Psychic Equivalence

You know that gut feeling when you really, really know something is true just because you feel it so strongly? Obvious things like "Lying, cheating and stealing are wrong!" and, "If you're not with us, you're with the terrorists?"

It's a core concept of western culture that's had everyone who ever cared about you working diligently to teach you right from wrong, starting in your cradle. All our institutions are based on the notion of handing out judgment and making important decisions for the masses, based on inalienable truths that all of us are supposed to hold as being obvious.

But there's a good chance most of that is complete bunk. Your guts are quite possibly lying to you. You might very well be making all kinds of wrong choices about reality because your feelings are screaming lies at you.

Psychic Equivalence: a Mental Problem

Joel and Sisera, Caravaggio

Psychic equivalence is a psychologists' term for what happens when your pre-conceived beliefs filter new information about reality out so that the new information doesn't enter your awareness. The phenomenon is related to perceptual blindness, change blindness or inattentional blindness, in which people who are focusing really hard on something specific such as how many basketball passes are made in a given video clip fail to notice a woman in a gorilla suit walking by. Another example is when non-literate tribal people cannot make sense of details of a photograph because they just don't know "how to see" the interpeted image. Kinda like those magic eye pictures. There are also many stories (mostly untrue) that describe the inability of aboriginal people to see or react to the sight of the ships of European conquerers because they had no idea that they should be looking for such a thing.

The difference between perceptual blindness and psychic equivalence is that perceptual blindness has to do with not being able to put your attention on something unexpected when you're focusing intently on trying to see something expected... while psychic equivalence has to do with your belief system, which places interpretation and meaning on otherwise meaningless events and experiences. While you are busily connecting dots that might not even be related to one another, your mind will not accept anything that falls outside your belief system.

Intellectual psychic equivalence means being unable to distinguish between things that happen in your imagination and things that happen in the real world. This is the source of vast numbers of arguments between family members and relationship partners, each having their own interpretation of past events and therefore their own memory of what actually occurred. Emotional psychic equivalence is what you're falling victim to when you believe that something outside your own brain "makes" you feel a certain way.

You - Yes You - Are Probably Afflicted With Psychic Equivalence

I'm willing to bet that just about every argument you've ever had with anyone has been because they got their facts wrong and were either deluded enough or evil enough to think that just because they wanted things to be a certain way that gave them the right to mess up your day to make it so. Even though the conviction tends to be incontrovertibly wrong, most people are unable to accept that what we firmly and strongly believe and what is reality might be different. It's the source of misunderstanding between human beings.

The tricky part of this problem is that "most people" happens to include... you. How can you be sure, even though your feelings are very strong, that you are right and that others who disagree with you are wrong?

The first step is to completely disregard your feelings.

Beliefs Versus Facts, and How to Tell the Difference

When you are experiencing a problem because others aren't behaving or thinking about reality the same way that you are, you've got two options to choose from before you can decide how to respond to the situation:

1. stick to your guns that you're right and all that is wrong in the world is external to you (that is, someone else's fault), or
2. accept that you might have been wrong and that it might be possible to have a different experience and different feelings about this situation

A fact is an actual event or experience. "My husband yelled at me." "The money is not where I put it." "I asked her to take out the garbage and the garbage is still in the garage."

Feelings are also actual events or experiences: fear, anger, worry, frustration, sadness. But the notion of causation between the one event/experience and the other, "My husband made me afraid," or "I'm worried because the money has been stolen," or "She frustrated me by not taking out the garbage," is fundamentally flawed. It might be true that the one event led to the other, but it also might not be true because there's an extra step between the one event and the other that you're ignoring when you think this way.

When the dog or the three-year-old sees that the garbage is still in the garage, neither of them feels frustrated. Why is that? It's because neither of them has ascribed any meaning to the event or experience.

