Learning to Listen
Learning to Listen
“The only tyrant I accept in this world is the still small voice within.”
—Mahatma Gandhi
Learning to Listen
We’ve discussed emotion at great length, and it cannot be overstated how the mood we are in will alter our perceptions and behaviors. As such, mood is itself the curator of the life we experience and even the beliefs we hold. We cannot actually choose to believe something. Belief is what feels true based upon the mood we hold and in so doing becomes our lived experience. While we may continue to believe concrete facts like that of gravity making things fall, subjective beliefs are more malleable through mood, experience, and feedback.
When a person is depressed, they cannot believe themselves out of the hole. We can share every bit of wisdom we think might help, but they cannot internalize any of it because of their mood. Words of encouragement are futile as the depressed person interprets the words through the reflection of their mood. You’re just trying to make me feel better. You don’t truly understand. You’ll never understand. The weight is too much. I can’t think straight. I have no energy. Your cheeriness is a knife in my back flaunting what I cannot have.
Someone in a good mood, however, could hear the exact same encouragement and their internal voice interprets it quite differently: Heck yeah! I can totally do this. I have support and I will give it my best! Our mood acts as a guide and our inputs will be interpreted by corresponding emotions into voices or subconscious impressions which then guide our beliefs. As we know, our beliefs will then modify our behaviors, performance, and the way we present ourselves to others. That will in turn have a significant impact on how the world responds and reinforces our mood. It all comes from mood and back to mood. Every unscrutinized action and behavior of every person is based upon the currents of emotion that they are riding on directing their behaviors.
With the importance of mood primed in our minds, it is time to learn how to curate it. We cannot simply choose our mood any more than we can choose for marble to become Michelangelo’s statue of David. It must be chiseled and shaped with intention, skill, knowledge, and insight. And so, we must dive deeper into mood itself—not simply what mood does, but finding ways to identify that which shapes it. If we wish to carve a statue out of marble, we must first learn the intricacies of marble manipulation and the tools at our disposal.
As stated before, our culture is very unaware when it comes to emotion and even more so for mood. If we can’t understand we are feeling shame in a single moment, we have no hope of identifying a current of shame guiding our lives. And if we cannot identify a single emotion in the moment, how much harder will it be to comprehend that we are flowing effortlessly in multiple mood streams simultaneously. I can be visibly angry while passively fearful or anxious. All three can flow right alongside each other and guide direction and behavior. We can throw in shame and jealousy as well and flow down all five at once.
What would that look like? A person who is fearful will grasp, claw, and fight when something worries them. An anxious person will be seeking out things to worry them and will indeed find them. If they are riding shame, they will dislike who they are but terrified of being found out. If someone even slightly indicates something negative about such a person, they will immediately fight. They will protect their ego as much as possible. Of course, this will have the opposite effect and destroy their reputation making them all the more fearful as they recognize their lack of control on the narrative.
Knowing this dynamic can help us understand other people better. There is not simply a label to be handed out that someone is narcissistic or otherwise evil. They are simply riding on negative currents and don’t know how to get off. Many of these negative moods can be understood as trauma coupled with immaturity through lack of awareness and guidance.
When I was a very young child, I had to deal with physical and emotional abuse much like many people around my age. Spanking with belts and paddles was commonplace and some still consider it sound parenting even today. Of course, when you’re two and don’t know how to pet the dog appropriately, paddle-spankings in the multiple digits is perhaps universally understood as abuse.
Compounding the abuse with a predisposition toward anger when not getting my way, I learned some moods with constant reinforcement early on. These experiences created multiple streams of moods in my psyche. I developed moods of indignation, fear, anger, self-reliance, and isolation. Moods in this way are very similar to a worldview. I saw the world as cold, heartless, and unfair because that’s what I had experienced.
Operating from these moods, I would shout in anger when I was mistreated. My anger would cause fear in others which in turn made them discredit me and ignore me further as they tried to keep their distance. This made me even more angry and so the pattern continued. My self-reliance made me learn more as I did things on my own without the support of others. If I hadn’t, I would have been lost. I became intelligent and unsympathetic for a world that didn’t care for me and fed my daily anger. Eventually that anger turned to depression. I was alone and isolated and I didn’t believe I would ever find anyone to be my friend. Adding depression to my list didn’t aid my efforts.
Trying to become happier and motivated was an impossible task. If someone acted wrongly against me, I’d have a right to be angry. But people would blame me for my anger rather than the one who acted wrongly toward me. With my voices articulating the unfairness so clearly, what hope did I ever have of becoming less angry? They convinced me that the world was against me in particular—that I was permitted to do no wrong while everyone around me could wrong me as they wished. The only solution was to learn about these feedback loops of mood and change my internal story. Only then was a better reality reflected back to me.
