Free Will and Free Won't
The illusion of free will has obvious survival advantages, foremost of which is the ability to be confident, assertive, and action-oriented in challenging and dangerous situations. The downside is that when we have time to think things through, we are limited by our belief that our conscious awareness is all there is, and that we have access to all relevant and necessary information. This is akin to thinking that global warming isn’t a real problem on a snowy day. Psychotherapy, in all of its forms, attempts to address and sometimes unpack, the architecture of the fast system to discern how our experience has been biased prior to consciousness.
Self-reflective capacity and an openness to questioning one’s assumptions is a key predictor of positive outcomes in psychotherapy. These are the main ingredients to explore aspects of consciousness that usually go unseen. One of our main roles as therapists is to give our clients a glimpse of the fact that what they assume to be objective reality, is actually a product of their own mind. At the point of this realization some flee, some argue, and others become fascinated. If they stay with it, they come to learn that their histories encoded in things like attachment schema, transference, and shame programming, contribute to and even shape their day-to-day experience. This “awakening” can lead to making new decisions about their behaviors, emotions, and relationships. Once they realize they are living according to an unconscious script, they have the possibility for edits and even rewrites.
The core of many anxiety treatments is a combination of exposure (to the feared stimulus), staying in its presence instead of fleeing (response prevention), and learning how to be calm in situations that have caused arousal in the past. Changing behavior that’s based in the programming of the half-second between sensation and perception has a similar biology and a parallel process of change. The first step is awareness – transition from unconscious acting-out to learning to observe what is happening. Don’t expect not to do it, just add conscious awareness to the mix. Say you want to drink less alcohol yet find yourself regularly drinking to excess. Instead of just doing it as a reflex, be aware that you have the impulse to have a drink, what feelings are driving the behavior, and pay attention to the consequences.
Adding awareness to previously reflexive behavior adds cortical activation and the possibility of regulation and inhibition of impulses buried within the implicit half-second. We need cortical activation to gain control of unconscious reflexes and habits. Once you are more present and aware while doing the behavior you wish to change, add some conscious thinking to the reflex. In the example of excessive drinking, ask yourself what you are feeling when the impulse to drink takes hold. You might find you are a vaguely aware of being a bit anxious or lonely when the reflex becomes activated. The reflex and the effects of drinking may have served to keep you from being consciously aware of being anxious or lonely.
For many of us, we may not be able to be aware of our feelings at the time, and only become aware of them hours or days after we engage in the behavior. That’s just another thing to become aware of. When I use this strategy with clients, I find that the time between the behavior and the awareness slowing decreases until they are able to have the feeling an hour later, then right after the first drink, and eventually, before they even reach for a drink. When the reflex is closely followed by the awareness, then you have the option to engage in free-won’t. The awareness creates the possibility of free will while without it, we are robots that are controlled by the programming contained within the half-second. We still might not decide to change our behaviors, but at least we are closer to being in control than a puppet on a neural string.
This is an excerpt from Dr. Cozolino’s book The Pocket Guide to Neuroscience for Clinicians.