Her friends and family think Mimi is a great catch; she is beautiful, affectionate, and very smart. Sadly, she is better at attracting intimacy than keeping it. She blames her history of failed relationships on her “loser boyfriends who are always staring at other women.” Their attribution for the relationship’s failure is that her jealous rages drove them away. Mimi hates it when her friends try to help by offering advice because “they don’t understand.” The advice they give her doesn’t ring true because they only see how it looks from the outside; they don’t have access to the experiences that drive her reaction. Alas, as her track record shows, Mimi doesn’t understand her puzzle either because she only experiences how it feels from her first-person perspective, and, at that moment, her understanding of what is true is distorted by her intense emotional state. To know herself well enough to solve her puzzle, she has to observe the sequence of external events [the things that happen] and her subjective reaction from two perspectives: How it looks from the outside and how it feels from the inside.

Mr. E. can usually figure out how to arrange things to get what he wants.  But in contrast to his uncanny ability to predict and control the events at his office, he can’t control himself.  While he may appear successful to his friends and coworkers, he feels like a failure because he is on the verge of losing everything that matters to him. He attributes his disastrous financial and marital situation to his bad luck at the casino, but from our third-person perspective, he seems blind to the true cause of his problem.

These cautionary tales illustrate two versions of the puzzle of voluntary self-sabotage: an individual with a particular biological predisposition and conditioning history encounters a high-risk situation, such as a crisis of stress or temptation, and chooses the path that they have already discovered leads to an unwanted outcome.   Each time this happens, they realize they made the wrong choice, but that doesn’t stop them from making the same mistake the next time they get the chance.

The complication that prevents them from taking advantage of recognizing their error is that it doesn’t come until later.  When they commit the error, it seems like the right thing to do. It is only later, when they look back on it from the third-person perspective of hindsight, that they realize it was a mistake.  They don’t benefit from their painful education because the next time they react to a provocative situation, they will interpret it from the first-person perspective.

Emotional and motivational reactions emerge from the first-person perspective; we can predict that the next time they encounter a high-risk situation, state-dependent distortions of perception and judgment will affect their choices in a manner similar to the past.   How can we use this forewarning to prepare for the inevitable encounters with the stressors and temptations that the future holds?  The first task is to solve the puzzle inside the enigma of voluntary self-sabotage.

Different ways of framing the puzzle suggest clues to its solution:

• Why do competent folks, who can usually figure out how to get what they want, repeatedly fail to solve this important yet seemingly simple problem?
• Why don’t they use the same problem-solving skills that enabled them to solve other difficult problems to solve this one?
• Why doesn’t their success rate improve with experience?
• Why is the critical error of judgment that is so obvious to most observers invisible to the one who makes it?

If you can detect a recurring pattern of voluntary self-sabotage in your personal history, you have a puzzle to solve.  Evidently, your conventional problem-solving strategies don’t work on this one, so you’ll have to try a different approach.  The problem of voluntary self-sabotage is difficult to solve because it contains a puzzle within it: A soul’s reaction to an event that happened looks different than it feels. The truth about cause-and-effect is not available from either perspective. Friends, family, and treatment providers only have access to the third-person perspective of the problem.  Their solutions tend to be simplistic, obvious, and ineffective.  The solutions that our heroes generate during high-risk situations tend to be simplistic and wrong. Solving the enigma of voluntary self-sabotage requires a collaboration of both perspectives. To become familiar with this kind of collaboration, I invite you to explore the transformation of objective reality [pixels on the screen] into subjective experience [images].

The image you saw changed in the absence of any changes on the screen because the image doesn’t exist on the screen. Images are subjective phenomena that are created by and exist only within a living soul.  When you look at these graphics, your eye and brain transform raw optical data [the pixels] into subjective experience [the images].  A similar transformation takes place when you listen to music: The psyche creates subjective experiences (rhythms, melodies, emotional reactions, etc.) from raw auditory input (pressure waves vibrating the ear drum).   Without the transformation of objective data into subjective experience, a reaction would be impossible.  The subjective world we experience is different than the objective world; it is a model, a map that guides our reactions to the things that happen.  Intrinsic to maps is a feature that is so obvious that it hardly seems worth mentioning: The map is not the same as the territory. 

