#mindsight

sorry the quality is shit

“One day Stuart mentioned that his oldest grandson had broken his leg skiing.

I recalled the early session when he’d told me about his older brother’s skiing accident, and I wondered if he had some unresolved emotions about it—which he might be open to discussing at this point. 

When I brought up the topic, Stuart became tearful, and I thought I had hit a tender spot in his memories.

I said that perhaps the event was still quite raw in his mind. Stuart shook his head. “No, that’s not it,” he said, wiping a tear from his cheek.

“What do you think it is?” I asked him, puzzled about what could be creating this new and, for him, unusually intense emotional response.

“It’s not about my brother, or about the accident,” he said, looking straight at me. “It’s that I can’t believe you remembered what I said months ago. … I can’t believe you really know me.” 

We sat in a powerful silence, looking at each other. I felt his presence in a way I had never experienced with him before. 

We talked about that sense of connection between us and about some other things on his mind, and the session ended.

When he rose from the chair, he came over to me and shook my hand, then brought his left hand up to cover our clasped right hands.

“Thanks,” he said. “Thank you so much for everything. This was such a good session.”

I can’t really put words to what happened, but—half a year into therapy—there now seemed to be a “we” in the room.

If we had had brain monitors on hand, I think they would have picked up the resonance between us.

Mindsight (Daniel Siegel, 2009)

“Dissolving fixed mental perceptions created along the brain’s firing patterns and reinforced relationally within our cultural practices is no simple accomplishment.

Our relationships engrain our early perceptual patterns, deepening the ways we come to see the world and believe our inner narrative.

Without an internal education that teaches us to pause and reflect, we may tend to live on automatic and succumb to these cultural and cortical influences that push us toward isolation.

We need to examine directly the ways in which our cortical processes create the top-down influences from prior experience that cloud our vision.

Part of our challenge in achieving well-being, in ourselves and perhaps in our world, is to develop enough mindsight to clear us of these restrictive definitions of ourselves so that we can grow toward higher degrees of integration within our individual and collective lives. (…)

If the mind creates automatic constraints on our sense of self so that we tend to see ourselves as separate from one another, how do we take the steps as individuals and as a society to widen our circles of compassion and dissolve these automatic top-down processes?

Cum se formează, de fapt, mintea noastră? 🧠

În noul episod Mind Architect X Pagina de Psihologie, Paul Olteanu și Nora Neghină vorbesc despre neurobiologia relațiilor, atașament, reglare emoțională și felul în care conexiunile ne modelează creierul și viața interioară.

An important aspect of more advanced executive function is metacognition, or the ability to recognize your thinking as thoughts. Being able to step back and just observe your process.