If you walk up to 10 different people on the street, one after another, and say to each of them with exactly the same inflection and body language, "You're a butthead!!" they will all have different feelings as a result. Some of them may need to go confer with others to decide how they should feel about it, but they'll all have a different initial feeling about you calling them buttheads. Some will wonder what the heck is wrong with you and how they can help you. Some might feel terrified because their secret has been found out. Some might be angry because they believe that, in fact, you're the butthead. Some will be insulted because they're better than you.

What's the difference between each of these people that determines how they react? It's their belief systems. A belief is an idea you've made up in order to explain an overwhelming experience that you've had some time in your past so that you don't have to stop short and re-think every little episode that happens. You just give the experience a meaning, and move forward with that as a working hypothesis.

And then the meaning that you already gave to certain types of experiences in the past is what produces your feelings about having those types of experiences now.

Anxiety: the Reason Why We Lie to Ourselves

Anxiety is normal when you have any kind of uncertainty in a situation with complexity beyond what your mind can immediately grasp. You have a whole toolbox of innate adaptations to regulate your anxiety by doing something, by taking actions and having new experiences to teach you more about what's really going on so you can understand and make sense of uncertain situations. These "innate adaptations" basically feel like... fun. Fun is pretty much the only thing that propels anyone to try anything new. Therefore, since fun is basically a response to anxiety caused by uncertainty, anxiety is technically a good thing. Because it's what makes you look for fun things to do which make you learn and expand and become happier and more adapted to your world. Anxiety, handled well, makes your life better.

We're all going to try to limit uncertainty (and therefore anxiety) in our lives. This is a biological adaptation of any species, and the underpinning of the process of evolution of any kind. However, uncertainty is the fringe where fun happens. Childhood is all about fun, because it's all about developing adaptations to uncertainty in experience. 

In our culture anxiety is regarded as abnormal, threatening, and something which needs to be eliminated by medication and proactive choices as much as possible. We don't admit to experiencing anxiety, often not even to ourselves. I am certain that there's a direct consequence of this bizarre cultural fashion that has developed with the Industrial Age: civilization's increasing epidemic of developmentally-disabled children is a direct consequence of the relentless limiting of childhood uncertainty and fun.

Whether a child is diagnosed with a learning disability or not, the problem still gets worse for everyone in society because, as a population, we're not learning and growing to anything close to our human potential. Our lives are increasingly about avoiding experience, not adapting to it. People aren't growing up. Senior citizens need the government to help them just to survive. This is not the human potential at all. This is institutionalized dumbing-down.

The downside of having few adaptations and never growing up is that we do not develop all those adaptations to the unexpected. Sooner or later, unexpected and anxiety-producing experiences will enter our lives... and we won't have what it takes to work our way through the obstacles to the other side because all we'll know how to do is run away from anxiety with pills or addictions or shopping sprees. Being unable to respond to an overwhelming conflict experience in life is the origin of every biological and emotional symptom of disease.

Four Psychic Equivalence Strategies to Avoid Anxiety

Just accept it.

See, what a person is doing when she avoids experiences instead of being open to learning from them, is she's attempting to control the world. This is what you might call impossible. And that's why eventually there's going to be a crisis point at which you can't just keep using perceptual blindness and psychic equivalence to keep on avoiding reality. Something that feels really shitty will happen to you. You're going to have an experience that "makes" you feel awful. At this point, if you want to stick with psychic equivalence and keep on changing the world,, you've got four strategies:

1. Make the world go away.
Some get rid of anxiety by self-medication: distraction, drugs, drinking, greater and greater extremes.

2. Make the world smaller.
To reduce almost certain disaster that unusual behaviour will bring upon you, you can reduce your number of experiences by making your world smaller. Have no hobbies, no relationships, and no activities outside the home or office. Make sure your job is really boring and don't speak to anyone who doesn't go to your church.