With the sole exception of Lewis Carroll’s map (which scales a mile to the mile), all models of reality come with the Map-Territory Disclaimer: The map is not the same as the territory.  The disclaimer is worth mentioning, even though it is blatantly obvious at an abstract level, because Darwinian forces demand that biological creatures regard their perceptions as valid so they can react to the things that happen.

Maps are fictions created to meet the needs of its users and the interests of its creator. Google Maps, for example, helps users navigate their way through unfamiliar territory. For a fee, Google will highlight your business location so that it appears larger and more salient on the map than it objectively is. Likewise, my subjective reality is a fictional model of reality that I create to navigate my way through the stressors and temptations that come my way.  Like Google Maps, the representation of reality that I create ignores some details and accentuates others depending on my needs at the moment.

The difference between a model and the real thing is self-evident when thinking about it abstractly, but when the situation demands an immediate reaction, you must regard your experience of reality as though it is the same as reality.  Accepting this necessary but bogus premise is a harmless concession to expedience as long as you remember that your current perception of the things that happen and your judgment of how to react to it is state-dependent. Mr. E’s appraisal of the wisdom of a detour through Las Vegas is distorted differently during the remorseful state following a relapse [“it would be the worst decision of my life”] than when he is driving through the high desert while on vacation to get away for the stress of the office. At that moment, his map of reality is so distorted by his proximity to the incentive that he expects that a Las Vegas detour will have a positive outcome.  From the dispassionate, third-person perspective, we are skeptical of his naive prediction and would bet that the actual outcome will include the sincere but familiar intention to never gamble again.

Even though Mr. E. has access to more information about his motivations and internal experience than we have, our prediction of what he will do and how it will turn out is probably better than his.  That’s because our current motivational state does not distort our appraisal of what is true.   What he judged to be true 10 miles outside of Las Vegas then it was yesterday.  Judgments and appraisal of judgment are state-dependent, so making an irreversible decision during a state of mind we know will change.  You would expect that the clever Mr. E. would have figured that out by now, but his arrogant assumption that his current interpretation of reality is valid and complete prevents him from learning the lessons reality is trying to teach him.    The implication of his recurring pattern of failure is that the future will be like the past.  Unless he finds a way to know himself well enough to use the principles of cause-and-effect to bring about outcomes that are in harmony with his interests and principles.  

The first obstical he must overcome is the illusion that his current experience of reality is the same as reality.  The day after a relapse, he tells his wife that he doesn’t want to gamble anymore.   Because he is telling the truth, he assumes it will always be true.   But when the pain of the last relapse is far away, and the thrills of the casino are nearby, he will judge things differently and assume that his current experience of reality is the same as reality.  Because his error is the result of an illusion, learning doesn’t prevent him from being taken in by the illusion that his current experience of reality is the same as reality.

Your personal research began by exploring how your nervous system transformed an array of meaningless pixels into meaningful images that could evoke aesthetic, emotional, or motivational reactions.  As you personally discovered, the process of transforming digital data into a subjective experience is not flawless.  Your personal experience demonstrated (harmlessly) that you can be taken in by the bogus assumption that you see things as they are.  Needless to say, the illusions you can spot are not nearly as dangerous as the ones that really take you in.  Intense emotional and motivational states distort subjective phenomena, including perception, judgment, and even the appraisal of judgment [On the way to Las Vegas, thoughts and images of his wife’s appraisal of his judgment cross his mind.  After serious re-evaluation, he is certain that his judgment is sound].   What will look like bad judgment in hindsight feels like good judgment at the moment.

