Warriors settlers and nomads – which are you?

Over the years I was always looking for a way to group types of people together in a way that everyone could understand rather than the highly niche and confusing technical groupings and sub-groupings used by many of the psychology community.

Because, I believe that people aren’t always who they think they are – often they are much more, yet they are held back by doubt and confidence issues, where, sometimes, they feel they don’t quite ‘fit in’ to certain events or situations.

Then I stumbled across a book called warriors, settlers and nomads by Terence Watts, and an elegant process unfolded, whereby we can begin to understand much more about who we are and the inner conflicts, in our mind, that we are very often unaware of.

During the last few years I have incorporated many elements of Terence’s work into my therapy sessions with quite amazing outcomes, and if you were looking for a good self help book I would whole heartedly recommend this one.

Below is a comprehensive summary written by Terence himself, if you would like to know more about this feel free to call me and we can discuss what would work for you.

Ancestral Memory – The origin of conflict

The human race in the form that we are now has been in existence for around 100,000 years. Throughout the whole of that time, there have been two separate streams of genetic information being passed from one generation to another, through different countries and cultures, through plague and famine, not stopped nor even hindered by barbarian uprisings, religious crusades, or bloody revolutions.

Those two genetic streams continued relentlessly, actually gaining strength, through times of witches and warlocks, peasants and kings, knights and serfs; they survived wars, holocaust, earthquakes that split continents, unimaginable volcanic upheaval, and fantastic inventions, until, in one single split second, they fused together within a single human cell that was to become… YOU!

A special moment

In that moment of conception, the genetically coded DNA strands from each of your parents combined in that one single cell, ensuring that you became a living record of the lives and ways of your ancestors. This is your Ancestral Memory, the complete set of instincts and response patterns that were responsible for the survival of those two genetic streams in the first place.

We are talking about the biological memory traces of attitudes towards success and survival that are every bit as relevant today as they were then.

Ancestral Memory has nothing to do with past lives or anything at all mystical – it is simply the biological memory traces that we are born with, the living record of our ancestors, handed on to us in the DNA strings we inherit via our parents.

What I want to present to you today is a hypothesis based around the idea that Ancestral Memory is responsible for much of our emotional conflict, and show you a way that you can use this hypothesis to achieve easier success with a greater range of clients.

Personality and conflict

To get the best out of it, it is necessary to have some knowledge of how conflicts and personality originate and develop, and that’s what the first part of this talk is going to deal with, although this information is simply background work to help you, rather than stuff you should actively use with your clients.

Use the intellect to understand

We are going to use our intellects to gain a greater understanding of the human condition, then allow that intellectually acquired understanding to fuel our intuitive instincts during the actual therapy. And we’ll come to that, the consulting room practicalities, later on.

I hope that today will adequately illustrate what, to me, are some very important aspects of this approach to analytical therapy.

There does not always have to be a villain of the piece – a parent, teacher or some other individual.

There does not always have to have been a traumatic event in the formative years.

Many of our clients are suffering from nothing more than the cumulative trauma effect – and even that is not necessarily anybody’s fault.

Analytical therapy on its own only produces, permanently, what might be termed a cure only in the case of hysterical illness. Other conditions need some additional therapeutic process if we are to be of maximum use to our client.

(Hysteric illnesses include: Phobias, Fears, almost everything that has a physical component, including Insomnia and bodily illnesses like IBS or Colitis.

Other psychological conditions include: Depression, Obsessions, Poor Self Esteem, Concentration Problems, Low Confidence – all conditions of thought process.)

If we present it to our clients in the right way, we can expect a far higher cure rate than we might otherwise have found, and with a far wider range of clients.
Sometimes, a simple part of our initial consultation can do as much for our client as five or six weeks of therapy might have struggled to achieve.

So here we go – Ancestral memory and it’s role in psychological conflict.

A nomadic race

One hundred thousand years ago, the human race lived in groups of twenty-five to fifty individuals, hunting and gathering their food from the land; they were already a developed race, having probably been around for some three hundred thousand years at least. But these were the first of the race that looked like us, and – in a primitive way – behaved like us.

For thousands of years, their way of life scarcely changed, so that instincts and response patterns were handed on from generation to generation, all within their own group in what amounted to a genetically pure chain. They would have had no qualms about incest or in-breeding – those concepts simply would not have entered the realms of thought.

There would obviously have been aggressive tribes and peaceful tribes; and because their way of life was constant, the instincts to deal with that way of life became inborn, so that each successive generation was steadily more adapted to the environment in which they lived.

Tens of thousands of years passed… something like fifty times the passage of time we have experienced as a ‘modern’ race since the days of Jesus Christ and the Roman Empire. Then, something of extreme importance happened, something that was to affect the whole of the human race for ever more.

The first settlements were formed.

Settlements and tribes

It doesn’t sound like much, but would have been a polarising effect upon many individuals. For some, those that had always chosen to stay out of trouble, it would have been an ideal situation; no need any more to wander the land in search of food – simply farm your own crops and livestock and share the work within the community.

Instead of fighting the land, adapt to it and tame it, and use its resources for survival and comfort. They became the Settlers and discovered their evolutionary destiny.

For others, those who had always simply taken whatever they wanted, this presented a golden opportunity of a different sort. They could wait until that settlement was established and everything was nicely under control, then simply move in and take over. Any protesters would have had a choice. Adapt to the situation or die. And anyway, these individuals were well equipped to protect the settlement from further attack. They were the Warriors.

