The Matrix. Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Fallout. Orwell’s 1984.
What do all of these stories have in common?
Well, off the top of my head, listed above are a number of examples of some of the world’s story tellers’ attempts to make sense of an important phenomenon: Perception vs Reality’.
These stories inject our lives with a dose of skepticism that stimulates the curiosity required of us to stay open to the possible ways that we may have been somehow unaware of greater truth, or indoctrinated without our knowing.
In case you haven’t heard of these stories, I recommend finding out more about them. But to save you the time, the idea is that many of us may take life as it is, unquestioningly and unexamined to varying degrees. We accept that ‘it is what it is’ and label things ‘fate’ and 'destiny'.
Platos’ Allegory of the Cave explains this idea by depicting the scene of, well, a cave with people in it, all born there and shackled there. They are bolted to an internal wall, facing the back wall of the cave. Behind and above them is a fire, and before that fire there are puppets and shapes, their shadows cast onto the wall in front of the cave dwellers like a show. The silhouettes play out scenes, and to the cave dwellers, these shadows are their definition of reality. If the cave dwellers were to somehow be led outside through the mouth of the cave, they would be faced with an unbearably bright sun, and confronted with a world they had never imagined, and realise that their perception has been mere 'shadows' of reality.
"The Unexamined Life is not worth living"- Socrates (rather brutally)
In our own life, we can be unwitting prisoners in a cave, thinking we know our world and selves, but our perception is based on only what we have been shown or exposed to. So how do we know if we’re in a cave?! Do barn laid chickens think planet earth is a big wooden walled room? I mean, we’re talking about our literal blind spots- the ‘unknown unknown’. It’s a similar question of ‘how can we imagine colour if we’re colour blind?'.
In each of the stories, and in therapy, we have the chance to speak with someone else. In the story of the Matrix, Neo has help from Morpheus and Trinity. Likewise, a therapist is a person who can think together with us in truly creative ways, someone to help think in new flexible ways regardless of their own background and experiences.
Part of therapy can be the introduction of someone who is curious about you and your life so as to stimulate reflectivity about yourself and your life that you mightn’t have considered before and foster that new reflective capacity within you. Sometimes therapy can be the repeated naming of your own personal matrix/cave/story. It can be working with you to respond to it differently. We aim to transform challenges from being sheer ‘fate’ to meaningful and comprehendible challenges.
"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate" — Carl Jung
There are infinite ways that we can be stuck in our own personal matrix or cave, and it's not the therapist's task to know what all the caves are ahead of time, but to be able to be a reflective co-thinker with you.
But to give you an example, one particular and common conundrum that I hear of in my practice is the ‘shame-anxiety-hopelessness’ matrix. Allow me to explain...
I will often speak to people who find themselves growing up placed in larger social systems that are punitive, demanding and critical. Maybe it’s a whole friendship group, a family system, a cult, or culture- but it’s their whole social world, and we are very social creatures. I see people who pick up ideas of themselves within the system they have grown up in, these ideas might be familiar to you: “I’m not good enough”, “I’m unacceptable”, “I’m pathetic”. I notice how people will unconsciously stave off this shame with efforts such as problem solving, rumination, worry, indecision, anxiety, withdrawing from others, clipping our own wings and not giving our goals a try, or deferring decisions to others. We can try to beat someone to the punch and say, “yeah I know, I suck”, and sabotage outcomes. But they try hard to overcome their issues by playing right into them.
Like a hamster in a wheel, every foot(paw?)fall on the wheel that tries to propel us away from shame, only spins the whole wheel faster and hurtling into more anxiety and shame. It’s alike to our cave dweller friends trying to get out of the cave by yelling at the shadows on the wall.
Again and again, I see clients try to be better people and stave off the shame by staying anxious but only to find themselves in the same rut over and over again. This repetition over time gains a new nasty edge of hopelessness and depression.
No matter how much they shame themselves into being "better", or stay anxious and on edge, they still feel “pathetic”. Although on the outside, a therapist watching in on this world, I can see how they are stuck in their own ‘matrix’ or hamster wheel, or cave- but for them, this is all they’ve known. How could they imagine any other way? Epiphanies rarely happen on our own. Often it takes the help of someone else to provide repeated noticing and acknowledging of client’s pattern of getting into their own caves “hey, it sounds like you’re doing that self-shaming thing again/found yourself in that shame-cave again”. The thing about our long-held ways of thinking about ourselves and others is that they’re hard to shake, and they are our blind spots. By definition, we don’t see them!
Neo didn’t make it out of the matrix on his own, maybe you don't need to make it out of your own personal matrix alone either.
Consider this as your invitation begin a journey out of that cave. I can’t promise to be the expert the exact cave you’re stuck in, but you can count on me to be the other curious and interested mind in the room with you to help increase your own reflectivity of self, awareness of others, and mastery of your own challenges.
- Chelsea
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