A Questioning State of Mind

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Tracking the live edge involves trusting your mind.  Trusting your mind entails some skepticism.

Notice, I don’t mean cynicism, a bitterer, more pessimistic condition.  Skepticism, when not taken to its cynical extreme, can be a provisional suspension of belief – as long as you don’t make it a way of life.  Let’s think of it here as a tool, the doubt that does not prevent you from later stepping forward.

I often think of Jon, an old boyfriend who came from a family of expert thinkers.  At any surprising development or assertion, no matter how persuasive it seemed, Jon would cry out, “Really?!” in a comical but earnest yodel.  He and his family were consummate questioners, always interested in challenging assumptions, very useful when exploring an idea.  Maddening when sharing an experience.

There has to be a balance between skepticism and trust.  That’s one reason we go with curiosity.  Contrast: “This is the way!” with, “What have we here?”   These are two very different exploratory stances.  The former, unquestioned, is “Trust your feelings, Luke.”  Trusting your feelings is great, as far as it goes.  Without the second question, “What have we here?” trusting your feelings can be very misleading if you’re trying to reckon with the varieties of human (yours and others’) experience and interaction.

Questions have a lot of uses.  Let’s consider one of them here.

Questions are a way of testing your point of view.  That means of course that yours isn’t the only one.  It’s remarkably difficult for many people to wrap their minds around this concept.

If you grew up in an environment in which your family and peers spent most of their time trying to get you to see things their way, they were probably not helping you question much.  If you were lucky, they helped you learn about things that didn’t threaten their world view, like why the sky is blue or how you fix a transmission.  So at first, when reflecting on it, you may have believed that your peer group was as inquiring as the next.

If most of your energy as a child went into abiding by doctrine, it would have been hard to think about any other approach to life as a stand-alone, valid alternative.  I don’t care what your doctrine was.  It might have been religious or secular, right or left.  If your social survival always depended on your coming up with the Right Answer, you were not really asking the question.

I worked for five years as a therapist at Hampshire College in the 1990s.  I never saw so many smart, independent thinkers trying so hard to toe a line, a politically correct line.  The students tyrannically critiqued attitudes and behavior, trying to get everyone to conform to very high moral standards that were rife with inconsistencies, all while pursuing the shared dream of intellectual exploration.  The situation they were perpetuating was, itself, an inconsistency quite difficult to reconcile.

You can call these moral struggles of college students the mere growing pains of adolescents but we see this kind of thing all around us in adults, in young people, and in children trying to learn the lessons that confused adults try to teach them.  Who hasn’t watched an imperious eight-year-old enforcing discipline on a younger brother while strenuously defending her own right to the candy he wants?  And who hasn’t seen a parent tell a child to be nice while, themselves, being downright awful?

I’m sure you’re familiar with hypocrisy.  We all hate it.  We’re all guilty of it.  At our best, we acknowledge that our claims and behavior are inconsistent (“actions speak louder than words,” “do as I say, not as I do”).  At our worst, we wage wars in the service of our denial.

Social psychologists have been studying psychological inconsistency in a form they call cognitive dissonance.  You’ve probably heard more recently of cognitive dissonance ever since some studies from social psychology and cognitive psychology have been repackaged into what they call behavioral economics.  A new science.  Amazing!

Cognitive dissonance is what results when people come to often bizarrely impossible conclusions in their attempts to get the ill-fitting pieces of their world-puzzle into a nice, neat, shape.  It’s tremendously costly in effort and mental space.  I’ll get into cognitive dissonance much more later.  Here, it’s an example of how our brains are adapted to carry inconsistent realities simultaneously, packaging them into transitory and incompatible explanations.  It’s one way to organize the products of our questioning (the answers) and it’s a constant reminder that our world views are more of a jumble than the coherent stories we often think of them as being.

We still have to ask questions in order to proceed alive to our circumstances.  It’s unrealistic to expect that we’re going to have it all sorted out from one minute, one hour, one year, or one decade to the next.

To get back to the live edge and curiosity: to stay alive we need to be at least provisionally open on some, not all fronts as we move forward.  We all live in the world and our worlds have – often inconsistent – rules which we are constantly choosing, if unconsciously, to abide by or challenge.

Look around you.  The openness to challenge of any social world is a matter of degree.  Some belief systems are more elastic than others, allowing greater leniency to its members before cracking down.  And some quite regimented societies have customs designed to alleviate the pressure.  The Amish, for example, give their 16-year-old children a year of experimentation before asking them to commit to the Amish way of life.  Of course, 16 is an age at which children are most likely to believe they’re able to make this judgment but whose personal resources are still awfully meagre for making the change if they opt out.

Pretty tricky.

Questions are radical.  In more doctrinal environments a question can be an act of insurrection.

When you take these pressures into account, you start to get a sense of the peril people feel about choosing to be in therapy, spending years in another country, or watching a news channel they don’t agree with.

There are many ways of sorting yourself out, many ways of traveling, and many ways of listening to the news, but you can only pretend to listen or adapt or inquire for so long.  Sooner or later you begin to feel empty and burdened, your life starts to feel pointless, and you get bored.  Some people have an enormous tolerance for this feeling and live it to the end.  But if you get into a decent therapy and you persist in this artifice, your therapist will become bored, realize that you are full of shit, and will probably challenge you or toss you out.

That’s when it hits the fan.

To my readers who are patients:

Patients tend to fall into one of four groups.

1. You go to a therapist for the purpose of getting yourself back on track.  Chances are you will be asking for help with a few symptoms.  You may be feeling depressed or anxious, like you can’t quite get it together the way you used to, and you probably want some reassurance, some guidance with a particular problem or two, and a chance to get a few things off your chest.
2. You go to a therapist because you have never quite pulled it together and are finally realizing it.  You have often had the sense that you were on the outside, you lurch from one situation and relationship to the next not quite feeling in control of yourself or not getting what you are looking for, then chances are you are going to be asking some deeper questions.  You’ll be a little readier to question reality.
3. You may begin therapy thinking you’re in the first group and turn out to be in the second group.
4. You might find yourself in therapy because you have no clue what your problem is or that you even have a problem and you are remanded to therapy by legal authorities or threatening family members.

One way or another, if you’re lucky and find the right therapist, you can grow a lot from the experience, improving your chances at happiness or possibly fishing your life out of the toilet.

Some people do seem determined to stay in the toilet.  They’ve usually spent a lot of time in the toilet and are actually more comfortable there.  Besides, you know how slippery the side of a toilet is when you’re trying to climb out.

The questions you’re prepared to ask will depend a lot on how you got to treatment, how much pain you’re in, and your willingness to know other realities.

To my readers who are therapists:

Your patient has to decide how curious he’s going to be.  You can help.

People joke a lot about patients having to want to change.  That’s a misplaced emphasis.  Everyone wants to change if they feel terrible; that is, they want to change how they feel.

No one wants to have to change everything and everyone around them in order to make it work.  That’s often what they feel like they’re going to have to do.

So the risk at the live edge is real.  If you’re not prepared to follow what makes you feel alive because the people around you don’t like that about you, you’ve got a big problem.

The skepticism, the curiosity, help with this.  They’re the buffer between where you are and where you may be going, it’s the condition of suspended disbelief that allows you to explore something before committing to it, a kind of hypothetical change, a thought experiment.

The trick is to inhabit it fully enough that it’s a real experiment, with some real risk.