Hello and welcome back!
Last week on the blog we started our exploration of cognitive bias - why it exists, how we develop it and how it impacts us.
This week we are going to take that deeper.
Make sure you read PART ONE first.
Now let’s continue our deep dive!
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Our Bias’ Are Formed Through A Childhood Lens
From here, we need to understand that our cognitive bias’ are often shaped by our childhood perspective of reality vs. being shaped by an adult view of reality - and then we BUILD on these bias’ with our adult perspective - which sometimes leads to figuring out ways of justifying and explaining childhood reasoning, which can further separate us from actual reality.
Most of us are living our lives based on programs that were created when we had far LESS understanding of ourselves and the world than we are currently capable of having. We have what can be thought of as an ‘old computer’ that created a WHOLE BUNCH of meaning around why things did or didn’t happen the way that they did or didn’t - and those old stories are now being explained by our new, adult reasoning skills.
In other words, in our childhoods we developed stories and ideas around why we were being treated how we were, why we were or weren’t getting our needs met, what we had to do to fit in and what was required for us to be safe - and a lot of the time those stories weren’t actually accurate - what we ‘thought’ was happening and what was ‘actually’ happening were two different things. But we didn’t know that. Also, we were in a very vulnerable state as children - being totally dependent upon our caregivers and other authority figures for all things - so again the way we learned that reality functioned and how we learned to be revolved exclusively around fitting in with those we depended upon, and our view of how the WORLD functioned came through the lens of what we were experiencing at home. This was our entire point of reference and our entire experience. Then as we grew, rather than replacing our old stories and the old paradigm of dependence with new stories and an expanded view of what it takes to be safe and healthy as we gained autonomy and independence, many of us have kept our stories of dependence, and have evolved them with adult logic rather than actually moving OUT of them and into NEW stories. It looks and feels to us like we are operating from an adult perspective - when in fact we may be operating from a childhood perspective that simply has adult reasoning layered on top.
For instance, in our childhoods we may have experienced our caregivers pulling away from us after a long day at work that left them feeling overwhelmed and exhausted. In our childhood perspective we likely believed that this withdrawal was a response to something WE were doing - because in our childhood perspective everything (generally speaking) was about US. We then would likely have started to look at the behaviors we were expressing at the time - for instance perhaps we were being particularly loud - and we would have then assumed that the withdrawal we were experiencing - that was threatening our feelings of safety and security - was due to our loudness - and in this we would start to believe that we must learn to be quieter in order to be loved and safe.
This would then turn into a bias - and we would start to perceive our loudness as being the reason we weren’t being loved more and more - even if this wasn’t the actual case - and we may even start to highlight getting extra love and attention when we were quiet, even again if this wasn’t actually the case in REAL reality. We would then grow up believing that this ‘loud’ part of ourselves was wrong, bad and shameful - because any part of self that we perceived to be the reason we were being separated from the love of our caregivers would have been seen as a THREAT to us and our survival - and we would then be busy collecting more and more ‘evidence’ for this being true as our minds filtered our experience to justify our reasoning. We would then land in adulthood with ALL of these stories about how we ‘always’ get rejected when we are loud and ‘always’ get loved when we are quiet - and we would feel that this sense of REJECTION is the SCARIEST thing to experience. Because we learned that to be rejected by those we depended upon for everything was to be separated from what we wanted and needed! This base bias that we must be loved/approved of to be safe is one of the MAIN childhood biases most of us carry and it dictates the behaviors we viscerally feels safe and unsafe engaging in. Whatever we perceived to be the ‘reason’ we were being rejected became an existential threat to us, and a part of self we then labeled as bad, wrong, shameful or otherwise something we had to get rid of/fix as we attempted to keep ourselves safe within the paradigm of our childhood perspective of dependence.
This means that we may start to realize as we begin deconstruction work that this isn’t actually the case.
But again, back to that childhood perspective - we would have collected lots of ‘evidence’ as we grew up that when we were being rejected, we were being rejected for being loud, that when we were being loved we were being loved for being quiet - even when this wasn’t the REAL reason we were being rejected or loved. We would have been filtering out the times we were celebrated for our loudness or when our being quiet actually caused us pain. We would have been unconsciously reinforcing our bias via interpreting reality in a way that matched our bias, instead of seeing reality for how it was and making our determinations around why we may have been being loved or rejected based on what was actually happening. We would land in adulthood with a SOLID belief that being quiet is always good and being loud always gets us rejected - because our minds had been doing their filtering thing creating more and more of a reason to believe this. This helped us to feel in CONTROL of our circumstances. We were attempting to explain to ourselves WHY we were being rejected and thus WHY we were being made to be unsafe (because again, separation from caregivers was to us separation from all of our needs and wants). We were attempting to find the CONTROL we had - controlling OURSELVES - in an attempt to save ourselves from the threat we were facing. We made everything about our behavior because we couldn’t really understand that our caregivers and other authority figures were having lives of their own, or that their behavior may not have been about us. Sometimes we were directly being told that what we were wasn’t ok, sometimes we were connecting dots that didn’t actually exist - but either way this is how we developed the fear of parts of ourselves almost all of us have, and how we then went about convincing ourselves that our behavior was the cause of our pain even if that wasn’t true in real reality.
