Cognitive Flexibility: taking what you need and leaving the rest
In a recent newsletter, I wrote about some of the mental models systems-thinkers and problem-solvers have when coming to therapy:
The idea that our difficulty and discomfort has one root cause, which it should be possible to fix if we identify and implement the right solution.
The idea that we are affected by multiple, unrelated difficulties, which it should be possible to fix if we identify and implement precisely the right solution to each.
If we subscribe to mental model 1, we might assume there should be a comprehensive and coherent approach to understanding and troubleshooting our experience - like the user’s manual for the particular make and model of our car.
This can mean that any time we try a new approach to solving our problems, we are primed to notice all the things about it that don’t quite fit our experience.
And when something doesn’t quite fit, we reject the approach - this must not be our user’s manual! - and continue our search for the right one.
We may end up feeling misunderstood, and in some sense fundamentally other, because we can’t find a category into which our experience neatly fits.
We may be perceived by people who try to help us as resistant, or difficult, or nitpicking - when it feels to us like we’re just doing our due diligence. We don’t want to waste time and effort on the wrong things.
Meanwhile, if we subscribe to mental model 2, we might slice ourselves too thinly into our various intersectional pieces, feeling that each aspect of our experience and identity requires a different conceptual paradigm and intervention, losing sight of the subjectivity that holds us together. We don’t see the forest for the trees, so to speak.
This might mean that we don’t believe we can be OK or fully ‘healthy’ until we have done the right things, or sought the right support, to address every difficulty we can articulate, categorise and find a framework for.
And we are likely to be very good at articulating and categorising.
This can lead to our feeling overwhelmed, fragmented and uncontained - as well as having a sense of ourselves as hopelessly dysfunctional, with too many broken parts.
We might overlook the parts of our lives that are going well, because of our laser focus on what could be improved, or what has been damaged.
We may be experienced by the people who try to help us as too much, or hypochondriacal, or determined to seek labels - when, again, we’re just trying to do our due diligence! We’re trying to find the best ways to fix the things that are going wrong for us so that we can be happy and successful.
Both of these models are common in people who find great cognitive satisfaction - and even joy - in
patterns
systems
categories
precision
completeness
predictability (even/especially if the lifestyle we’ve chosen is unpredictable in nature)
the ideal of efficiency (even/especially if our experience is quite chaotic)
plans and strategies (even if we find these hard to implement)
Not everyone shares this cognitive orientation to the world. In fact, most people don’t - and most people is who a lot of therapeutic interventions are designed to help.
Over the course of my time as a therapist, some people have come through my doors who navigate the world relatively intuitively, without reference to a conscious mental model or ideal of how things ought to work.
They don’t worry excessively, and they are present in their own experience, not lost to dissociation or obsession or rumination. They are able to relax on their time off. They might be incredibly thoughtful and intelligent but they are not what you’d call neurotic.
They have cognitive flexibility - which has nothing to do with intelligence or intellectual capacity, but helps people move smoothly between mood and attentional states, adjust their plans in light of new information, and hold expectations lightly.
These people generally come to therapy if something bad has happened to them that they want to process.
And one striking thing these people have in common is the ability to cherry-pick what is helpful to them based on where they are at the moment and the direction they want to move in.
To throw a bunch of ideas at the wall and see what sticks.
To take what they need and leave the rest, engaging with the aspects of therapy that feel useful, and disregarding any parts of the process or theories that don’t feel relevant or helpful.
Which is exactly the sort of thing a pattern-loving, problem-solving, efficiency-driven systems-thinker might find unsatisfying - possibly to the point of being anxiety provoking.
It can be tough for systems-thinkers to go into therapy without understanding and intellectually buying in to the mechanism by which the process will work.
And many will come into therapy wary and apprehensive, trying to test the conceptual framework for flaws before they can let themselves get stuck in.
