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Over and over again we have found the usefulness of this process of re-examining older patterns and understandings and “re-searching” deeper into the finer structure of them, using newer understandings to explore them more thoroughly and characterize them in more useful ways.
In the mid-1980's we developed a simple way to create a piece of self-concept when the person simply did not have a useful way to generalize about a category of their own behavior. We recognized clearly at the time that if the person already had a negative self-concept about the same class of behaviors, creating a new structure would either be very difficult, or plunge the person into conflict. Nevertheless, what we had developed worked very nicely, as long as the person did not already have a negative belief about themselves.
In recent years I have returned to explore the overall functioning of self-concept (and the much simpler and much misunderstood “self-esteem”) and modelled the entire process that people use to generalize about themselves. Since the self-concept is a “through time” recursive process that describes itself, and is also at a high level of generalization, changes in it are particularly pervasive and powerful. Rather than just adding to the self-concept by using a specific step-by-step pattern, this resulted in much broader and deeper understandings, out of which specific applications can be easily be developed as needed. A number of very interesting discoveries emerged from this modeling.
One discovery was that there are several processes that do two things simultaneously: 1. They make the self-concept more durable and resilient, and 2. They make it more open and responsive to ongoing feedback and correction when behavior does not match the self-concept.
I had expected that there would probably have to be two processes in balance—one to provide durability, and another to make it open to corrective feedback. I cannot tell you how pleased I was to discover that my expectations were wrong, and that the same processes have dual functions that accomplish both objectives simultaneously.
One of these processes (which was very surprising to me) is the value of including counter-examples in the self-concept database. Rather than weakening the self-concept, appropriately represented counter-examples actually make it stronger, like the effect of impurities that make steel much stronger than pure iron. These same counter-examples also function as templates that sensitize us to the kind of mistakes that we have made in the past, making it more likely that we will notice if we repeat mistakes in the future. This is just one example of the dual nature of these mechanisms that simultaneously make the self-concept stronger and at the same time more open to corrective feedback.
A serendipitous discovery that emerged from this is an understanding of the basic self-concept structure of “projection” and its more severe form, paranoia, a process that was recognized a hundred years ago, but without a satisfactory understanding of how it worked, or how to change it.
Another valuable understanding that emerged from these investigations, is the fundamental structure of what has been called “ego” or “self-importance.” Self-conscious preoccupation separates us both from others and from aspects of our own experience, and this results in defensiveness and being closed to feedback and useful change. Again this is something that has been recognized for thousands of years, particularly by spiritual traditions. But with the new understanding of how it works, it becomes possible to work with it directly and change it quickly. Unfortunately, the people who most need this kind of change are the least likely to want it or seek it out; usually a spouse, or someone else, comes in because they are suffering from its consequences.
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