There were some for whom all this would be too much. They never had had the stomach for fighting, nor any wish to do loads of hard work for somebody else’s benefit. And now they had no desire whatsoever to stand around getting caught up in the crossfire between the Settlers and a bunch of club-wielding thugs wearing strings of animal teeth round their necks. So they adopted the instinctive Nomadic urges of their earliest forefathers – keep on the move, don’t get involved, and constantly look for someplace new. They were the true Nomads.

Developing civilisation

Those three tribal types still exist today, but because of the huge increase in interbreeding that would have started with the advent of civilisation, the purity of each type was soon lost, so that each of us has inherited characteristics of all three types. And that means, of course, that we are born with conflict, or the potential for conflict, already in the psyche.

And as if that wasn’t awkward enough, there is something else of enormous importance here.

Because genetic selection is apparently random, we can inherit a particular gene, or set of genes, from our parents which are actually not evident within them at all. So we can inherit an entirely different set of instincts for survival than either parent has – and yet they are going to teach us how to live! For example, we could be a Settler born to a Warrior father and Nomadic mother.

Just think about that. We are brought up by someone who teaches us to behave in a way that we come to believe is correct, but which conflicts with what our instincts are attempting to insist we do. That’s bad enough, but it also means that we do NOT have the instincts that go with what we believe is the way to behave.

So there is going to be a great deal of incongruence in the thought processing – tribal instincts demanding one set of behaviour attributes, family conditioning demanding something quite different.

It’s a fair statement to say that in order for us to feel happy and confident, we absolutely must be discharging our natural instincts, otherwise we will be trapping libidic energy within the psyche, and that libidic energy WILL find a way out somewhere or another.

Unfulfilled urges and drives may well become sublimated, and instincts for self-protection which remain undischarged may well manifest as anxiety as a result. You might want to ask yourself if this could sometimes be the origin of panic attacks, for example.

Reactions, not events

Ancestral memories would not be of actual events – don’t get it confused with the idea of past life or reincarnation – but of instinctive behaviour patterns brought about by
the environment of those early tribes whose main way of life was subservience, aggression, nomadic urges, famine fear, etc.

Gradual changes

These environmental circumstances, via the process of natural selection, ensured that each generation became progressively more inclined to the predominating characteristic of their particular tribe. They would have been Warrior/Conquerors, Nomads or Settlers.

Now, I firmly believe that these Warriors, Nomads and Settlers are the origins of the Anal, Hysteric and Oral personality groups.

Anals & warriors

It makes a whole lot of sense if you imagine that the Anal Paranoidal individuals amongst us carry a predominance of warrior genes and will therefore tend to fight for dominance, control and possession. Like all warriors, too, they are necessarily unsympathetic. You cannot win a battle if you feel sorry for the enemy. Their personality is based on fear and the Fight reaction.

Hysterics & nomads

Now, if we believe that the Hysterics are carrying the genetic message from the nomadic tribes – to move on to new things, new pastures, away from trouble – it accounts for their tendency to run when the going gets tough. It explains why they sometimes make few real friends, can find difficulty in taking life seriously, and are most interested in self-gratification.

After all, if you’re not going to stay in one place for any length of time, you don’t have to face the consequences of your actions. Wouldn’t be able to, in fact. There must always be something in the life of these types that is dynamic and changeable. It can be the type of work they do, their relationships, or their homes, or something else but there must always be some expression of that nomadic influence.

They love change, excitement and drama, because then there is no need to try to make sense of the deeper human values, which are a total mystery to them. For this reason, they often choose to work in the worlds of finance or law, both of which are just about as far removed from the world of emotions as it could be.

They are based mainly on pleasure and self gratification and often have no stomach for unpleasantness of any sort. The Flight reaction in operation

Orals & settlers

And the Orals – well, they’re doing their best to fulfil the instincts of reason and problem solving that would have been necessary for the Settlers to be able to live harmoniously together in their settlement. Fighting goes against their wish for peaceful co-existence, running goes against their sense of responsibility. So they will adapt to a situation and be content. That’s how the Oral is in life, of course, most of the time. Friendly and unambitious. Not flamboyant or a show-off. Just getting on with living and dealing with things as well as they can. They are based around the need for love and security.
They don’t want to fight and their conscientiousness forbids them to run. They are demonstrating the Freeze reaction.

Later on, we’ll have a look at how easy it is to discover just which of those genetic streams is predominant in yourself – to discover, in fact, whether you are a Warrior, a Nomad, or a Settler by birthright, as well as what that means and how it might benefit you.

The subject of genetics is highly complex and it is fortunate that we do not have to have a full understanding of it to appreciate how it affects us. One or two facts are certainly fascinating, though, and definitely worth mentioning.

Genetic information

If it seems to you that there has to be an awful lot of information passed on to each generation, then you’re right. And the truth is that investigation as to how this actually happens is still in its infancy. But consider this amazing fact.

There are millions of fragments of protein involved within one DNA strand which are so minute that they can only just be seen with the most powerful of electron microscopes…. And the gene-carrying DNA strand itself is so absolutely minuscule that there are scores of them grouped together in clusters known as a chromosome… and the Human animal has 23 pairs of such chromosomes buried away just in the nucleus of each cell… and the entire human cell is around only around one hundredth of one millimetre in diameter.