Shifting Our Bias Into The Adult Perspective
As we do this work, we may start to have ‘breakthrough’ realizations that people have loved our loud side, and that being quiet all the time hurts us when it’s not genuine to who we are. We may start to realize that now as an adult we can be rejected for being loud and still be ok - and we can start to break down our cognitive bias and stories upon stories that tell us that being quiet is always better than being loud - but this is going to be a LOT of work because again, our mind has been busy justifying our stories by filtering reality for a long, long time. This is also hard because these stories have been solidified into our NERVOUS SYSTEMS. They are now subconscious patterns that drive how we FEEL - and this activates our minds to come in to tell us the same stories we’ve always told ourselves, so that we feel like we have a clear view of reality and thus CONTROL over reality.
The story of being quite = being good will make PERFECT sense to us, even if it’s leading to outcomes where we don’t speak up where we should, where we don’t express ourselves authentically and where we have learned to deny our true personality - which are all things that will cause us pain! When we feel that sense of rejection we will automatically start looking for where we were too loud - and this idea that we have to be quiet to be loved and that we have to be loved to be safe - that is ALL a bias or story - but it will be SO obvious to us as to seem like questioning it isn’t even in the realm of possibilities. We will notice that we will already be 10 steps down the path of trying to make ourselves quieter, even before we notice that we felt any sense of rejection at all - we may not even NOTICE what drives our automatic ‘I was too loud that is not ok’ thoughts - because the trigger creates that automatic response that again is SO quick to happen, we don’t even see it. This is an evolutionary trick we inherited - to be able to sense threat and to ACT as quickly as possible, even before our minds have PROCESSED that we are feeling a threat.
This is why a lot of us walk around in that self blame/shame spiral all the time - and don’t see what ‘triggered’ it. It just feels right and true. We felt a sense of not being safe, our bodies assumed that was because we were being rejected by someone (as that’s the program we’re running in terms of what our childhood self thought was ALWAYS the cause of us not being safe/not getting our needs met/not being happy) and we went directly into trying to ‘fix’ or ‘change’ the part of self we learned to scapegoat in our childhoods as a way of trying to bring ourselves back into safety by doing what we thought was expected of us. We will usually have to do a LOT of work to see this cycle happening in ourselves because again, it’s SO automatic by the time we reach adulthood as to be almost imperceptible.
The childhood story, that wasn’t even true to begin with, became our world-view, which became how we filtered our experiences and how we interpreted how others were responding to us and it became our code of being, it became how we thought we HAD to be to be loved and therefore SAFE - which would then need to be deconstructed from the root in order for us to be able to embrace the ‘loud’ parts of ourselves and to learn that even IF we are rejected for being loud, that we can still be ok! It will be a long process because it was a long process of many years of piling on evidence and denying evidence to get to where we are now.
This is even MORE the case when we are OUTRIGHT rejected for who we are, or taught that who we must be in order to be good enough is something that opposes who we are.
This is even more true when we are not given what we need in our childhoods, and when we literally and legitimately lack safety and care.
From our childhood vantage point the ONLY thing we have control over is our behavior, and from our childhood perspective the ONE WAY to get to a place of being perfectly provided for is to be perfectly loved.
We don’t understand that not everything is because of us, we don’t understand that we deserve to be loved and cared for even if we are acting in ways that those around us don’t approve of, we don’t understand that even if we are legitimately causing harm this doesn’t make us fundamentally bad, we just need to be shown another way, and we don’t understand that perfect provision likely isn’t POSSIBLE - all we know is that pain = we are doing something wrong and pleasure = we are doing something right.
That’s where pretty much all of our stories about self and the world are ROOTED - and then everything evolves from there as we grow into adulthood - old stories get new justifications and updated explanations - but the roots are likely old and childlike.
This then expands out to our view of reality in general a lot of the time - we tend to use this childhood bias of ‘pain = I am doing something wrong/there’s something wrong with me and pleasure = I am good/being rewarded/being who I should be’ and we use that template to guide our lives. We see evil in others, we see authority in others, we see stories of how the world functions not based on what’s actually happening and the complexity of our social and natural reality - but rather we fit what’s happening into our preconceived ideas about right and wrong, good and bad and how things work and THIS is where we get our bias that dictates how we process EVERYTHING we see around us.
This is why we can have a totally different PERCEPTION of an event than someone who experienced the exact same event but who has a totally different set of bias’ from us.
Our nature, our nurture, our experiences and what we have been raised to believe are the ‘right and wrong’ ways of being are ALL going to play into the kinds of filters we have and how our filters dictate our behavior.
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Alright! Let’s take another break here, and come back next week for MORE about our bias’ and why we hold onto them!
<3
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