To recap, what we know about mood is that it determines our sets of interpretations and default choices to be made. We ride many various moods simultaneously, and these moods control our lives. There is really only one way to change a mood: focus on the ones you wish to have. This sounds easy, but anyone who has ever tried to think of positive things while they were depressed knows how hard this is to accomplish. Add on the fact that we have no control over our subconscious thoughts, and we can begin to see the problem. This is where listening for our subconscious voices can help us learn how to proceed.
The voices within us are many and they speak in different ways. Some might speak through actual words like the thoughts we consider to be our own. Others come as instantaneous knowledge or impressions.
Consider a time you’ve been very angry. Perhaps you wanted to shout some obscene insult, throw something, or storm out of the room and slam the door. Recognize how your voice comes up with the idea: we should storm out of this room and slam that door—that will show what business we mean. It likely comes as an instantaneous urge. You may simply have the idea and follow through or you might even visualize it in your mind. More than likely, it does not come as a verbal request in your mind and you perform the action automatically while in the throes of passion.
We’ve got the action in our mind and we’ve envisioned it without any words spoken. We know what we want to do, we know how to do it, we know the exact emotional wave we intend to blast our partner, friend, or parent with, and in most cases, we instantaneously choose whether or not we are going to follow through with it. No words, just instantaneous thoughts or imagery. These are what I call voices of impression.
Consider also that when we dream, we often simply know things. We don’t have to think them aloud with words, and we don’t have to hear them—we simply know them. I can see a dragon and know it’s my best friend. I can hop on and go flying around with no words spoken or thought. This is how the vast majority of voices operate. Through them, we simply know things. We could be talking to someone and instinctively know they’re lying. That understanding is instantaneous and requires no words to be thought aloud.
The problem is, these voices or impressions are often wrong. They are not even our own conclusions—they are simply inputs of possibility or reflections of our flawed worldview or the emotional current we are swimming in. Unfortunately, we often take these voices at face value and believe them as fact while concluding we believe them. We assume them as our own conclusions from our own thoughts spoken or impressed in our own voices. And what happens then? Well, fact or not, our beliefs have the power to make them our realities and convince us of our mighty predictive powers. If we’re not careful with how we handle our impressive voices, we will fall hook, line, and sinker into a feedback loop of making them true.
All this talk about voices, I would be remiss if I did not introduce a growing field in psychology known as Internal Family Systems (IFS). While not fully mainstream as of writing, it is widely regarded as a valid and useful method of therapy with increasing support in clinical trials. More importantly, it has significant scientific results to give it credence.
The framework of IFS therapy is the notion that our minds are made up of—you guessed it—voices. They would be called “parts” within IFS, but these parts are processes in our mind that behave much like individuals running their own routines. They provide input from their perspectives to make up our larger sense of self, they have their own personality and objectives, and they provide their opinions verbally or non-verbally while affecting our emotions, moods, and actions. These parts appear to be fully in line with our use of voices in this book.
By recognizing these parts—or voices—we can find the ones who are struggling and needing guidance. Much like we’d deal with children, the IFS framework would have us love these parts, have compassion on them, recognize their intent, and calmly guide them toward less destructive behaviors. These parts are often attempting to shield us from pain but their method in doing so may be overall harmful.
Using IFS has had significant results in reducing symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)1 and improving emotional regulation for trauma-scarred individuals2. IFS has been used to reduce pain, depression, and even functional impairment for patients with rheumatoid arthritis3. And if we’ve learned anything from the ACE scores and Gabor Maté’s work, this could very well be adding many years back onto the lives of mentally scarred individuals and preventing many health issues. That is, of course, speculation, but it certainly follows logically.
If the concept of having multiple parts with their own thoughts is hard to believe, we actually have significant evidence that we are at least two unique individuals combining into one. In the 1960s and 1970s, two scientists Sperry and Gazzaniga, provided the shocking evidence that perhaps we are at minimum, two individuals coinciding as one.
Our brains are composed of two halves roughly the size of each of our fists. These halves are connected to each other by a thin band of nerve fibers known as the corpus callosum. This pathway is the major highway for how the two halves of the brain communicate with each other. Without this connection, the two halves have far less ability for sharing information and they begin to operate with significant separation.
Surgeons cut this corpus callosum on multiple individuals which now provides us with our astonishing body of knowledge regarding split-brain patients4. The reason for this separation was not simply scientific exploration, but because these particular patients were experiencing seizures that we did not yet know how to treat.
