Schizophrenia Bulletin vol. 41 no. 3 pp. 544–545, 2015
doi:10.1093/schbul/sbt098
Advance Access publication July 13, 2013
First Person Account
How Understanding Neuroscience Helps Me Get Unstuck
Amy Johnson
Yale Program for Recovery and Community Health
Last Friday, when a friend of mine and I walked around
outside, we bumped into each other walking by accident,
but it was normal for me. Usually, when I bump into
someone, especially a male, I feel like I brushed against
a hot stove, and I feel burned and singed somehow. But
when I bumped into this particular friend, I felt nothing.
And, when he had a drink at the pizza place where we
eat—I don’t know if it’s liquor or not, but it looks like
it to me—I had no instant bad memories. Usually, when
someone is drinking what I think is an alcoholic beverage,
I am catapulted into bad memories immediately. But I’m
not when I’m with this particular friend. It is amazing
how plastic the brain is, isn’t it? How new experiences can
form new neural pathways.
My understanding of neural plasticity is that the brain
can both learn and unlearn unwanted ways of thinking
in favor of new, better ways of coping. But this type of
learning takes time. When I blame my brain cells, how
brain cells function, rather than blame myself for repetitive mistakes, it creates a willingness in me to try new
styles of coping. It allows me to sort of play around with
or try on new ways of acting. Self-blame keeps me stuck.
Realizing that it’s my brain and not me that is keeping me
stuck helps a lot. I’ve read a lot of books on how limited
the human brain is. These books help me to understand
how and why my brain works the way it does and help me
be more patient and compassionate with my emotional
self. When I pamper my emotional self, I feel heard and
I sort of validate myself, and this creates enough space
for me to step away from the behavior that I know and
try something brand new. I see that, for me, to become
healthy, to work on recovery, I must let go completely
of many of the ways I’ve been thinking and coping over
the last 40 years. And it takes huge amounts of faith to
abandon what I know in favor of something I’ve had no
experience with. Finding compassion for myself helps me
make these huge leaps of faith. Understanding neurobiology confirms that yes, I am a human being, limited, and
allowed many mistakes but still able to grow and learn …
over time, through taking risks, again and again.
In this respect, my symptoms are like habits; they are
structured responses to certain stimuli that have formed
over time. This means that I can unlearn them too, but
with Practice, Time, Patience, and COMPASSION
FOR SELF during this learning phase. Self-compassion
gives one the patience to be kind to oneself, and selfcompassion gives one the right to take the time to learn
and make mistakes and go through the normal trialand-error process of practicing a new skill or behavior
before it can become a routine.
I can unlearn my behavioral symptoms. I separate my
symptoms into behavioral ones and cognitive ones. In the
past, I assumed that what I thought drove how I behaved,
that how I thought about what was happening determined how I interpreted what was happening as either
good or bad, and that this value judgment then drove my
emotions, with my emotions in turn driving my behavior.
But now I know that I can change those old neuronal
relationships, those old neural pathways and connections,
by withstanding the uncertainty of the unknown, ie, by trying “on” or trying out new responses, by engaging in new,
unfamiliar behaviors. This feels sort of like putting the
horse before the cart, where I change my behavior first,
without changing my thoughts. Without yet understanding why I do something, I figure out where I want to be or
how I want to feel emotionally, and I aim to feel that way
the next time a situation arises that pushes my buttons.
I practice the feeling change before the thought change.
This sort of opens the door to a brand new way to view
a situation. I have then created a new reality—I have
opened up the possibility of another way to cope. For
instance, at a restaurant today, I was feeling intense paranoia and wanted to hide under the table. But, instead,
I watched my friend, and he appeared calm and almost
sleepy. He was resting his face on his hand, with his elbow
on the table. He looked casual and unencumbered. I tried
on the same stance, I too rested my arm on the table with
my face on my hand and adjusted my facial expression
to match his. Then I did not need to hide under the table.
It may seem at first that changing a behavior won’t
work. Like, the behavior change won’t stick unless you
understand why and how the behavior is driven. But
I have learned that this is not always true. I suffer with a
very stubborn mental illness, and out of sheer desperation
© The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center. All rights reserved.
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Understanding Neuroscience
to feel better, to get out of paranoia and self-sabotage,
I decided that my brain is only doing what it’s always done
and that it is not my fault that I keep repeating the same
old maladaptive behaviors. My brain is in a rut, plain and
simple. I am not choosing bad behavior. I am not being
willful or lazy or stubborn. My brain has created a groove
so deep that it literally cannot do anything different. As
in the television commercial in which the elderly person
shouts “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!” I too have fallen
into a hole and can’t get out. It’s not my fault that I do
bad things, it’s my brain’s fault. And once I realize how
human it is to fall into a rut, to acquire and maintain
a habit, then I can relax and stop beating myself up for
being so “stupid.” I can stop feeling self-hatred for being
so “lazy” and instead can shake off this bad behavior
with a laugh, and say to myself, “That old brain of mine!
There it goes again, getting stuck again. I will just roll
up my sleeves and go about the calculated business of
finding my way out of this habit.”
To get out of the rut, I take small steps to change the old
behavior into a new one that I have determined will give
me the outcome that I want. Change then becomes more
of a step-by-step math equation, where if I do A then
I will get B, and if I do B then I will get C. I become more
hopeful as I begin to see that there are definite things
I can do every day to work on changing into who I want
to be and how I’d rather be feeling, which is to feel good,
to feel better about myself, to believe that I can rather
than that I’m screwed and I can’t. I write down a plan; I
write down a plan in steps so I can plainly chart my progress. And it is always encouraging to see progress.
You may think that changing behavior alone is not effective and that in order to obtain lasting change, you must
understand why you are doing something. But this is not
necessarily so. I can change my behavior much quicker than
I can change my patterns of thinking, and, luckily, simply
changing how I do things (changing my behavior) positively influences why I do them (changes my thinking) too.
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