeated exposure, it’s the image of secure attachment that comes to mind when a person reacts to or assesses a situation. Finally, though, the researchers acknowledge that “although repetitive priming of attachment security may change people’s cognitions or thoughts about relationships and the self, it may be more difficult to change emotional reactions to attachment stimuli.” In blunt terms, that describes the unconscious hypervigilance of both the anxious and the avoidant, and their automatic ways of coping. But those, too, can be disarmed over time with effort.

  The bottom line: Your ability to imagine and bring up images of the kind and caring people in your life into your thoughts can facilitate change. For some exercises to strengthen your skills, see page 243 .

  THE TAKEAWAY LESSONS: RECOGNIZING YOUR TRIGGERS

  Disarming your unconscious process is a battle to be fought on several fronts. Following are some potentially helpful strategies:

  Focus on your reactivity: Years ago, a therapist had these words of wisdom for me: STOP. LOOK. LISTEN. What he meant was that I had to focus and pay conscious attention to situations that made me feel the way I did around my mother. Instead of allowing myself to go on autopilot—becoming defensive or reactive—I had to learn to step back and process not only what I was feeling but also why.

  Use STOP, LOOK, LISTEN as a mental timeout when you are becoming reactive, and ask yourself the following questions:

  ♦ Am I reacting to something in the present, or has the present moment dredged up something out of my past? Keep in mind that words, tone, gestures, and body language can all act as triggers, blurring the line between the past and present.

  ♦ Am I seeing the situation clearly, or is my reactivity driving the car that’s me?

  ♦ Am I listening to the intention behind the words, not just the words themselves?

  Giving yourself a wide enough berth to be able to examine both the source and nature of your feelings is particularly important for those of us who grew up looking through the wrong end of the binoculars.

  If you’re having a physical response—heightened anxiety, a pounding heart, or fear—to a situation that isn’t particularly threatening, it’s entirely possible that your emotions are being hijacked by automatic processes. The only way to know is to give yourself a timeout, hit the pause button, and STOP, LOOK, LISTEN .

  Pay attention to situational cues: Work on becoming aware of how you’re being affected by the space you’re in, along with the situation. It’s normal to feel anxious, for example, when you go to the doctor, or irritated when you’re standing in line at the bank, but it’s key to get a bead on how you are triggered and by what. Ask yourself the following questions:

  ♦ Does my mood shift when I’m in a crowded room? In what ways?

  ♦ Do I get energized by being around people or exhausted?

  ♦ Do I tend to overreact to small annoyances and have trouble self-calming?

  ♦ Am I hypervigilant to small slights, especially those that echo my treatment in childhood—someone calling me out on my version of events, for example, or telling me that I’m too sensitive?

  ♦ Alternatively, am I quick to withdraw or get defensive when there’s tension or a glitch in communication?

  Writing down your observations in your journal using cool processing will also give you greater mastery over both your emotions and reactivity over time. All of these behaviors are learned in childhood and need to be consciously unlearned.

  Listen to your body: If you’re starting to sweat or your throat suddenly feels tight or you have any other visceral response to a situation, see if you can trace those feelings back to a source or sources. Words or postures in what might seem to be an ordinary exchange to someone else but that recall a childhood experience might be triggering you. For example, when someone cuts me dead in mid-conversation—saying something like, “I don’t want to talk about this now,” or stonewalls by going silent—all of my buttons are automatically pushed because it’s my childhood revisited; I have to consci
ously remind myself that my reaction is being heightened. Beginning to untangle the unconscious responses you learned growing up from what are appropriate and measured responses to what’s happening now is key to recovery.

  Use self-priming and visualization to increase your security: Follow the lead set by research findings by visualizing, in times of stress, secure connections, people, and places. Remember that securely attached people do this automatically and unconsciously; you can get the same effects by using conscious processing. See pages 243 -244 for more.