3. Make the world simpler.

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines." ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ever wonder why children's television and the public school system has been reduced to such ridiculous oversimplified absolutes? It's to reduce children's anxiety about dealing with uncertainty... or, more accurately, to reduce adults' anxiety about children doing unusual things since they don't know right from wrong. Oversimplification is held in place by maintaining rigid single-mindedness and conviction that this view is the only proper view. Oversimplification of the world splits all experience into two categories: "safe" and "unsafe." Anything not "absolutely safe" has to be regarded as "unsafe". The former category is far smaller than the latter. This is how the buttheaded linear logic of our modern society has been passed along and distilled, generation after generation, to the point that more than 90% of us do not have basic survival skills by the time we reach voting age. The process of simplifying reality in order to ease anxiety has steadily displaced real learning for the lifetime of everyone alive today.

4. Make the world a divine battlefield.
The "safe" and "unsafe" categories are also the origin of our cultural concepts of "good" and "evil." That which is not good is instead evil. With this kind of psychic equivalence, all we have to do to push complexity (and its attendant uncertainty and anxiety) out of our lives is pinpoint those who are the cause of the complexity... and get rid of them. We can kick them out of the club, evict them from the building, sue them for all they're worth or use a hostile takeover to shut them down. Or we can stick them in jail. Or medicate them to death. 

We're taught very young to seek to control ourselves so as to be "good," in the absolute sense. Over time, as you inevitably screw this up, you as a child come to regard yourself as "bad" and then you develop anxiety about being abandoned. That's the basis for your whole suite of beliefs that you developed that helped you interpret overwhelming experiences as a child and in young adulthood and that now screw up your life because you can't tell fact from belief. Because you are afflicted with a mental problem called psychic equivalence and you think that what you feel and imagine must be true because it is associated with certain feelings in your body.

How Your Beliefs Create Your Reality

How do you limit your abandonment anxiety? What does anyone do about abandonment anxiety? With psychic equivalence, we externalize it. The child, or the child within, aligns himself with absolute good (also known as God, Mother Earth, "morality"), and then fights evil. That's what all the fighting is about: the wars on drugs, AIDS, cancer, homelessness, terrorism, poverty. Those things are evil and we have to fight them (usually just by providing funds and an occasional tweet or Facebook post) and that makes us good. More importantly, while we are decided to fight these things, we will not participate in them or do anything that looks like participating them. Because that would be wrong and we know right from wrong.

A philosophical question for you: who among us actually knows good from evil? When we eat apples from the tree in the Garden of Eden, do we actually learn good from evil, or do we just feel guilty because we've violated someone else's rule? And, if a rule has been made without our input, why do we have to follow it? How do we choose whether something is good for everyone or just for ourselves? How do we justify, for example, killing living creatures to feed ourselves, or allowing our governments to use excessive forces on civilian populations in other countries to protect us from a few villains? Aren't those choices good for us and evil for others?

"Playing on God's team" manifests during childhood mostly in fantasy, such as in fascination with superheroes who crusade on the side of good against evil. As adults, however, the need to crusade against evil plays out in tragic global conflict, conspiracy theorizing, religiosity, bigotry of all kinds, and power imbalance of all kinds. We do not defend our rights because it looks selfish. We do not live our dreams because it looks risky. We do not speak from our hearts because it looks unusual.

In other words, it plays out as modern industrial civilization. Which, in my opinion, is really boring and shitty for most of the people in the world. Thank goodness it's all falling apart.

Controlling your anxiety through externalization is successful only to the degree that you can convince yourself that the conflict you're experiencing is outside yourself - something that the world is doing to you; in other words, controlling your anxiety is successful only to the degree you can pull off psychic equivalence. What happens when you realize that you're nuts and decide to drop the fantasy and examine the actual facts?

If you ever unintentionally let your psychic equivalence begin to falter and start to experience reality instead of holding it all outside yourself like a TV show, two things happen:

1. You'll feel a sense of danger as you experience that the evil you "know" is inside you may be exposed. You'll become hypervigilant because of this danger, maybe even paranoid. Psychic equivalence may then use this as proof that we live in dangerous times. Why else would you feel paranoid?
2. You'll feel the need to put this horrible inner conflict outside yourself again, which will result in an increased need to crusade against evil. Enemies must be found to destroy. Good people must be supplied with evil to fight. Luckily, there is never any shortage of evil to fight, since anyone who does not share your psychic equivalence is obviously aligned with evil.

