Our brains are not stupid. They just appear to be sometimes. I try to tell this to every person who comes into my office dealing with dysfunction in their lives. Many times, people end up feeling ashamed, or foolish for the things they do. But while these things are not usually the best way to handle a problem, they are not without purpose. There is a beautiful, implanted logic in the part of us dedicated to self-preservation that always comes into play, even when the reasoning is really roundabout.
Let me give you an example: A woman is living with her husband of one year. (I feel like they need names, so let’s call them Steve and Mindy.) Before they were married, they dated for three years. Steve has never cheated on her and they are thinking about having kids next year. The husband gets a promotion at his job, which requires more travel. Instead of being home most nights, he will be gone two weekends of the month. His wife is excited for his promotion, and although she will miss him, is secretly looking forward to doing pedicures and staying up late watching Grey’s Anatomy reruns while he's gone.
She kisses him goodbye on the day of his first business trip. Her day progresses fairly normally. But, about an hour after she comes home from work, when her husband usually joins her in eating take-out, she starts feeling an odd clutching in her chest. Her heart starts racing. She gets dizzy, and has to sit down on the ground. Suddenly she can’t breathe. Mindy extricates her cell phone from her purse pocket and dials her neighbor, who helps her to the hospital. She gets there and they diagnose her with a panic attack. She’s stunned. She never has had a mental problem in her life. Surely that can’t be what it is?
She feels silly but tells her husband about the episode on the phone that night. He expresses concern, but accepts her reassurance that it was just a weird one-night thing. Unfortunately, it happens again, the next night he leaves. It gets worse until she starts having them in the middle of the day as well as at night. Even when he’s at home, she starts feeling shaky if he’s not in the room with her at all times. What’s going on?
The mistake that often gets made here is that this – a panic attack, a sudden burst of anger, a convenient memory loss - is a random occurrence. A firing of neurons that went haywire. But things happen, with rare exception, for a reason. In a situation like this, you need to look for the logic in the dysfunction.
For Mindy, the trigger is clearly first activated when Steve’s job requires him to go out of town overnight. What might that link into in Mindy’s mind? The history that we’re missing (and Mindy would probably be reluctant to tell us) is that Mindy was abandoned at three by her mother, who was so coked out of her mind she didn’t know she had left her young daughter behind. She was alone in a squalid hotel room until a maid came in sixteen hours later. She was returned to her grandparents’ custody and raised in a loving and secure environment from then on. Mindy never saw her mom again. She hardly thinks about the abandonment on regular basis and would consider her life to be fairly normal, boring even.
But this piece of history tells us the logic. Mindy had internalized early on that people we love can leave us and never come back. Though now the situation was different, she had never loved anyone as much as she loved Steve, and they were planning a future together. When Steve left and wasn’t home when he was supposed to be, her mind went, “Mindy, pay attention. We’re in trouble again. He’s abandoned us, like your mom. Something bad is happening! Do something, Mindy!”
See? It’s not a random occurrence. Deep down, the dysfunction (aka the panic attacks) has the purpose of trying to draw her attention to a problem.
Our brain doesn’t like it when we don’t deal with things. Beyond an immediate block to protect ourselves from trauma, it doesn’t cooperate well with buried issues. This issue was so buried Mindy didn’t even know it was one. But the evidence was in her reaction to Steve’s absences.
All the painful, irritating, and problematic reactions we have are trying to tell us something. Sometimes it can be trying to point to an organic cause, such as chemical imbalance in depression, but oftentimes it’s just saying that “you need to deal with this already.” It’s trying to help.
So when you get stuck with a dysfunction, look for the logic. The point of origin it leads back to will tell you what the real problem is, and help you meet that need in a healthy way, instead of a dysfunctional one.
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