We are talking REAL miniaturisation here.

Not only humans

The idea of ancestral memory doesn’t apply to just the human race but is very evident in other species as well.

Experiments to determine the validity of genetic memory have been carried out with various creatures and some experiments on rats, particularly, revealed interesting results. There were two groups of rats used, one group of which was trained to find their way through a maze.

The experiments appeared to show that the offspring of that group learned to find their own way through the same maze far more easily than the offspring of the other group, those who had not been taught. Their offspring found it easier still. And after a few generations, the offspring needed no teaching – they already knew their way through the maze.

So perhaps it is not so difficult, when you take all this on board, to understand how animals instinctively know their migration routes.

The birth predisposition

Ancestral Memory is responsible for our predisposition at birth towards certain responses and reactions. These are probably a physical part of the Right Brain, and are therefore ‘hardwired’ and unchangeable without the intervention of surgery, clinical intervention, or other physical damage such as illness or accident; it is possible, too, that massive trauma might produce some modifying effect, even if not a total change, but it would have to be life threatening trauma, I think.

Templates

I like to refer to these birth predispositions as our ‘basic-ideal’ template. In case you’re not familiar with the term, a template is the basic outline of how something should be. A clothing pattern is a set of paper templates to show you the shapes to cut out. A template in word-processing might be the layout of a letter showing you where to type the address and other details.

You can imagine it if you like, as a series of indicators that show our predisposed REQUIREMENTS and REACTIONS. All our natural behavioural instincts are here.

Our Ancestral Memories govern how those indicators are when we are first born and therefore have a tremendous effect upon our subsequent behaviour patterns throughout life.

Early learning – The first experiences

At birth, the logical left brain is almost empty – and like a sponge, starts soaking up information, every new stimulus, avidly and immediately. It can’t NOT. And since the logical brain IS pretty much empty, everything perceived, though not necessarily understood, is accepted without question.

Responses to stimuli

The ‘basic ideal’ template, the genetic ancestral memory, is nothing more than a set of responses to stimuli, rather than a belief and expectation system. It is those responses themselves which actually create the belief and expectation systems, and that process starts at the moment of birth. Events that are repeated and reinforced a few times soon become a fundamental belief, since we have no prior experiences for comparison and we have not yet discovered doubt to make us wary.

The yardstick

Our first experiences are our yardstick of the world however good or bad they are; they are what we learn to expect and the responses to them, governed by that ancestral memory, result in a fundamental behaviour set that is designed around those expectations.

Cuddles, comfort, pain, violence, and the situations which cause them are all equally accepted as being normal. The way things are, the way things should actually be.

Later, we’ll have a look at this process in great detail, observing what happens when an individual with a predisposition that belongs to one tribal group or behaviour pattern is reared by parents that are in a different group. This can actually be extraordinarily problematic.

‘Normal’ = Security

If pain and violence can be accepted as a normal situation – and they really do have to be if they exist from the outset – and if we accept the existence of the subconscious ID as essentially pleasure seeking, then it becomes obvious that we have a serious potential for emotional conflict.

The conflict arises from the fact that for the whole of our lives we are subject to a subconscious drive to seek security; but security comes from being in a situation which mirrors or matches what is already stored in our subconscious as ‘normal’.
We’re not talking about the conscious stuff here, that we all look for – trust in partner and a place to live and so on – but a deep compulsion to recreate that which we subconsciously believe is a ‘normal’ situation – normal, therefore safe.

You can think of it as Destructive security.

If we’re brought up with pain, for instance, we will continue to subconsciously seek situations which can cause us pain, even though at the same time we are seeking pleasure… and perhaps you can now more easily understand the roots of sado-masochism. It is where part of that early violence contained sexual overtones.

Quite often, where there is little or no sexual content to the violence, there will be a different effect, which we can observe in the individual who determinedly seeks out partners who will beat them, for example.

First ten years

Even where there is no violence as such, there is still much potential for harm. By the time we are ten years old, we have a firm idea of how we fit into the world and how the world thinks of us. If we are confident at that age, we have a good chance of remaining so.

But if we feel we don’t fit in some way, that we are different from the crowd, then we are likely to feel like that for the rest of our lives or at least until something makes a radical change to our underlying thought processes.

So if parents or others teach us that adults are going to belittle us or hurt us in some other way, we are likely to experience problems as we grow older and begin to mix predominantly with other adults.

Onset of maturity

You can see from this where the origins of low self esteem in adulthood lie and why the onset of maturity so often brings psychological difficulties with it.

Also, if we are taught that other children will hurt us – and many parents do just that – then we may very well grow up hating children. Hate and aggression, of course, are based upon fear.

Neurosis V. Conditioning

Now, there is something very important in all of this. If we have a subconscious driver that was brought about by the creation of doubt or uncertainty – about ourselves or our environment – it becomes a neurosis and can be dealt with via analysis.

But if that same driver was brought about as a result of our early conditioning, it is a part of our fundamental belief system in the way things are and may therefore be more difficult to deal with.

Fundamental belief

Adult understanding and concepts might help, but there will always be that deep subconscious belief pattern which is likely to make itself felt if circumstances arise which seem to confirm that belief.
An example might help to clarify this. If a child is brought up in a reasonably balanced environment and at some relatively late stage (after 5 years old or so) is subject to a repeated harangue that s/he is stupid, then there is an affront to the fundamental belief system creating doubt and anxiety.