It can also be hard for systems-thinkers to trust that another person will be able to correctly conceptualise the difficulty they are having - to provide the right user’s manual. Because very few people have, so far. And often their experience is quite different from how the people around them describe their own.
The use that people make of therapy when they are not primarily systems-thinkers, pattern-seekers, and conscious categorisers, is like this:
they take comfort in the experience of someone listening to them, compassionately bearing witness to their emotions and experiences - even if that person doesn’t always get them, and even if that person isn’t as smart as they are. Being listened to and offered comfort helps them galvanize their own capacities for self-soothing and self-compassion.
they release some of the physiological energy that accompanies their distress - in the form of crying, or raising their voices in anger, or simply expressing their emotions through a bit of un-constructive ‘venting’. This doesn’t solve their problems, but it does help them down-regulate their nervous system so that they are able to move out of difficult mood-states and think more clearly.
they might ask questions - existential, spiritual questions, like ‘why me?’ - without pursuing answers. This is also what people do when they pray, or meditate, or hand something over to a higher power, and it helps in part by letting go of what can’t currently be solved, and reducing the pull towards rumination.
they might show interest in the experiences of other people who have been in similar situations, which connects them to a feeling of belonging and common humanity.
they assess, on a visceral level, what steps they feel able to take to improve their situation, and what won’t work for them, or that they don’t feel ready for yet, leaning into their capacity for interoception and their sense of autonomy and agency.
they leave therapy not when they have a roadmap to solving their difficulties, but when they feel replete: they have taken enough of what they need for now. There might be some sadness about the ending, but no great anxiety about continuing to have some unsolved problems.
Even if this isn’t what everyone’s experience of therapy looks like, it offers an insight into some of the ideas and attitudes that we might try to incorporate into our own mental models, as a sneaky way of accessing more cognitive flexibility:
that it’s OK and normal to have unsolved problems, even if this feels uncomfortable
that it’s OK and normal not to be fully optimised, efficient or functioning to our fullest potential all the time
that we will have ups and downs, and that a good day or a bad day is not indicative of a trajectory
that help and support can be valuable in all sorts of ways, even in the absence of a solution
that experiencing and expressing our distress is an important step towards making constructive changes
Being conscious that we have mental models, and that we are more cognitively inclined to seek and formulate them than the average person, can also be an important part of managing our emotional state and our functioning.
Being aware that it can feel cognitively unsettling to have loose ends, uncertain plans, unmade decisions, or disrupted patterns, can also help us to understand why we might sometimes feel anxious when things are, on the face of it, going more or less OK.
In the exercise below, I will share with you some ideas and questions that have been helpful when I feel stuck in work with a client.
They are questions that have been posed to me by my clinical supervisors over the years - and I’m lucky to have benefitted from the skills and experience of some incredibly intelligent and accomplished people, who drew upon concepts and ideas from an enormous variety of different modalities - from narrative therapy to Internal Family Systems therapy to sensorimotor therapy - where they thought these could illuminate the work with whichever client we were discussing and help to get someone unstuck.
Despite all of their rigorous trainings, my mentors and supervisors were not bound by the dogma of any particular theory or formulation, and took a pragmatic, intuitive, eclectic approach to doing what they could to help the people in front of them.
Exercise: Eclectic Questions
The following are questions that my supervisors have asked me about my clients over the years.
I’ve re-worded them as questions you can ask yourselves when you feel stuck or overwhelmed.
What do I want to be able to do - emotionally, cognitively, relationally - that I am not currently able to do?
What is in my zone of proximal development - i.e. what is the next step I can take towards developing the skills and abilities I need?
Which parts of my situation and experience am I not seeing, given my current focus?
What is my part in the dynamic I’m currently in?
What could I experiment with doing differently?
Which aspects of my current difficulty are cognitive? Which are relational, circumstantial, emotional, and physiological?
What is my mental model of my current situation? What are some other possible ways to look at it?
What am I responsible for in this situation, and what am I not responsible for?
