STORY BYJanuary: new beginnings. We start a new year, hang a new calendar, learn to program the new gadget we received over the holidays. It’s also the time to rethink how we live; a time to make decisions—resolutions—for living better or differently.
Starting anew is a gift, one that can be carelessly squandered if not done with conscious consideration. Just wanting to change won’t make change happen, as the mountains of failed resolutions confirm. What does it take to make a decision a reality?
Janus, the Roman God who guarded portals and gates, looked in two directions. The first month of the new year straddles the past and the future, the ending of one period of our lives, the beginning of the next. We look back at what has happened in the previous12 months and we make plans for the unspent time ahead. Looking both behind and ahead is the first step in making a conscious decision to live differently. It is also the hardest step.
The path toward change is different for everyone. Alcoholics Anonymous and other addiction-recovery programs offer a 12-step model. All religions teach ways of beginning again. Almost all of them require a fearless self-inventory as that first step to becoming conscious.
What does “being conscious” even mean? More New Age jargon for hyper-awareness of our failings? For starters, consciousness isn’t a metaphor. It is physical. Sir Francis Crick, the Nobel laureate neurophysicist who discovered the structure of DNA, spent the last part of his life interested most in two issues: the boundary between living and nonliving and the origin of consciousness. He was passionate about discovering how we become conscious.
Crick and his longtime associate Dr. Christof Koch were working on a paper on claustrum, the thin sheet of gray matter that lies concealed beneath the cortex. What is known about it is that there are two-way connections between claustrum and various parts of the brain. Crick and Koch likened the claustrum to the conductor of an orchestra, whose job it is to synchronize and coordinate various parts into a unified whole.
When Crick was dying of colon cancer, he remarked to his old friend Dr. V.S. Ramachamdran, director of the Center for Brain and Cognition in San Diego, “Rama, I think the secret of consciousness lies in a claustrum,” and gave a conspiratorial wink. “Don’t you?”
Living a life in personal harmony depends on the critical synchronization of the “adaptive unconscious” and the “constructed self.” Social psychologist Dr. Timothy D. Wilson, author of Strangers to Ourselves, sees the adaptive unconscious as a big computer in our brain that sits below the surface and evaluates, filters, and searches for patterns in the ocean of data that comes in through our senses.
That system has a personality, a set of patterns, responses and tendencies that are laid down by our genes and our early childhood experiences. These patterns are stable and hard to change and we are only dimly aware of them.
The constructed self, on the other hand, is the more deliberate identity that we create for ourselves through the choices we make, the stories we tell about ourselves, and the reasons we come up with to explain our motives and our feelings.
Wilson believes the constructed self has no particular connection with our adaptive unconscious and the two could easily be at odds. The adaptive unconscious is more likely to influence our knee-jerk, implicit reactions. Our constructed self exerts more control over our chosen, explicit responses. For example, he writes, “the quick, spontaneous decision of whether to argue with a co-worker is likely to be under the control of one’s non-conscious needs for power and affiliation. A more thoughtful decision about whether to invite a co-worker over for dinner is more likely to be under the control of one’s conscious, self-attributed motives.”
In other words, the “constructed self ” makes the New Year’s resolutions, but the “adaptive unconscious” determines how long we keep them. So how can we coordinate the two when the final vote is given by a part that is, by definition, “unconscious”?
Wilson proposes that we quit trying at all. It isn’t helpful in terms of happiness or success in predicting outcomes, according to the research. Numerous social psychological studies have confirmed Aristotle’s observation that “we become just by the practice of just actions, self-controlled by exercising self-control, and courageous by performing acts of courage.” Says, Wilson, “If we are dissatisfied with some aspect of our lives, one of the best approaches is to act more like the person we want to be, rather than sitting around analyzing ourselves.”
Acting differently, though, requires some acknowledgement that there are parts of ourselves we reject or dislike. Writes author Robert Bly in his book, Meeting the Shadow: The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature, “Every part of our personality that we do not love will become hostile to us. The drama is this. We came as infants ‘trailing clouds of glory’…bringing with us appetites well-preserved from our mammal inheritance, spontaneities wonderfully preserved from our l50,000 years of tree life, angers well-preserved from more than 5,000 years of tribal life…and we offer this gift to our parents. They don’t want it. They wanted a nice girl or a nice boy.”
Bly likens this primal imprinting to “the long bag that we drag around” and when it eventually rips open we end up with trash and treasure spilling forth. We end up looking at two faces—“Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” The nice side of us gets culturally groomed to become even nicer. We sport good manners. We give to charity. We think about the good of others.
But what we came into this world with takes on a personality of its own, Bly says, and “it can’t be ignored. A person who owns his bag opens it and rightly feels fear. A man or woman glances up and sees the shadow of an ape passing along the alley wall. Anyone seeing that would be frightened.” So rage, jealousy, dishonesty, greed, criticism, and contempt all go into the bag.
Like Janus, dual vision of both who we are and who we wish to become, guards both our flanks and our future aspirations. Squaring our two selves is part of the struggle and glory of daily living. The first step though requires the conscious decision to paw through the bag in hope of resolving the tension between the “shoulds” and the “wants.” Only then, can we make and keep resolutions.
UPDATED: 1-13-2006
Editorial Board | Legal Disclaimer | Privacy & Security | Contact Us
©2000-2006 Office of Institutional Advancement, UT-Houston
Dr. Blair Justice is professor emeritus of psychology at UT School of Public Health and the author of several books. His wife, Dr. Rita Justice is a psychologist in private practice in Houston.
See Drs. Justice also at:
Fireworks
Don’t lose your independence
on Independence Day!
They’re beautiful, hypnotic, inspiring and dangerous. Each year, thousands of injuries occur from fireworks. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) cite
Most injuries involved:
Most common fireworks involved:
Between 2000-05, more than one-third of the fireworks-related deaths involved professional devices that were illegally sold to consumers.
According to the American Academy of Ophthalmology, if you are going to light firecrackers:
What is banned nationwide: Any firecracker with more than 50 milligrams of explosive powder and any aerial firework with more than 130 milligrams of flash powder is banned under federal law, as are mail order kits and components designed to build these fireworks.
