Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World (24 page)

But Kate could not forgive herself. She replayed the accident in her mind’s eye over and over again. What if Amy had not been strapped in (she had been); what if the other car had been going faster (it wasn’t)? what if Amy had been injured or even killed (she wasn’t). Kate’s mind was doing what minds often do: creating imaginary scenarios that then become adhesive. Try as she might, she could not dismiss them from her mind. More and more, she found herself focusing on these as often or more than on the actual events themselves. She had developed what is sometimes called posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD),
¹
and she was also depressed: tired all the time, feeling low. The joy had gone
out of her life, and she’d lost interest in things she used to take pleasure in. Eventually, all these feelings had accumulated into a state of mind that could only be described as prolonged mental pain: Kate alternated between feelings of emptiness and hopelessness on the one hand, and of turmoil and confusion on the other. Now she thought less of the event, but more about the mental pain itself. Her thoughts went round and round on themes that anyone in such pain can experience (see box, below).
²

Kate’s story illustrates in a very direct way some of the states of mind that can entrap us. In many subtle ways, we find that we cannot forgive ourselves for things we have done or failed to do in the past. We carry around the dead weight of past failures, unfinished business, relationship difficulties, unresolved arguments, unfulfilled ambitions for ourselves and others. It may not be as traumatic an event as Kate’s, but her experience reveals aspects of her mind that she shares with all of us: the difficulty in letting go of the past, the brooding about things that did or didn’t happen or worrying about things that haven’t yet happened. When the mind gets into such ruts and will not let go, you can find yourself overthinking. Try as you might, you cannot disengage the mind from its own goals and imaginings: a state that has been called “painful engagement.”
³
In fact, at times like these, it can seem that if you ever allowed yourself to feel happy again, you’d be betraying some person or principle. How could Kate feel happy after what she’d done? She felt she didn’t deserve it.

It is not hard to see why any and all of us might feel guilty for much of the time. It’s all around us. Western society has been built from the ground up on guilt and shame. We can feel guilty for not being able to cope; guilty for being a bad person or a poor husband, wife, mother, father, brother, sister, daughter or son; guilty for not achieving our potential. We can feel shame for not living up to
our own expectations, or for feeling anger, bitterness, jealousy, sadness, meanness and despair. Guilty for enjoying life. Guilty for feeling happy …

And the foundation for much of this guilt and shame is fear—the inner bully that we all carry around in our heads: fear that we’re not good enough; fear that if we relax we’ll begin to fail; fear that if we let ourselves off the leash, all hell will break
loose; fear that if we don’t maintain our defenses we’ll be overwhelmed … And if we fear that others will criticize us, why not play safe and attack ourselves with a few homemade criticisms first?
⁴
One fear leads to another, which feeds into another, in an endless debilitating cycle that saps our energy, leaving us like a hollow shell drifting through life.

But there’s also something else in Kate’s experience that may easily go unnoticed: the theme of
irreversibility
in all her thoughts. After the accident she felt different in some unchangeable way. And struggling in the midst of her trauma and depression, with the antidepressants not really helping, she’d felt that her life was irreversibly damaged; that she’d lost something that she’d never find again. Any of us can fall into the same mental trap. We can ca
rry with us a hidden assumption that, because of what has happened to us, nothing at all can ever be the same again.

But why does this happen? The answer lies in the way we remember events from the past. Scientific research has made great progress in understanding how memory for events in our life works and how it can go wrong. In experiments conducted over many years by Mark Williams and colleagues, volunteers recall an event in the past when they felt happy. It does not necessarily have to have been an important one, but one that lasted less than a day from any time in the past. Most of us find it easy to recall something. Perhaps we’d remember some good news or walking in the hills and seeing a dramatic view, a first kiss or a day out with a good friend. Notice that the memory has worked smoothly, retrieving a specific event—something that happened on a particular day and time and place (even if you cannot recall exactly when it took place). You could try more examples for yourself using the questions in the box on page
190
.

Look at the words below. Think of a real event that has happened to you, and that comes into your mind when you see each of these words. Keep in mind or write down what happened. (It doesn’t matter whether the real event happened a long time ago or only recently, but it should be something that lasted for less than one day.)

For example, if “fun” was one of the words, it would be OK to say, “I had fun when I went to Jane’s party,” but it would not be OK to say, “I always have fun at parties,” because that doesn’t mention a particular event. Do your best to write something for each word.

In each case, remember to come up with something that lasted for less than one day.

Think of a time when you felt:

 

• Happy
  
 

 

• Bored
  
 

 

• Relieved
  
 

 

• Hopeless
  
 

 

• Excited
  
 

 

• Failure
  
 

 

• Lonely
  
 

 

• Sad
  
 

 

• Lucky
  
 

 

• Relaxed
  
 

But it is not always easy to be specific. Research has found that if we’ve experienced traumatic events in the past, or if we are depressed or exhausted or locked into a brooding preoccupation about our feelings, then our memory shows a different pattern. Instead of doing the work of retrieving one specific event, the retrieval process stops short when it has only completed the first step of recollection: retrieving a summary of events. Very often, the result is what psychologists call an “overgeneral memory.”

So when Kate was asked if could she think of something—any particular event in the past—that made her feel happy, she said, “Me and my roommate used to go out on the weekends.” Her memory had stopped short of producing a particular episode. And when asked to recall any specific event that had made her feel sorry, she said, “Arguments with my mom.” When asked if she remembered any
particular
time, she simply said, “We always argued.”

Kate’s response is not unique. Research conducted by our team at Oxford, and in other labs throughout the world, has discovered that this pattern is very common for some people, particularly those who are too tired or frantic to think straight, those who are prone to depression or those with traumatic life histories. At first, the impact that this memory difficulty might have was unclear. Then it was found that the more people tended to retrieve memories in this nonspecific way, the more difficulty they had in letting go of the past and the more affected they were by things going wrong in their lives right
now
and rebuilding their lives again after an upset.
⁵
For example, in 2007 Professor Richard Bryant, working in Sydney, Australia, found that firefighters who showed this pattern of memory when they joined the fire service were later found to have been
more traumatized by what they had to witness as part of their stressful jobs.
⁶
Another colleague, Professor Anke Ehlers, found that those with this overgeneral memory pattern were more likely to suffer PTSD after an assault. When they investigated further, they found that this memory difficulty went along with a tendency to brood, and also, importantly, with the feeling that the assault had in some way changed things permanently and irreversibly.
⁷

What we now understand from this research is something hugely important: that the feeling that “things are irreversible” or that “I have been damaged forever” is a very toxic aspect of a pattern of mind. But it is a pattern of mind in which we can easily get stuck, because the very thought itself seems to say:
I am permanent: there is nothing you can do about me: I am with you forever
. This sense of permanence arises from a tendency to be
trapped in the past
, recalling events in an overgeneral way. And this overgenerality is fed by a tendency to suppress memories of events we don’t like or by simply brooding about them. Suppression and brooding are exhausting, and this also feeds overgeneralized recall. And once our memories are overgeneral, we don’t return to the specifics of what has actually happened in the past; instead, we get caught and trapped inside our sense of guilt for what has happened and hopelessness about anything ever changing in the future. It
feels
permanent, but the good news is that it is temporary. Despite the propaganda it represents, it
can
change. Our research has found that eight weeks of mindfulness training makes memory more specific and less overgeneral.
⁸
Mindfulness releases us from the trap of over-generality.