In Steve Martin’s comedy, The Jerk, his character Navin Johnson was the target of a random assassin.
As the sniper fired at him, an anxious Navin ran around the gas station where he worked.
The sniper kept firing and missing. Instead, he’d hit the oil cans. Then the cola cans. And that’s when Navin realised what was happening and relaxed.
"Ohhhhh! It’s the cans! He hates these cans!"
Poor Navin. This is what happens when you choose the wrong paradigm.
Dr Jason Fung offers a similar metaphor in his book, The Obesity Code.
If you’re a battlefield doctor, you may be tempted to see blood as the problem. When blood is present, bad things are happening. If not, things are fine.
The conclusion? Blood is bad! We must remove blood from everyone’s bodies!
Of course, this would be disastrous, but that’s what happens when you get stuck in the wrong paradigm.
In the therapy world, many of us do that too. We focus on the problem, not the cause of the problem.
We become fascinated by "depression" or "anxiety" or "self esteem issues". As Dr Fung would put it, we get distracted by the blood, not the bullet.
We focus on the presenting problem rather than why keeping hold of it is essential.
To be a consistent, effective practitioner, you need to step free of wrong paradigms.
Here are 3 paradigms you can change right away.
1. "This is irrational and disordered" to "This makes sense, let’s find out how."
2. "We must focus on the problem" to "We must focus on the core prediction that needs us to keep the problem."
3. "Trauma response can’t be erased so we can only manage it" to "We all have an innate brain mechanism that removes trauma response completely."
Throughout my therapy training, I sensed that the profession was stuck in the wrong paradigm. I just didn’t know how.
Learning about memory reconsolidation gave me the answer. Finally, I had a paradigm that works, and gets results consistently.
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