Brain Lock
Becoming familiar with the brain helps me to work more easily with the Four-Step and other methods. For example, it’s not me, it is my caudate nucleus locked in gear and unable to shift me out of these obsessive thoughts.
Brain Lock
Figure 13–1 Brain Lock
Jeffrey Schwartz, psychiatrist, researcher, author of “You Are Not Your Brain,” calls the obsessive thoughts, feelings, and compulsive behaviors “Brain Lock,” the title of one of his books, because the caudate nucleus, a part of the basal ganglia deep inside the center of the brain, gets stuck or brain locked. He describes the caudate nucleus as an automatic transmission that should allow for the efficient coordination of thought and movement. In a person with OCD, the caudate nucleus is not shifting gears properly and messages from the occipital cortex up front in the brain get stuck and the caudate nucleus can’t shift gears and move on to the next thought. Instead, the thought goes round and round relentlessly.
The other part of the basal ganglia, the putamen, Schwartz describes as the part of the automatic transmission controlling body movement.
Stuck in Gear
Figure 13-2: Putamen Stuck in Gear
These two parts of the basal ganglia, the caudate nucleus, and the putamen, normally function together smoothly, but not in patients with OCD. When they get stuck, you get obsessive thoughts–caudate nucleus–and compulsive acts–putamen. Schwartz’s Four-Step Method helps the automatic transmission in the brain shift more smoothly so that over time the intrusive obsessions and compulsions decrease in intensity.
Four-Step Method
Jeffrey Schwartz’s Four-Step Method, very basically, involves mindful awareness of the voice of the Narrator. We can’t easily shut this voice out since it is a basic function of the left hemisphere of our brain. The four-step method is a mental string around your finger reminding you not to buy into the Narrator’s specious pitch.
Make up a pitch of your own to counteract the Narrator’s pitch. Schwartz likes “It is not me, it’s my brain.” This key phrase is easy to focus on when things get a bit shaky. I sometimes say to myself, “It’s not resolvable.”
This fits with Metacognitive Therapy (MCT), Cognitive Behavior Therapy, and ou focus on processes that aid in healing like Ki Breathing Meditation (Chapter 6), Open Focus (Chapter 9)
Acknowledge the Narrator as a nonstop story-spouting machine, an illusion dispenser, not defining who you are. Awareness is the key to freeing yourself from the binding, restricting, limiting illusion of self.
The Four-Step Method with its roots in Buddhist Mindfulness alters consciousness, not by denying the voice of the Narrator, but by separating who we are from the Narrator’s convincing account of who we are. We are not this storyline spun so intricately into our consciousness.
Buddhist meditators realized thousands of years ago the reality of a non-cohesive self. Neuroscientists conceive of the brain as a collection of neural pathways and circuits, modules interacting with trillions of modules. No central cohesive self, no command central, no thoughts found among the billions of neurons. Our brain is an ant colony of neurons functioning in huge clusters to get different jobs done. Our conscious self is a fifty-bit story spun to hold us together. The brain does not consider whether this story is true and whether it helps or hinders.
Feeding the Monster
Schwartz refers to the process of doing almost anything to get rid of uncomfortable thoughts and sensations by automatically responding with detrimental behaviors as “feeding the monster.” The monster is the part of the brain generating deceptive messages that cause bodily and emotional reactions so uncomfortable you will do anything to make them go away, even things harmful to your mind and body.
These behaviors may be psychologically and physically, as well as legally harmful, yet you respond again and again in a semi-automatic way. You feed the message-making monster, making it stronger, rewarding it with drugs, alcohol, food, obsession, compulsions, rage, sex, and in thankfully extremely rare cases, serial murder. The monster becomes an overlay of your sense of self. You see no way out and resign yourself to believing this is who you are and this is how it must be.
The Four-Step Method is a cognitive, mindful strategy for dealing with brain messages invading our psyche. These repetitive thoughts and feelings make us angry and uncomfortable, causing us to behave in ways unhelpful to setting and reaching goals. If someone were to bring up these thoughts and feelings each time we meet, our meetings might likely be few and far between. Yet they enter uninvited into our own private sanctuary, ad nauseam.
Include the Four-Step Method in your arsenal, along with Ki Breathing Meditation, Metacognitive Therapy, Cognitive Therapy, Insight Meditation, Open-Focus, and Attention Therapy.
Self-help books that help:
Total Self-Renewal through Attention Therapies and Open Focus
The Open-Focus Brain: Harnessing the Power of Attention to Heal Mind and Body
