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My back was painful after a season of bike riding so I booked a massage for the first time in more than a decade. This is a regulated practice in Ontario, which means I saw a registered massage therapist. While she worked on my sore muscles, she spoke of this tight spot and how it was connected there, there and there, and how this all combined to create discomfort over there too. By the end, she had told me the story of the pain, explained what she did in the short run and what I could do on my own to improve things further. The narrative made the pain understandable. She gave me a structure of pieces of information that held the pain and made it easier to bear. It stopped being a troublesome experience and became information embedded in a narrative. It took on a different reality. She gave me some distance from what I felt and turned it into something I thought.
This is the process by which we take any experience and rework it with words. This is the packaging the conscious mind does in order to move something from daily experience to long term storage. Take experience, add information to the experience, shape it into a narrative to give it structural integrity, and the result is an amalgam of something felt with a structure of facts. Like a post and beam house, the structure contains the experience so that it will becomes solidly meaningful. Done this way, something felt becomes something understood in words. In this form it will last in long term memory.
We speak of rough ideas as frameworks. Stories are stuctured information. The principles of language shape something felt into a construct of nouns and verbs, actions and consequences. This forms a substrate upon which future experiences can be placed, and responses can arise. Supply a narrative to a set of facts or experiences and it can be saved and then, later, do something. Each fresh experience can take on meaning when slotted into a framework already in place. The whole mental framework is reinforced. Our mind structures experience to contain many different types of information and to serve a range of purposes.
This is a mechanism by which the brain organizes information into reality: the thing and its connector. Language has nouns with their verbs; mathematics has integers with their functions; physics has particles with their forces. Thing plus connector leads to an activity of some kind. These basic mental organizational tools are fundamental to our understanding of how things work. When faced with something new to understand, we work out what it is and what it does.
There is a concept called cognitive schema, a way by which we organize factual information. These schema are reality based, linear and logical. This is your understanding of how a dry stone wall is built, or the periodic table of elements, or the mental map you have of your city. The feelings we hold for some people or values we hold dear also form structures, but these are emotionally based schema. In this way experience coalesces into a narrative, the stories by which we know ourselves and our place in the world.
Once any schema is in place, it is able to define how new learning and new experiences can be understood. The new thing is slotted into mental space based on the strength and similarity is has to an older schema, of whatever type.
This is why people tend to marry someone who is familiar to them in terms of their emotional makeup. The important part is that the emotional landscape is familiar. The rules by which this marriage will be conducted were set firmly in place years earlier in childhood, based on how family members treated each other. I came across an observation years ago that one highly stable marital relationship is between a man who had a younger sister, and a woman who had an older brother (or the converse with an older sister and younger brother). The interaction patterns are familiar.
Marrying the familiar person, not necessarily the right person, may be the mechanism by which intergenerational patterns of interaction, like abuse, are perpetuated. These are the ways that emotional frameworks work. Once set down, these are the basics that people turn to when faced with decisions of an emotional nature.
The schema of familiar patterns may be in place early on, but new narratives can be formed all through adult life. People can and do change. It is not unlike renovating a house. Building a post and beam structure is straightforward in that the final shape is dictated by the framework that is built first. In subsequent years, if the building no longer serves its purpose, additions can be made that shape the function in very new directions. Build a wing, move the entry door and the traffic flow shifts.
These schema, our basic mental constructs, have the stability of a post and beam built structure. They are as persistent as old barns that last centuries. Such things can be altered as needed. Barns are converted into dwellings. People learn to act differently.
It begins only with saying, that way does not work well enough anymore. To return to the example above, couples choose each other in large part beause they recognize in the other the emotional landscapes with which they grew up. In these marriages, the individuals know what to expect and what the rules of engagement are. One or both may conclude at some point that the familiar ways are no longer fit for purpose. The ground rules may change or the couple may divorce. It is entirely possible to bring new values to an old way of doing things and thereby alter patterns of behaviour.
Change is often construed as doing something hard, but that is not entirely true. Change just comes from doing something different, and persisting in doing that thing without stopping. I think the really hard part is the decision to change. In that profound moment of saying no to one way and yes to another way, the rest looks rather straightforward.
Anyone who has done the slog work of an advanced degree knows the regimen of just not giving up. When I was in graduate school, there were some people in the program who did not make the full run. Some were forced out by circumstances beyond their control. The academic structure itself sets limits and does not graduate everyone, but I remain puzzled by the ones who could have stayed the course, but left. I remember one person who was bright and could work a problem into the ground, but who left without completing the degree, in fact, as soon as a job offer was made.
Persistence is an odd calculus of staying or going, starting or stopping. Ignoring the shiny object and staying on track. It provides an additional pleasure as the final goal expands to take in the satisfaction of getting through another day. One foot in front of another. Slowly the internal schema reforms, behaviour changes, and one day there is a finished new structure.