  Don’t normalize abusive behavior: Daughters who experienced verbal abuse in childhood and were bullied, taunted, or gaslighted, sometimes have trouble recognizing toxicity in adulthood. Your tendency to excuse or normalize abusive behavior is an important pattern to bring to consciousness so that you can set clear and immutable boundaries and recognize toxic behavior when you see it. If someone is using disparaging words or gestures, excuse yourself and practice STOP, LOOK, LISTEN. You don’t have to start World War III; all you need is to say something like, “I’m taking a break now. We can continue this discussion when you don’t feel the need to put me down.” Setting boundaries is a matter of practice, and you will get used to doing it in time.

  Getting off the merry-go-round by recognizing more unconscious patterns: The more you know about the human brain and its special bag of tricks, the better you’ll be at disarming unconscious patterns inherited from childhood. These habits of mind aren’t limited to unloved daughters, of course, but they definitely stand in everyone’s way when it comes to making good decisions, managing emotions successfully, and becoming happier with yourself and your life. For the unloved daughter, still struggling with the fallout from childhood, they are real stumbling blocks. Again, these are unconscious mental processes that can be disarmed by conscious recognition.

  REALIZING THE POWER OF INTERMITTENT REINFORCEMENT

  If you ever took an introductory psych course, you might remember an experiment involving three very hungry rats conducted by B. F. Skinner, but if you missed it, here’s the scoop. Each cage holds a single rat and is equipped with a lever. In the first cage, when the rat pushes the lever, a food pellet is always delivered. Once the rat realizes that food is a sure thing, he loses interest in the lever and goes about his business unless he’s hungry. In the second cage, the lever has been disconnected, and when the rat pushes it, nothing happens. He pushes again and again, and the result is the same and, not surprisingly, he loses interest in the lever. It’s what happens in the third cage, though, that has a lesson for us. Sometimes the lever works and delivers the pellet, and sometimes it doesn’t. It’s a totally random pattern, but the intermittent delivery gets the rat totally fixated on the lever and increases his persistence. He’ll keep on pushing.

  This is true of humans, too. Nothing makes us more persistent than getting what we want some of the time. Combine that with two other common habits of mind—recasting a loss as a “near win” and being overly optimistic (which humans are)—and the chances are good that you are going to stay on the emotional carousel forever.

  Consider your relationship to your mother or anyone in your life who is disappointing you, big time—and has been for ages— in terms of behavior, empathy, reciprocity, or anything else, and imagine a conversation or a meeting that goes much better than you expected and even makes you feel hopeful that things are about to change. Your inner optimist is smiling, and you’re going to try harder because, maybe, this is the time things will finally turn around. That’s intermittent reinforcement at work. Intermittent reinforcement keeps people at slot machines because winning now and again makes them believe that if they persist, they’ll hit it big. It’s especially true in relationships: When you get just a tiny taste of what you want, you’re suddenly in it to win it even though nothing has really changed. It goes without saying that intermittent reinforcement keeps the dance of denial going and gets your hopes up but also sets you up for second-guessing and rumination when it’s clear things haven’t changed a bit.

  How to tell intermittent reinforcement from real change? By looking at what’s happened realistically and paying attention to whether or not you’re reading in. One occasional moment that seems promising doesn’t foretell a trend. Questions to ask yourself:

  ♦ Has the person really changed tacks, or is he or she simply less derisive, less withholding, than usual?

  ♦ What exactly is different about the person’s treatment of you? Be sure that it’s not your optimism or hopefulness kicking in and making you upbeat for no reason.

  ♦ Are you ready to talk to the person directly about his or her behavior? And to discuss the kinds of changes you’ll need to see if the relationship is to go forward? If you’re not ready, then you are effectively deciding to stay on the merry-go-round.

  Simply recognizing how intermittent reinforcement can keep you stuck is a step toward disarming it.

