Caffe Interactions

I’ve been listening to a series of podcasts during the past five to six months and they all somehow talk about ways of nurturing who we are, instilling self-improving habits and becoming a better version of ourselves. 

From entrepreneurs to scientists in different fields, athletes and people who decided to share their own experience after diverse traumas, they talk about what they’ve learned and studied, providing resources to others. To name a few, I’ve listened to James Clear (Atomic Habits), Steve Peters, Robert Greene, Mo Gawdat, Andrew Huberman and Adam Grant, among others. Even if each of them speaks from different perspectives and all of them are worth listening to, there is a slightly shared pattern on a frequent issue we face almost everyday: the inner judge. Julia Cameron also addresses this subject in her book The Artist’s Way – and I’m sure we could make a really long list of people who discuss this. 

Many of you might have experienced that, on the path to awakening self-awareness and self-love, there is a moment when we acknowledge when and how we adopted certain automatic responses or attitudes, that might not be helpful nor healthy. It can happen as well that we realize many of those have been adopted at mercy of what our inner-judge says is better for ourselves. 

I’m sure you know what I’m talking about when referring to it… That voice that always has the unsatisfactory insight, either the scared one, guilty, frustrated, ashamed or shy. And, if we stop to consider it, it’s so amazing to realize the amount of power our mind has over us and our behavior. We think of ourselves as a unit but before we can actually behave the way we really want, we have to uncover all the layers our tricky mind has been hiding, canceling or distorting, without us being aware of it. There’s actually so much we don’t know about and can’t control about our mind and its ways. Like… Where is that voice coming from? Where can I find the judge to talk to him/her or shut them down? Do I have a right to an attorney to engage this prosecution? Where’s the attorney inside my mind?

Mo Gawdat says he named his brain so he could have an actual mechanism to address that voice and tell her to stop, when it starts speaking automatically, guided by a wrong or destructive line of thought. I named mine Elisa and am incorporating the habit of telling her to stop, when I realize I start ruminating about something.
In a closer experience, a friend of mine that’s a psychologist -and a great partner to share conversations with- once told me “Don’t believe everything your mind might tell you”. I never forgot that. This was more than 10 years ago, I was already over 20 and remember the feeling of discovery I felt. Before that, it was impossible for me to consider that my mind and I were different entities. What’s worse, considering that my mind could fool me or trick me. My friend, Camila, went beyond that phrase and told me that our brains can build refuges in places they consider familiar, even if those aren’t really safe or healthy. Because they are familiar, the brain identifies them as safe and, as our mind is there to ensure our survival, it’s constantly trying to find these shelters, so we can delude ourselves into thinking that we have things under control. Hard fact to discover in these cases is that, actually, the only thing that has any kind of control there is our mind over us, under a questionable standard of what safety should be. 

After the conversation with my friend, my perception of thought processes has never been the same. I developed a great tool to question my immediate conclusions and criticize my old shelters… Although I still struggle a lot finding ways to stop the inner-judge’s voice and other feedback Elisa comes up with.
For example, I know my mind believes thinking continuously about something that’s troubling me is a safe strategy ‘cause this will supposedly allow me to have the problem under control – just by obsessing over it. I realize that’s an illusion, as there is no chance of real control over anything outside me, but the behavior is hard to stop. Another example was when, only eighteen months ago, I started to realize I used to confuse rejection with love by associating them as one being part of the other. So, my memory banks had built, since my adolescence, a belief and recognition system where I used to identify as a shelter, a place where I was being rejected. The line of thought was: I “fell in love” -assuming I knew what that meant- ->  then I was somehow rejected by that someone ->  then that was part of what Love meant for me ->  then that was a safe place to stay at. Leaving that place meant uncertainty and unknown facts to come and that in the mind triggers the warning of losing control and danger to come. So Elisa started yelling, “stay there in the love(rejection)-refuge and be safe”.

Steve Peters is also known as The Chimp Doctor and he has a theory of three systems working simultaneously in the mind: the human + the chimp + the computer. 
I’ll try to synthesize the idea – with due truce, as I am not an expert. We are the human, the chimp is not under our control and the computer is a place we can access to manage the chimp. The chimp will naturally be worried about surviving but has no emotional management resources, so we have to nurture it to be able to guide it. A nurtured chimp is an untroubled one. There are three ways of training this guy: by exercising it (letting out our emotions properly); boxing it (feeding it with facts and “truth”, so it can count the arguments his/her emotional thinking is bringing up) and pacifying it (by distractions and rewards). According to this model, the human and the chimp are interpreting and analyzing all the time, while the computer is working with automatic fast coding. It is really interesting to get deeper into the model, but I’ll stay for now with the computer system that has a strong figure related to our inner-judge.
The Chimp Doctor says that the computer system is spread along the whole brain in different areas and that it is our memory network. This one contains beliefs and behaviors divided into two groups: the autopilot and the gremlin. 🧌 The gremlin is the destructive unhelpful behavioral belief and Peters says there are at least six of them. 🤯 (as if one wouldn’t have been enough…) 

I interpreted the gremlin as the inner-judge I’ve been talking about.   

So, while we are being harsh on ourselves either due to the voice that’s saying we don’t deserve something, we could have done better or we should stay somewhere that’s -not really- safe, the gremlin feeds the mindset of the judge and the chimp will continue to create chaos, unless we train it… Isn’t it incredible all the life and characters that are active inside this black box and we haven’t even started getting into real action?

Naming these sources of reactions the Chimp, the Gremlin or the Inner-judge is already an easier mechanism to separate our(real)selves from the automatic and disruptive behavior of our minds. To start figuring out different ways to manifest the “I” we want to become, it would help at least, to be a little more skeptical of the immediate results that the mind comes up with, and try to observe what perspective each one of them comes from. Is it a result that comes from fear? Is it corresponding with the perspective from which we don’t deserve better? Or with that from which we didn’t do good enough? Which voice is talking?

I am not able to bring further conclusions or methods on how to deal with this inner-judge and the later impostor syndrome, but reading and listening to so many people addressing this topic has already helped me understand some processes in the mind. At least, learning from these behavioral mechanisms helps identify them and be more aware of the automatic answers we come up with. 

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Some days ago I was at work where I usually listen to a radio station from the UK that allows you to choose the decade of music you’ll be listening to, throughout the daily programme. During the afternoon show, the hosts were requesting the audience to call them and say which decade they were listening to and why. 

The decades chosen were varied, from the 60’s to the 90’s, 80’ and so on… But the reasons why they were chosen, started to match. The answer I heard the most was that the listeners were choosing the decade that corresponded with their teenage period of life, the music of their early youth.  

Doesn’t that seem to fit the pattern? What a typical concept of a shelter in which automatism and deception coexist! 

Through our teenage years we might have integrated models we now struggle with. But one thing we probably treasure from back then are the friends we made (the chosen family), and the fun we had. The brain proves once again with these choices, to be capable of throwing us back to places that can make us both happy -with memories- and troubled -with automatic behaviors-, at the same time.

If music is there to bring us back to all those happy memories and feelings and thus, become a shelter… then so be it. 🎉 At least we will have a nice soundtrack to play along this deep and worthwhile journey to wake up our-better-selves.

Speaking of which… What is your favorite decade of music? 🎶I just realized I have been sharing all these podcasts with my partner but still haven’t asked which is his fav one 🤔  … 

… And how would you name your brain or your judge?
Do you experience any of these feelings or struggles? How do you manage them?

I’d like to read your feedback 🙏 …After all, it is when we expose our inner battles, creating community out of the shared, that they become smaller and sometimes even easier to be approached and defeated.