The same situation, compounded by repetition, may lay the foundations for a response pattern, a symptom, later on. The symptom would in all likelihood be resolvable by an understanding of its origins, allowing the doubt and anxiety to be resolved and the integrity of the fundamental belief system to be restored.

But if the harangue of stupidity had existed since birth, then there will be a belief that is devoid of doubt, a feeling of stupidity, that will become part of the fundamental belief system. There is nothing to be restored. There would certainly still be a response pattern, a symptom, but only a behavioural approach would be likely to produce lasting change.

Niggling feelings

Even then, although the adult might very well learn that s/he is not actually stupid at all, and be able to function accordingly, the moment there is any doubt that they handled a situation properly, that fundamental belief will be stirred.

Then there is likely to be that niggling feeling that it was their own fault, that they are actually quite stupid and somehow only manage to bamboozle others into thinking otherwise.

Well, an understanding of Ancestral Memory will allow easier access to that fundamental belief system.

Fundamental Beliefs

It is probable that we continue to create our fundamental beliefs at least throughout the Oral stage of development, about the first 3 years or so of life, because throughout that time we are busily adapting to our environment.

At that time, we have no way of knowing that what you see is NOT necessarily what you get, so everything that befalls us is always indicative of the way life is, as far as we are concerned. We know have to learn to deal with it in some way and totality of brainwork ensures that all senses are included in the experience, which is then stored for future evaluations and comparisons.

Totality of brainwork

By totality of brainwork, I mean the fact that the brain is a TOTAL learning machine, rather than selective; it learns EVERYTHING about an event and uses every sense PLUS emotional reaction. The sound of a voice, a smell, a sensation of touch somewhere on the body, a physical effect, colours, tastes… and so on.

A good example of this totality and how it is applied is that effect when you have forgotten where you put your keys, for example, and you go to wherever you were when you had them last.

As if by magic, everything ‘clicks’ and you remember. But what has actually happened is that you have provided your recall system with the rest of the information that was around you when you last had them. It’s like a jig-saw puzzle which is mostly complete – you can ‘see’ the rest of the picture in your mind’s eye.

Early learning

Exactly that same process occurs during the early learning of life; associations with everything around us to everything that happens to us. Evaluation of experience. These early evaluations, reinforced a few times, start to act upon that ‘basic-ideal’ template, and are imprinted into our psyche.

Those imprinted associations will be there for the whole of our lives and will act upon, and be acted upon, by our Ancestral Memories, to become part of our instinctive behaviour pattern.

The ‘As-Is’ template

Gradually, the basis of the system we will use for the rest of our lives to assess threats to security begins to develop, in the form of another template; the ‘as-is’ template, a reflection upon how life actually seems to be. It is the basis of our expectation and belief system.

At first, it is very similar to the ‘basic ideal’, and indeed, some of it will always remain so. But great changes will be made to much of it soon enough. Uncomfortable changes that force us to accommodate the fact that life often does not go the way we want it to. The major difference between the two templates is that our ‘basic ideal’ indicates our requirements, while the ‘as-is’ is an illustration of what we have learned to expect.

This ‘as-is’ template will continue to develop and change for the whole of our lives, but by far the greater part of the changes will have occurred well before we reach maturity.

Imprints

The imprinting effect of experience, especially early experience, is part of our built-in ‘survival pack’ – it as though there were a programme built into the psyche which, if it could speak, would say something like: “OK, if this is what life is all about, then let’s get used to it as soon as we can, so that we can survive long enough to go about the important business of procreation.”

These imprints join the instinctive responses that are our ancestral memories and they do this so that we can constantly adapt to the environment in which we find ourselves, developing patterns of behaviour that are appropriate to that environment and therefore conducive to survival. They allow us to function instinctively and safely, responding well to any new dangers that might have developed since those ancestral instincts were formed.

Fallibility and doubt

So those early imprints are accepted without question until the very moment that we discover DOUBT – but it is doubt of a specific nature. It is the realisation that what we expected would happen did not – and we are thrown into a quandary.

It’s not necessarily a new experience that does it. Just something that didn’t pan out as we believed it would.

Now our ‘basic-ideal’ template of how life is, the embryonic expectation and belief system, is suddenly shown to be fallible and it worries us. And the ‘as-is’ template starts, just slightly, to begin the process of change to indicate how life actually is, an indication of what we have survived.

Threat

We have no idea how or why it could have happened. We are completely mystified by it and because of this, our security is suddenly shot to pieces. So we now have to introduce a new system into the psyche, because the survival instinct demands that we understand what is happening, and why, in order to react in such a way as to protect ourselves from danger, because danger equals possible extinction.

The way we handle it and our success or otherwise, obviously becomes an imprint in itself. That very moment governs our future reactions to conflict. If we adapt, then we will always try to adapt; if we fight and win, then we will always try to fight; if we fight and lose, we will probably always tend to be defeatist, and if we turn our back on it and pretend it did not happen, then we will seldom follow things through and will always tend to turn away from problems.

That reaction is obviously governed by our major genetic inheritance and the influence that has been exerted upon it by our parents or parent figures.

Making sense of life

From that very second when we discover doubt for the first time, we behave differently towards each experience and event that befalls us.