  GETTING A HANDLE ON RUMINATION

  Did you know that the brain actively searches for unfinished business and works to counteract any efforts you make at subverting unwanted thoughts? That’s exactly what Daniel Wegner discovered when he wanted to tackle the question of why, when we try not to think of something, it ends up being all we can think about. The answer has a fancy name—“ironic processes of mental control”—but it comes down to this: Your brain searches for the very thought you’re trying to suppress. In one experiment, Wegner and other researchers told participants not to think about white bears while they were performing a task. Do appreciate the fact that most of us don’t spend a lot of our time thinking about white bears most days, so the fact that those who were told not to think about them thought about them once a minute is quite something! In another experiment, participants were first instructed to think about white bears and then not to think about them. Guess what? They thought about them more when they were told not to. Avoiding a specific thought seems to have a priming effect. Yikes!

  So if you, like many of us, find yourself up in the middle of the night stewing and second-guessing about that last run-in with your mother or someone else, keep in mind that those ironic processes are out to destroy your every effort to stop thinking about her or him. You might want to register the fact that rumination can also feed into self-criticism—that habit of mind that ascribes failures to flaws in your character, rather than events. So how to stop this particular merry-go-round from spinning?

  Science shows that while distraction doesn’t work, concentrated focus on something that really absorbs your interest does. Planning in detail—whether that’s the garden bed you want to dig, the redecorating and repainting of the kitchen you want to do, or even a strategy for how you’re going to handle emotional conflict in the future—can stop the white bears in their tracks.

  In a paper called “Setting Free the Bears,” Dr. Wegner suggests other strategies as well:

  ♦ Use positive-focused visualization to calm yourself.

  ♦ Assign yourself a “worry” time. To be honest, I don’t think this would work for me, but it does work for other people. Book a time to worry—say 20 minutes—and focus on everything that’s bothering you.

  ♦ Invite the white bears in. This is the technique I’ve found the most useful; it involves confronting those worries and worst-case scenarios that have been keeping you up and driving you mad. Forcing yourself to confront them, seeing what would actually happen if they came to pass, and what you can do about them if they do, pushes worry out of the shadows and into the light where you can use slow thinking to figure things out. If you have close and trusted intimates with whom you can discuss these scenarios—it really helps to hear yourself clearly—all the better.

  Rumination keeps us stuck and prevents us from acting. It’s as simple as that, and if you can stop the merry-go-round and begin to plan and set goals for yourself, you will make real progress.

  THE DOWNSIDE TO FOCUS

  Yes, I know that culturally we praise people who are able to focus a
nd persist, but the truth is that it all depends on what they’re focusing on and whether, as the old saw has it, they’re “missing the forest for the trees.” It’s one of the few adages that actually incorporates some psychological truth. This information is especially pertinent for those of you who are anxiously attached and tend to be vigilant and focused on details as a way of directing your behaviors.

  In addition to wrongly believing that memory is like a photograph, rather than the patched-together quilt of details that it is, we also like to think of ourselves as having panoramic vision: a capacity for seeing the big picture as well as the small detail. Well, that turns out not to be true, as an experiment conducted by Daniel J. Simons and Christopher Chabris showed, published in a paper wittily called “Gorillas in Our Midst.” (They later wrote a book as well, titling it The Invisible Gorilla .) They had participants watch a video of people playing basketball, and told them to either count the dribbles or the passes, thus forcing them to focus on a single detail. The video lasted two minutes, and about halfway through, a student in a gorilla costume walked into the middle of the game, thumped her chest, and exited. The researchers asked participants to report the number of bounces or passes, and then asked about the gorilla. Only half of them saw it! That is the downside to focus.

  More experiments followed, and they all showed that when we’re focused on the detail, more than half of us will miss something important. This process is called “inattentional blindness” and it underscores that our brains are not reliable in the way we think. There are just too many details for our eyes to take in so the brain fills in for us and, sometimes, we end up missing the forest for the trees. Inattentional blindness affects all of us, but since you’re on a voyage of self-discovery, ask yourself the following questions: