Amby Lakdawala, MC, RCC, CCC
Influences
Robert Sapolsky
How much control do we really have over our thoughts, emotions, and actions? Do we choose to be either anxious or confident in a difficult situation, or is our behavior already pre-determined by our genes and our upbringing? The Stanford neurobiologist Dr. Robert Sapolsky offers a powerful lens through which to view the continuum of influences that make us who we are.
To understand behavior a half second before it occurs, we might look for clues in the neuronal circuitry and the various parts of the brain that get activated.
But if we step back a minute or so, we might ask what sights and sounds in the environment caused those neurons to get activated.
Or if you go back a few hours, we might examine the various hormone levels in the individual that affected how sensitive the individual was to those stimuli.
This process can be traced back all the way through early development, fetal life, the genetic makeup of the individual, the gene pools of entire populations, species, which in turn were shaped by various evolutionary pressures thousands of years ago.
The way I see it, your anxiety isn't "in your head." It's in your neurons, your hormones, your childhood experiences that literally shaped your brain architecture. Your depression isn't a character flaw. It's your nervous system responding using survival strategies that once kept your ancestors safe but now keep you stuck.
Does that mean there is no hope of change? Not quite. Fortunately, your brain is constantly rewiring itself based on your experiences and narratives. Every moment of safety you create in therapy, every new way of thinking you practice, every relationship that offers you something different - these experiences are literally changing your neural pathways.
When I understand how your "difficult" behaviors made perfect sense given your biology and history, I stop trying to talk you out of them. Instead, I help you understand them with compassion, then slowly introduce new experiences that can teach your nervous system that it is safe to respond differently.
You're not broken. You're a beautifully complex system doing exactly what it was designed to do, given everything it's been through. And that system can learn new ways of being.
Albert Camus
For thousands of years, the ancient Greek story of Sisyphus stood as a cautionary tale of daring to go up against the will of the gods. For his sly maneuverings in cheating death, the King of Ephyra incurred Zeus’ wrath, who condemned him to roll a massive boulder up a steep mountain for eternity. Every time Sisyphus nears the summit, his muscles straining, hope flickering – the boulder escapes his grasp and rolls back down. Sisyphus has no choice but to follow the boulder to the bottom and begin his endless effort again and yet again, forever.
For centuries Sisyphus cut a sorry figure, worthy only of pity. He became a metaphor for the many thankless tasks and routines that humans must perform day-after-day, year-after-year merely as a matter of course. “Sisyphean” became a verb for the endless monotony and pointlessness of human existence.
That was until the French absurdist philosopher Albert Camus reimagined the story of Sisyphus. After running the gamut of emotions from anger and outrage at the injustice meted out to him, Camus’ Sisyphus ultimately emerges victorious over Zeus not by escaping, but by accepting. "The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy." Camus writes at the conclusion of his seminal essay. Life is absurd, and so what? Joy is to be created, not merely discovered, along the way.
So that demon you thought you’d finally slain last year who comes back to haunt you; the anxiety that creeps back just when you thought you’d come out on top; that old pattern that is playing out yet again in a new relationship… whatever your personal rock that you’re condemned to rolling uphill, let’s find a way to do it with intention rather than desperation.
The question isn't whether the boulder will roll back down—it will. The question is: Can you find meaning in the pushing? Can you imagine yourself not just surviving the mountain, but experiencing it with acceptance, grace, and humor.
Alan Watts
"The more you pursue feeling better all the time, the less satisfied you become. Pursuing only reinforces the fact that you lack it in the first place," is a nugget of wisdom from the British-American philosopher that changed the way I look at the process of therapy. We have long been taught to run from our pain by fixing ourselves; to chase happiness like it's a destination we can finally reach. Watts showed me how this very chase can keep us trapped.
Famous for interpreting Buddhist, Taoist and Hindu philosophy for Western audiences, Alan Watts’ tongue-in-cheek discourse reveals great truths about the human condition while simultaneously refusing to take anything too seriously, including himself. He held that absolute morality had nothing to do with the fundamental realization of one’s deep spiritual identity. When he was active in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, he advocated for social rather than personal ethics, as well as for harmony between humanity and the natural environment, and between the government and its citizens – evidently a thinker far ahead of his time.
For all his teachings, Watts broke the enlightened-monk mold in his personal life. He had three wives, at least one known affair, smoked all his life, and struggled with alcohol in his later years; all without losing his sagacity and good humor. I find great optimism in his story; I see that being perfect is not a requirement of leading a purposeful life, and that it is possible to remain kind and equanimous even while finding one’s way through personal challenges.
In the therapeutic setting, we can use his teachings to understand that the path to freedom isn't around our difficult emotions - it's straight through them, with curiosity instead of resistance. We don't aim to eliminate what hurts; we learn to surf the waves of emotions. Instead of being hijacked by our feelings, we learn to hold them. Rather than being consumed by an emotion, we see what it is like to experience it fully to see what it is communicating. We can learn to “get out of our own way” to finally give ourselves a real shot at enduring change, unencumbered by the conscious self.