Within this new experience, we start to seek separate elements that we already know about, that we have already experienced, that we already understand, so that we can perhaps make sense of what we do not understand – or ignore it if everything else seems well.

We do this by evaluating the qualities of the new event against those of our previous experiences so that we can assess the likely outcome to see if it fits our ideal; we try to somehow consolidate each new experience with what we know should happen by understanding why when it does not.

Experience templates

As well as this, each experience we have is linked to its own template, its own set of reactions and responses – either one that it has created anew, or a pre-existing one that fits well enough, one that seems to have the same qualities. You can often feel that happening in your mind when you say: “This is just like that time when…”

That template will be compared against our ‘basic-ideal’ and ‘as-is’ templates for evaluation as to how it might affect us and if we need to interact in some way with it. When something seems to match the worst part of the ‘as-is’ template, then it may well produce uncomfortable surges of anxiety, even though we consciously cannot understand why.

The mind stores these templates forever. Every been to a place and realise that you’ve been there before, but only once and many years ago?

That ‘basic-ideal’ template is the benchmark against which we will compare all experiences, the standard, if you like, by which we judge the value, the ‘goodness’ or the ‘badness’ of all future events. All our other templates – we probably have thousands – are formed, developed and constantly modified by events.

Everything that happens to us is compared with everything that has already happened, in an attempt to consolidate the new event with experience, thus creating security.

Repression can result

I believe that it is when we are unable to achieve that consolidation, that is one of the situations in which repression may occur. Which is why repression is unlikely in the adult – our experiences are wider and we have more resources to help make sense of each new event.

An example of this is that when a nine year old child is raped, it is likely that she has no experience of sexual intercourse. She’s not sure what’s happening and the violence of it means she has no idea if she will even survive the event – it can feel to her that she might die.

Something bad…

Afterwards, she cannot make any real sense of it at all. All she knows for certain is that something very bad has happened and it was probably her fault – and most children will think like that because there is an instinctive belief that the adult of the species must be right – and the level of emotion allows and indeed encourages repression.

But when a twenty-one year old woman is raped, it is likely that she will have experience of sexual intercourse – or at least she knows what it is and that it won’t kill her. She’ll make sense of it all right. She’ll recognise that this person is going to have sex with her against her will – and of course, she’s assessed the situation accurately and she knows she’s assessed the situation accurately. Afterwards she will suffer feelings of humiliation and anger and a whole host of painful and very powerful emotions – but she’ll understand why. No need for repression.

Of course, lesser events may well be subject to repression, too, and here we are very much into the realms of the individual templates and beliefs. What feels bad and full of guilt to, say, a Settler/Oral type of child may very well be shrugged off by a Warrior/Anal type.

A situation involving loss of control for a Warrior/Anal will feel far worse than it would to a Nomad/Hysteric who may well laugh and simply dismiss the whole thing… even something as profound as a rape.

They may even embrace the event while performing a dramatic act of great distress in order to use it as a wonderful attention-getting device.

Emotional development and filters

At some point during our early years we begin to develop the whole complex range of emotions that go to make up the human psyche. And then are we in trouble for ever more!

Gradually, what might be called our tuning filters are created, filters which search every event for like elements, creating new filters where necessary, so that we soon develop the capacity to recognise, within any event, the potential for certain emotional and physiological responses.

These filters will be concerned with the potential of an event to generate… well you tell me. Let’s develop a list of emotions and responses here.

ANGER, FEAR, SADNESS, FRUSTRATION, GUILT, PLEASURE, HATE, LOVE, EMBARRASSMENT, SEXUAL AROUSAL, GRATIFICATION, INADEQUACY, POWER, CONTROL, SELF-LIKING, SELF DISLIKE…

These filters continually alter and monitor that new ‘as-is’ template that is gradually being created. It helps to understand this concept if you imagine that for every event that occurs, the emotional response generated is recorded separately.

This record, of course, has a marked effect upon our expectation and belief systems – the more there is of it, the more we expect to find it. If you imagine a stack of coins which gets added to each time a certain feeling is generated, the amount of coins being added depending on the importance of the event, you get the idea easily.

In addition, there appears to be a system of counters that tell us how frequently we experience that same reaction, which will also tell us of the likelihood of finding it again.

So our ‘as-is’ template which is formed by this process accurately reflects the way we fit into the world and what the world does to us and for us. The whole thing becomes a highly sensitive detection and response system, a unique biological record of how we have conducted our life so far, how we have coped, and will therefore inevitably influence even the tiniest of decisions that we might have to make.

Assessing fitness

I believe that this is so for survival, as a way of assessing our fitness for any particular task, our ability to vanquish another creature, and so on. It is to save us from getting into situations in which we are unlikely to survive and is therefore probably accessed millions of times every day.

This new template forms the very core of our belief and expectation processes about the way things actually are, and the way we are likely to deal with them.

Knowledge and evaluation base

This core of belief and expectation is both a knowledge base and an evaluation system through which every sensorial input, however minute, every micro-second of every event, must pass before we can make sense of it. Every input is evaluated and an anticipation of likely outcome made.

And this must be so, because if we had to wait for an event to finish before we could evaluate it, we would have no way of anticipating any form of danger. So we continually evaluate, anticipate, and behave accordingly – not just complete happenings and events, but every single micro-second of that event as it unfolds.

