Synopsis – A book about how we lie to ourselves without realising, why we do it, how we do it and what it means.
Key Takeaways
Page 21 – The trade-off of a distorted awareness for a sense of security is, I believe, an organizing principle operating over many levels and realms of human life.
We can’t do all things all the time, we need to economise
Page 35 – The first response to an alarm alerts us to the danger; the second stroke allows an obliviousness to pain
Avoiding danger is the priority of the brain
Page 43 – A lion’s bite is specific, it can be dealt with decisively: flee, or, if trapped, flood the brain with endorphins. But mental pain is elusive. Financial woes, an uncommunicative spouse, existential angst – none if these stressors necessarily yields to a single simple solution. Neither flight nor flight is satisfactory; the fight could make matters worse, the flight even more so.
The brain has not fully evolved to deal with the modern world
Page 43 – For those dangers and pains that are mental, selective attention offers relief.
Our brain protects us from the world without us even knowing
Page 52 – When the appraisal of threat has led to a stress response, this mean he is stewing, both in the brain’s stress hormones and in his worries about the threat. That stew is what we call anxiety.
Prolonged state of stress
Page 88 – Under certain circumstances, that unconscious awareness can be contacted and can communicate, still outside the persons main awareness. That special capacity Hilgard calls the ‘hidden observer’
Almost as if another person acted, think of when you have almost had an accident, you act before you realise it.
Page 98 – Information that threatens the self – that does not support the story one tell oneself – threatens self esteem. Such threats are a major source of anxiety.
Being put on a performance plan, your spouse leaving you, get dropped from the team, all these things can fracture your reality
Page 102 – Schemas change continually through life, as do images of the self. Past self-images leave their trace; no one has just one fully integrated self-image, a single harmonious version of the self.
We are different people in different situations
Page 104 – Events that shape the lacuna result from such intense anxiety, and anxiety so suddenly precipitated, that it was impossible for the then rudimentary person to make any sense of, to develop any true grasp on, the circumstances which dictated the experience.
Our brains will create blackholes to avoid confronting the ugly truth
Page 111 – Lacunas take a toll: they make for a deficit in attention as great that caused by the anxiety they protect against.
It will cause issues in other areas if not dealt with, just like physical injuries
Page 112 – Every man has some reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has others which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But finally, there are still others which a man is even afraid to tell himself, and every decent man has a considerable number of such things stored away. That is, one can even say that the more decent he is, the greater the number of such things in his mind.
Dostoyevsky
Page 113 – Repression is the quintessential lacuna; it lessens mental pain by attenuating awareness as does its close cousin, denial. This goes on in such a way that we have no awareness either of the operations that extinguish aspects of our experience or of the secondary operations that out the first.
These things happen outside our consciousness
Page 116 – According to Freud, the penalty for repression is repetition
We make the same mistakes again and again
Page 120 – Denial is the refusal to accept things as they are
This is why truth telling is so energising
Page 121 – Isolation is partial blanking out of experience, a semi-denial. An unpleasant event not repressed, but the feelings it evokes are. In that way the details can remain in awareness but cleansed of their aversive tone. Attention fixes on the facts, while blanking out the related feelings.
Think about how prisoners of concentration camps dealt with their experience
Page 121 – Rationalization allows the denial of ones true motives by covering over unpleasant impulses with a cloak of reasonableness.
Is rationalization a form of lying?
Page 127 – In sum, the ego’s task is to control the flow of information in order to deflect anxiety, the architecture of self is shaped in large degree by the set of lacunas, it favours to censor and guide information flow.
All these mechanisms are set up to protect ourselves
Page 174 – I have never come across a family that does not draw a line somewhere as to what may be put into words and what words it may be put into. That is, each family has its signature pattern of what aspects of shared experience can be open, what must be closed and denied. When experience is openly shared, the family also has a sanctioned language for what may be said about it
These things operate at a group level
Final Thoughts – This book is very insightful but what can you do about it? If these mechanisms are so effective, then is simply knowing about it enough to stop it? Do you even want to stop it? Fascinating. 8/10
Stranger in Sydney 