A seizure is a misfiring of neurons that creates a chain reaction throughout the brain. Sometimes it begins on one side and travels across the corpus callosum to the other side which can then completely debilitate the person who owns the brain. By severing the connection, the patient could retain more functionality during such an event and potentially save their lives if they were walking down stairs or performing some other delicate operation. This surgery, however, came with the interesting cost of effectively creating two separate people attempting to coordinate a single life.
The left half of the brain generally controls the right half of the human body and the right half of the brain generally controls the left half of the body. By splitting the brains, the left hand is literally unaware of what the right hand is doing. This is slightly different with vision and eye control. Both halves control both eyes simultaneously, but each half can only see half of the field of view. You can cover one eye and the left brain will still see the right half of the visible image and your right brain will see the left half of the view. Also, while both halves of the brain are able to receive audio input, the left half often dominates the actual ability to speak.
Severing the connection made for some interesting possibilities of study. If you put an object in the left hand of the patient, they’d be unable to say what it was. But if you gave their left hand a pen, they could write it out. If you flashed a number on a screen in the left or right field of view fast enough that the eyes couldn’t move, you could provide visual information to each half individually. Flash a 2 on the left and a 3 on the right then ask the person to hold up as many fingers as was shown on the screen, and the individual would show 2 on their left hand and 3 on their right hand while saying aloud the number was 3 and 3 alone.
Put a key in the left hand and the person could use it to manipulate a lock, and if you ask the person what they were doing they’d simply shrug unaware that anything at all was occurring. This also led to an interesting situation they dubbed “the alien hand phenomena.” At times, a person’s objective would be foiled by the activities of the other hand. One would be buttoning up a shirt while the other was unbuttoning it. One would reach for a dress to wear while the other would rip it out of her other hand and put it back.
When asked to show fingers for the number of seizures they’ve had, one side, having experienced a different amount, would show a different number and try to “correct” the other hand by forcing its fingers down. All this to say, it is philosophically defensible that there are at least two people in our heads and we are simply more often in sync via shared information across the corpus callosum. That doesn’t mean we are perfectly in sync, however, or that both halves have the same shared goals and agendas.
It is widely understood that the right half of the brain is more holistic and global in its approach while the left brain is more local, analytic, and categorical. This is perhaps an oversimplification and is colloquially misunderstood, but the right brain sees the forest while the left brain sees the trees. When you approach your coworker Frank, your right brain goes, “Hey, that’s Frank!” while your left brain goes, “Human, colleague, front desk guy, oh that’s Frank.” The two halves do operate differently, and as we saw with the split brain patients, each side might even have its own aesthetic or temperament.
So our minds are certainly made of two voices or streams of thought input, and IFS would argue it is far more than two. These parts or voices combine to create who and what we are and they dictate the choices we are able to make. We have a higher governing power that can look back at all the inputs and attempt to make tweaks, but it’s much like the head of an organization.
As CEO of our minds, we can look around, see what’s happening, and try to create order, but if we don’t know what we’re doing, chaos will reign. A CEO being pushed around by the employees is not a very successful one—especially if the employees are traumatized, unlearned, disorganized, or have competing goals. Disunified is unfortunately the state for most of us, and it will stay that way if we don’t take seriously our role of CEO.
If we don’t align our voices to the moods we want, then each internal voice we have will operate on autopilot and push up thoughts, ideas, beliefs, and behavioral suggestions that our CEO may not wish to entertain. And if the CEO has to choose between inputs of slamming a door, cursing, stomping, punching, or stabbing as all the voices have to offer, they’re going to struggle immensely at doing anything kind. The voices must be trained and aligned for common purpose.
In his book Flow,5 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi argues that people feel most alive and fulfilled when they are completely absorbed in a meaningful activity. He calls this state Flow. No doubt we have all experienced this phenomenon at some point in our lives. It directly relates to the well-known idiom “Time flies when you’re having fun.” We enter flow when our attention is focused on something so intently that we don’t think about time, worries, problems, money, or any other things that would distract us. Without those voices, so to say, we easily flow with a single unified purpose. Flow sounds a lot like our emotional currents and with the same analogy.
With flow, Mihaly touches on what I conclude to be a profound truth in finding happiness. By redirecting our negative voices and organizing instead toward a unified goal, we flow effortlessly and joyfully. The unique thing here is that flow doesn’t require an activity at all. We are always in some form of flow. It might be turbulent, it might have eddies that spin us in circles, we may transfer from one flow to the next in rapid succession, but we are always in some sort of flow. The real question is simply whether or not our current is aligned and beneficial or tainted with immaturity.