Previous experience = future expectation

Precisely because evaluation MUST be based on existing experience, it follows that if the counter for any one response pattern is particularly high, then we are going to keep on finding that same response more frequently than any other. It will be compounded and reinforced, whether it is good or bad.

The tuning filters will become more sensitive in that particular area, especially in the case of an expectation of negativity, to allow us an earlier chance of dealing effectively with the situation.

Negative response

We are all more attuned to negative responses by the time we reach maturity, for the simple reason that in the early part of our life, we learn far more about negativity than positivity.

Unless we are unusually lucky, we learn that we are often wrong, that other people know we are wrong and are often only too happy to tell us so; that however much effort we make there is almost always someone who can do better; that there are many things that we simply do not know how to do, and that we are generally ineffective.

A character flaw?

The interesting thing about all this is that we are so ready to accept the negative aspects of any experience, that we will more readily dwell on the bad bits than the good bits. It’s a fact that most people, especially therapists, look upon negativity as if it were a character flaw of some sort, a kind of weakness of the personality.

Well, I happen to think that negativity is a natural response of the human psyche and not necessarily an indication of ‘damage to a young maturing mind’ at all.

A natural response

The naturalness of this negative response is astoundingly clear when you think of it in a logical manner. Our subconscious is geared towards survival and towards steering us away from anything that threatens survival; it’s geared up to pleasure-seeking, too, but things that can hurt us and maybe terminate our very existence will quite rightly be given precedence so that we are still around to find pleasure as well as procreate when it’s safe to do so – it’s the “He who turns and runs away, lives to procreate another day” response in action!

In other words, awareness of the possibility of danger – in effect, a negative thought process – is the result of the genetic programme for procreation and protection of the species.

In order to save us from something which threatens our existence, the subconscious must be tuned to being instantly aware of that something.

Sabre-toothed TIGERS

The prehistoric individual who was stalking his prey would not have stood much chance of survival if he became so intent on this task that he was simply unaware of the sabre-toothed tiger that was stalking him.

It was necessary to deal with his own predators first and foremost if he was going to live long enough to need that prey.

Looked at in this light, it can be seen things that can hurt us are naturally going to be perceived far more readily and seen as more important than things that will give us pleasure because it is indigenous to our species and exists as a predisposition.

Or, if you like, it’s an ancestral memory of a behaviour pattern that was necessary for the survival of the species.

Keeping up with the JONES’S

Now, our modern way of life, concerned with material success and keeping up with the Jones’ is something which our primitive subconscious neither knows nor cares about unless it is taught to do so. It does not realise that we no longer need that sensitivity towards negative influences or events, does not understand that there are actually very few predators that are able to leap on us without warning and destroy us.

With practice and an understanding of the workings of our belief system, we can tune ourselves – and others – to spot opportunities for pleasure without having to ‘untune’ the natural search for mortal danger. What we actually do in this case, without really being aware of it, is to set up a new set of templates and filters to work alongside those we already carry.

New templates

These new templates can motivate us towards whatever we have programmed them for – material success, more friends, a better job, better social life, etc. – but will not over-ride any of the still more powerful and naturally occurring templates for physical survival.

Experience

Wherever it comes from, we all have plenty of experience and knowledge of negativity and negative behaviour to fuel that expectation and belief system of filters and templates…

You can imagine that each stack applies a ‘charge’, if you like, to the emotional arousal centre with which it is associated. So the greater, say, the GUILT stack, the greater will be the capacity to feel guilt and the greater the amount of guilt will be felt.

This means that any emotional reaction is sometimes not in proportion to the scale of the event, but more in proportion to the amount of that emotional reaction we have already experienced and the number of times we have experienced it. So now it’s easy to understand why some people can appear to be over-reacting to certain events – and how they sometime seem to seek the very event to which they over-react!

This is because of a particular predisposition that is common to all of us – that is, the predisposition to look for what we expect to find, and having found it, stop looking, because we have found what we were looking for and there is no longer any point in continuing the search.

Be careful what you look for

And because we are looking for one particular element, we tend to largely ignore the off-setting elements that we ‘bump into’ during the search, or we simply do not see them.

If we are looking for evidence that somebody does not like us, for example – probably out of fear that we might find it – we will not be content with two or three or even ten instances that seem to show the opposite. We will keep on looking for that ONE piece of evidence that we are searching for until we find it – or think we have. And then that belief system has been reinforced, the ‘as-is’ template correspondingly modified.

That’s why that saying: “Be very careful what you look for, because you’ll find it,” is so true.

Triumphant

And then what? We might become triumphant, especially when others have been saying we’re wrong “There!” we say. “You see? I knew I was right!” And we’re actually pleased to be proved right – even if that proof is that people don’t like us. That’s a funny state of affairs, when you think about it and it often leads into another similar illogicallity; when taking on a difficult task, it’s not at all unknown for a negative-thinking individual to forecast that it’ll all go wrong in some way.

So when the wall he or she is building falls down, smashes into the car parked behind it, wrecks the greenhouse and scares the excrement out of the family cat before avalanching into the goldfish pond, all our hero can do is say: “There! I knew that would happen!”

Defensive behaviour

Of course, it’s defensive behaviour. In reality, he had little or no idea of the catastrophe that lay in wait but believes he should have done, and that adds to any feelings of inadequacy that already exist. It exerts affect upon the ‘as-is’ template as another example of when life fell short of what should have been.