So, if your psychic equivalence accidentally begins to falter, there's this nice feedback mechanism to strengthen the psychic equivalence and make reality go away again. Whew! Life becomes a very simple external battle between good and evil. And, so long as the battle can be fought externally, each of us is able to remain blind to the actual internal battle between the various aspects of ourselves that we have long since learned are good and evil.

How to Feel Better, Even When Shitty Things Happen

The simple (and, if done right, extremely fast) way to stop feeling bad about events and experiences around you is to recognize that you have given meaning to meaningless events. It's your belief that's making you feel bad about events, not the events themselves. You are acting from psychic equivalence. You are mentally dysfunctional because you don't know right from wrong, you just have chosen the easier belief because it soothed your anxiety at some point in the past.

Those of us who grew up in families in which psychic equivalence was a way of life - perhaps even a proud way of life - grew up psychologically and emotionally crippled, and unable to regulate emotions naturally. The terror any of us experiences in facing the life choices that would free us to fulfill our human potential... that terror is the direct result of years of practiced psychic equivalence. It feels extremely strange, at first, to think differently. But that's all. It just feels strange. You get used to it.

There is no way to win the battle against your life's conflicts and blockages without first winning the battle against psychic equivalence. If you, like the vast majority of us, grew up in a culture where psychic equivalence was a way of life, this will be a battle with very strange feelings, nothing more. A lonely, completely internal battle... that will change your life drastically for the better when you have won it.

First you have to make the choice to deal with this, to go through the dip on your way to the prize. But this choice should be pretty easy to make; consider how arrogant it is to think that you are right and others - those with a different view - are wrong, and perhaps even evil. Consider how prideful it is to hold a conviction that what you imagine is accurate simply because it is your imagination. Consider how cruel it is to impose your will on others, just for the sake of feeling powerful. How lonely it must be to be king of the universe.

You need four things to win the battle:

1. You need to have a full intellectual understanding that new experiences and alternate points of view are not threats.
2. You need to accept that what you have believed is quite possibly wrong. Does Mohammed go to the mountain, or is Mohammed so shit-hot that the mountain will come on his command? Can you conform your thinking to reality, or do you insist that reality conform to your way of thinking?
3. You need to accept that when you are exploring uncertainty and new experiences, feelings mean nothing whatsoever about that new reality. They are a hangover from your past. They arise from your mind.
4. During new experiences and in the realm of uncertainty, you need to experience that new reality not as the psychic equivalence you traditionally experience in new situations, which only reinforces the conviction that you are right and that new experiences are wrong and dangerous and evil ...but just as it is, adding nothing and subtracting nothing from the experience.Overcoming anxiety is about learning to accept reality inside and outside of you as your senses and logic tell you it is, not as your psychic equivalence says it is. This means accepting events, accepting feelings, but deliberately failing to connect them through applying any kind of story to give meaning to the events or feelings. Just say to yourself "Yup. That happened."

Examine all the moments of your life - especially the unusual ones - as though you were a scientist conducting a study, or, better yet, as though you were a very young child tasting a new kind of book or listening to a new kind of flower. Stop trying to not notice what is happening. Stop trying to pretend you are someplace else. Stop hoping it will go away. Stop wishing it were less intense. Stop wishing it were less scary. Stop imagining it means that your life is out of control. Stop imagining that God is fighting a battle to maintain control of the world.

Give up both forms of your psychic equivalence and open yourself to the experience. Shitty feelings are only shitty because you have decided they are bad. If you don't give up this belief, you can't ever get over the anxiety that prevents you from living the life you were born to live.

But the moment you learn to just experience, without judging "good" or "evil"... you'll feel the joy.

I promise.

Blissfully Unaware, by QFamily