Mihaly provides many examples of flow for individuals as they play chess and become one with the chessboard, or surgeons as they perform long operations with a singular focus. Musicians and artists quite often get into a state of flow as they feel the music or get absorbed into their art. I often feel a sense of flow while I am writing my thoughts for books or in journalling. While we are engaged in these activities, time simply flies by and we feel wonderful for having experienced it. It is a rest from the noise. The only thing that stops activities from being flow is if other concerns enter into our minds. In such a case, we oscillate back and forth and double-back and spiral.
Consider a surgeon who is in a state of flow. If they question if they’re good enough, flow has ended. If the chess player starts questioning if he left the stove on, flow is gone. Or, I should say, aligned flow is gone. They’re still moving down the river of life; they’re just also being jostled around and bumping rocks.
Negative voices are the flow disruptors. We can be in flow as we drive to work on autopilot or we can be in flow as we’re programming or juggling or interviewing a candidate. I am often in flow being lost in my thoughts. It is the abrupt change in direction or the negative accompanying thoughts that make our flows less enjoyable and make us all too aware of the turbulence.
So whatever it is we are doing, we can enter this state of flow that Mihaly speaks of by having a one-track mind so to say, but the benefits only come if they are positive currents. One can be in a state of flow doom-scrolling through social media on their phone, but they never feel energized afterward. Time flies, but it’s a flow of numbness and lethargy. All the tiny voices go dull and stare at the screen like zombies. It’s nice in a way that they stop talking, but it’s like floating down a current of sewage pipes.
We can also get lost in a flow of negativity. As we watch political videos, news, and posts, we can get fired up with a one-track mind on how the world is going to hell in a hand basket. And where does that leave our emotional current? It’s not a particularly peaceful mood any longer. And since negativity hits harder, lasts longer, and is easier to remember, the longer we reside in the flow of political unrest, the deeper and wider that river gets. The feedback loop consumes us until we can no longer even see the other currents of joy.
Many of us experience our lives in a flow of autopilot. The world happens to us and pushes us around and we numbly follow where the current takes us. As we get older, we notice that time just flies on by. It’s because we’re flowing. We’re no longer changing gears as we just go through the exact same motions over and over with the same numbed expression of pain, concern, and the daily grind. Novelty is gone so the attention no longer shifts. We stop paying attention and go with the flow.
We can have a wonderful flow, a depressing flow, or we can bounce around aimlessly, painfully, or with novelty and awe. The trick is simply being intentional with it. Flow is equivalent to mood in this regard. While we often think of mood itself as emotion, we can indeed be in the mood for a cheeseburger or to paint a picture. Mood is simply the currently operating flow of the mind and that operating flow provides our interpretations of emotion. This is why someone asking us a question can be fine in one setting yet disruptive in another if we’re not in that mood, that mode, or that flow.
So what if there was a flow that we could engage that would by default make things not annoy us? A flow that we would find joy in the mundane or challenging? A flow that finds happiness in all the small things? That flow is certainly real, but you may find that your own mind works against you achieving it. Such a flow is the opposite direction to many of the flows we are already in. If a part of us is flowing in self-preservation, we cannot simultaneously flow in relaxation. If we are flowing in indignation, we cannot flow in fairness. We must alter the flows within us before we can find ourselves floating effortlessly down the current of peace.
Are you ready to take on this challenge? The effortless flow is available and it is worth it. Life will appear easier as we are not constantly fighting with ourselves. We will embody our true capabilities and generate the outcomes around us without the striving. But to get there is a battlefield in our own mind. We must face the way we are, accept the way we are, change our understandings and priorities, admit where we fail, and hardest of all: love ourselves.
To be successful at reclaiming our minds and entering the current of peace, we must fully well comprehend the part we play in shaping our experience. If we don’t fully understand and believe, we will lack what it takes to persevere and see it through while thwarting our own performance. If we don’t fully believe that mood shapes our emotions, reactions, and abilities or that we can alter this mood, we will fail at our attempts to do so. The stronger we understand this dynamic, the more successful we will be. But even a glimmer of understanding can begin to shift the bedrock of our broken minds. And if we fail, we can try again. If we give up, we can still come back again later.
The sooner we take this journey, the sooner we can reap the rewards of a curated feedback loop. There is an initial cost for the effort of introspection as it shatters our current ways of being, but the outcome is worth it all. Our existing currents will fight our progress as they are opposed to the currents we want. They will find every reason to stop us or convince us this is nuts or that we need them. But if we can remember the facts and remain grounded in the scientific evidence, we might just stand a chance.
Whatever arguments the voices make to dismiss the goal or overall truth to any of this, consider what they’d offer in its place even if they were right. If we are to believe the negative voices, we’re supposed to… what? Grab hold of anger and strife instead? Choose depression? The negative streams of emotion have nothing to offer. With this in mind, let us begin to enter… the mindfield.