The bigger the gap

As the ‘as-is’ template develops, so it is continuously compared with our ‘basic-ideal’ in order to assess how safe we are, how likely we are to be able to deal with the process of living.

‘I shouldn’t feel like this…’

We’ve all met people who have told us: ‘I shouldn’t feel like this’ even though they cannot actually tell us exactly WHY they shouldn’t; we should listen closely, because if they feel it’s wrong, then it IS wrong, to them. They have a subconscious knowledge that their two main templates are moving too far apart.

Continual comparisons

Since the ‘basic ideal’ is how we believe life should be, that continual comparison with the ‘as-is’ template is an indicator to our subconscious as to how well or otherwise we fit into the world.

It is easy to see that the more that ‘as-is’ template becomes separated from the ‘basic-ideal’ that reveals our instinctive selves, the more likely we are to notice possible threats to our security in one way or another. We subconsciously recognise that we do not have the right resources to deal with the situations in which we are likely to find ourselves.

In short, we start to suffer anxiety neurosis. Then, events may not be seen in their true form, but in the form that we are frightened we will encounter and not be able to survive.

Fortunately, there appears to be a sort of decay time so that the charge, if you like, from particular events in each stack may begin to diminish. You’ve only got to think of how you feel in the few moments after some profound embarrassment or other, then compare it with how you feel a week or so later, to recognise the truth of this.

Long and short term memory

This principle might partly explain why we seem to have both long and short term memory processes – as well as being an immediate ‘to-do’ list of items needing current attention, the short term memory area may well be a sort of holding area to allow secondary evaluation.

It’s a sort of memory propagator that allows us to assess how important an event might be later on.. Only if it is eventually considered relevant and/or useful – in other words, if it has an effect upon our ego – will it, or part of it, be transferred to our longer term memory to be accessed for comparison purposes.

Bias of perception

Coming back to the concept of the ‘as-is’ template, the collection of stacks of emotional responses, we can easily recognise that it causes a bias in the perception of an event that is peculiar to that particular individual, which is why truth is very seldom, if ever, the same as fact. Truth is simply the belief created by that bias of perception and that belief alters the balance of the ‘as-is’ template still further.

In some cases, there can eventually be such perceptual distortion created in this manner, where emotional upheavals and disturbances have been particularly profound, that an individual is simply no longer able to view events in the same way as other people and yet has no recognition of this fact. His or her perceptions have become distorted to the point that they quite easily be mistaken for psychosis.

Fight, flight, or freeze

Our basic response to any conflict is probably governed by our ancestral memory, that birth predisposition, as much as it is by the way we are brought up. That response may be toward flight, fight, or the well-known freeze reaction.

When sudden crisis occurs and we are under threat, we tend to exhibit the more primitive and fundamental response patterns. So typically, somebody who freezes in moments of crisis could well do so because part of their genetic code, one of their Ancestral Memories, is saying ‘Run!’ ‘Run!’ while another part says ‘Kill the bastard!’. Of course, it can be just the conflict of the Settler that I mentioned earlier.

Super ego V. Instincts

That freeze response might also be inspired in some way by their environment, their superego giving them the opposite message to their instinctive reaction.

What might happen then is a conflict between the instinctive survival urges of hurt or be hurt, kill or be killed, and an artificially induced urge from the superego to pacify or negotiate.

These mainly unconscious urges from the superego are the result of teaching by parents and other mentor figures and are extremely powerful. Now cast your mind back, for a moment or two, to what I said at the beginning about us being brought up by people whose urges and ideals may be different from ours.

The superego is our ego-ideal, the person we believe we should be, and it can actually get us into all sorts of tricky situations, especially where our upbringing has seen to it that the urges and drives it originates are totally inappropriate to our situation.

Conscience

Those urges and drives form the basis of our conscience and our own personal code of what constitutes ethical behaviour. They are so powerful that it is not unknown for an individual to die for what he would probably term his principles, even though this actually achieves nothing worthwhile at all. That individual would seem to be better off making some sort of compromise in order to be able to redress the situation another day. Sometimes they might do that – then become suicidal as a result of what the view as a complete loss of integrity.

MEMORY

And so we come to the biggest problem of psychology the human species has to deal with… the effects and affects of long term memory. Because it is not the actual events of an individual’s life that shape and reshape personality, not even just the way they reacted to those events, but the way that they remember them. Memory plays a HUGE part in everyday behaviour and an even bigger part in therapy.

Memory is a function of the brain, rather than the mind, a chemical reaction of sorts which is simply not well understood at all. It is the reaction of the mind to those memories which causes us problems, rather then the memory itself.

Our reactions to our memories, in fact, governs the entire way we are – our behaviour patterns, our beliefs about self and our self-perception. Physical illness, too, is the product of subconscious beliefs about self-worth and there is a great deal of mind/body healing research that illustrates this.

Memory is the map of experience

So if we can help somebody to change the way they react to their memories, how they perceive them, then we are helping them to produce change in their lives, because we are all the product of experience and our memories are the map of our experience.

But we do have a bit of problem here, because nobody actually is certain about how memory actually works.

The latest theory is that it is recreated with each recall, rather than the whole thing being stored intact in some way – but we still don’t really know how it happens, even though there are plenty of theories.

Re-evaluation

The theory that memories – or, more precisely the psychological experiences that are produced by memory – are created afresh each time is a very useful circumstance which accounts in part for the effect whereby an individual often continues to find improvement in his or her life long after therapy has finished.

We help them to generate a change in their personal belief system – if we do our job properly. And from that day on, that newly established belief system will work it’s magic on every memory that comes to mind.

And since every experience is rapidly compared with all like past experience, and therefore serves as a reminder of it, it seems likely that our client’s personal belief system is being continually upgraded, day by day, those emotional stacks continually being modified for the better.

But we should remember that the emotion is not, itself, responsible for our ills. It is any subconscious programme that was set up by that emotion the first time around that MUST be dealt with to create profound change.

There may be a programme for failure, for instance, and we may need to do some detective work with our client to identify exactly what that programme is trying to achieve. The most common example is the individual who is overweight in order to avoid attention from the opposite sex.

Now, you could totally discharge the emotion from the sensitising event, but if the client does not come to realise why she was trying to be fat, she will continue with the programme of putting on weight.

Finished

If there is no unfinished business with any one particular memory, if all conflict is resolved, then there is no negative emotion generated by it and no subconscious programme associated with it.

…Unfinished

But where there IS an unfinished element, where the qualities in conflict with that ‘basic ideal’ have not been sufficiently resolved, then the revaluation of that recall during the analytical process can produce a very useful circumstance.

The recall will pass through the same tuning filters as the originating event did. But we are now adults and we have enough resources and experience to allow us to rationalise the event both from the safe distance of time and our adult set of values.

New insight

The same applies, of course, if we suddenly get a new insight into some of the details of that memory. Again, it allows rationalisation. And, of course, if the memory is from childhood and we are now adult, then our view of it is going to be far more mature and the effects it has upon us quite different and less profound.

In this way, even the most uncomfortable of events can be rendered harmless, though it may be that a desensitisation process may also be necessary.

Excessive positive emotions

Now, of course, we are talking about the rationalisation of negative emotions. But here’s something interesting. If we get too much of a POSITIVE emotion, something that seems some way in excess of that ‘basic ideal’ evaluation, we will feel almost as uneasy as if it were a NEGATIVE event. It’s not difficult to understand why; it does not fit what we instinctively feel is right to us – so it is a threat to our security.

It is very well established that positive events can often appear to cause as much stress as negative happenings and that that stress can have a profound effect on the immune system. This shows up sometimes when somebody becomes suddenly affluent and, after a few months, falls ill or suffers some other negative response pattern.

It might be an urge for self punishment, a programmed belief that there should be a price to pay, a subconscious feeling of guilt, or some other reaction. Whatever it is, it matters not a bit that the conscious mind is very happy with the situation; the subconscious is not and the resultant stress will adversely affect the immune system.

A table of stressors and stress factors is included in the lecture notes.

Pointers

Whatever our reactions to any given situation, each time a filter, or stack, is activated in that ‘as-is’ template, it is as if an element is added to it which acts both as a pointer to the particular memory that activated it and as a record of the amount of emotion generated.

If the activation is by a memory, rather than a new experience, then the pointer will not change… but, under the right circumstances, the amount of emotion generated may well be different, and this can and probably will alter the position of that memory between our ‘basic ideal’ and ‘as-is’ templates.

In the normal way, such a change would usually be for the better so that it feels more comfortable, particularly if the reactions where somewhat extreme in the first place.

When it IS recalled, it is evaluated by the same set of filters; but this time round maturity and increased resources, or simply the passage of time, makes it very probable that we will get a different response.

When the event happened, it was the limit of the individual’s experience of life – it was the latest thing and therefore the most important because it was NOW.

It’s only with hindsight that we find the right perspective and those stacks of emotion get shuffled around, energy being transferred from negative emotional response to healthy, positive attitudes.

Remember, the libido has a constant and finite amount of energy that is distributed differently according to situations.

Big experience = Big emotion

Big experiences create big emotion and become character shaping events. BUT as we get older and more used to the process of living, as we discover that great universal truth that nothing in life is as good or as bad as we first believe it is going to be, it becomes steadily less likely that an experience will create sufficient disturbance to change us to any noticeable degree.

So something which would seem earth-shattering to a teenager, definitely qualifying as a big experience, may not even raise the eyebrow of a seventy-year-old. It’s not difficult to understand, of course. To the teenager, that event is far greater in terms of percentage of lifetime experience than it would be to the old-timer.

Where the teenager might say: “Wow! YESSSS!”, the pensioner is probably going to say “Uh-huh…”

Low understanding & high sensitivityig

This is why it is the experiences of childhood that are so important in therapy; the experiences from the days when our understanding was low and our sensitivities were high; experiences from a time when we were changing rapidly as we grew up, a time when every new experience was so easily believed to be a profound truth.

The changes to those tuning filters of ours could easily be very dramatic in those days, the experiences that created them truly character shaping. So it is not difficult to appreciate why, when those experiences are re-evaluated with a more mature mind and in the light of greater experience, the change that this might produce can also be quite profound.

Significant change

When we change our understanding of the more profound of our memories, we can often make sweeping changes to the destructive subconscious programmes that were set up as a result of our reactions to these experiences the first time around. In this way, failures can become successful; timid people can become confident; ill people can become well.