Popular versions of the Soul Illusion:

• Immaculate Perception— Mimi feels certain that the unlikely explanation for her partner’s tardiness is valid because it automatically came to mind when she wondered why he was late.  [Of all the possible causes of his lateness, this is the most attention-grabbing attribution.  Whatever captures her attention will determine her subjective reality]  The illusion that her subjective reality is the same as reality is responsible for her gullibility and dogmatism in the domain of intimacy but not other domains of her life.   She considers herself to be data-driven, but in matters of the heart, she is uncharacteristically insensitive to data.  Offspring of the Illusion of Immaculate Perception that complicates problem-solving:
  • Gullibility — She gives assent to the belief that her lover will abandon her for another woman on the basis of insufficient evidence.
  • Dogmatism — Once she designates an interpretation as the true one, she becomes stubbornly loyal to it despite contradictory evidence and logic.

• Immortal Perspective —  I see things as they really are, and so will always see things as I do now:  After a relapse, it is obvious to Mr. E. that the costs of gambling far exceed the benefits.  Now that he “knows” the truth, he feels certain that he has solved his problem and will never gamble again. 

To understand what causes otherwise competent folks to repeat the same blunder voluntarily, you must study what happens where the rubber meets the road- that is, where objective reality is transformed into subjective experience. For example, as you transform Ocampo’s pixels into images that have the power to evoke an emotional, aesthetic, or even a sexual reaction, you become increasingly familiar with the process of creating subjective reality. Take this opportunity to observe the transformation from the outside [the researcher’s perspective] and the inside [the subject’s perspective]. You can use the cautionary tales in the same way to observe the transformation of objective to subjective reality from the two perspectives: How it looks and how it feels. For example, Mr. E.’s decision to spend the night in Las Vegas looks insane from the third-person perspective. To understand how an otherwise successful individual can repeatedly and voluntarily make such an obvious blunder, you’ll have to use your cognitive and imaginative faculties to experience the things from Mr. E.’s first-person perspective. So, suspend your disbelief and begin this thought experiment by pretending that you are Mr. E. in the remorseful state soon after a relapse. Imagine what thoughts and images would go through your mind if you lost more money than you could afford and felt that you failed yourself and your family. The more detailed your fictional first-person thoughts and imagery are, the more authentic your emotional reaction will be and the more interesting your exploration. . . . If you were able to elicit frustration, self-loathing, or shame, you would appreciate the sincerity of his vow to never gamble again. These emotional reactions are analogous to the images you created from the pixels of Ocampo’s ambiguous artwork.

The punch line of this thought experiment is to appreciate what causes him to violate that sincere vow. So, imagine how you would appraise the Vegas detour if you were Mr. E. on the road “to get away from it all” when he realizes he is within a few hour’s driving distance of Las Vegas and “a four-star hotel room for fifty bucks, instead of a dingy Comfort Inn in the middle of nowhere. It’s not gambling that draws me to Vegas; what I want is an escape from the stress I’ve been under, and the luxury of my favorite hotel is just what I need right now.” Cynics might judge his assertion, “It’s not gambling that draws me to Vegas. . . .” as a fabrication designed to promote what he really wanted: Gambling. However, a lie-detector test would show that he really wanted a nice hotel room, and since he had no interest in gambling, the danger of relapse was nil. His sin was ignorance, not deceit. He confused the authenticity of his appraisal with its permanence.

 Mr. E.’s failure to anticipate how his judgment would change as he neared the casino demonstrates that he doesn’t know himself.  The Problem of Immediate Gratification [the PIG] is a cute name for the primary cause of addictive relapse: Namely, the hyperbolic relationship between the immediacy of a gratification and its influence of state-dependent phenomena.  To illustrate this relationship, consider what happened as Mr. E. walked from the hotel parking lot to the front desk.  On the way, he passed through the casino and was transformed by the sights, sounds, and smells he encountered there.  Now, state-dependent phenomena were distorted differently than when the casino was far away, and the remorse for previous relapses was closer.  Now, his judgment was that a few small bets would have more benefits than costs — an appraisal that he is certain is valid.  It’s his certainty that he is appraising things correctly that makes it so difficult for him to solve his problem.

Three pearls of wisdom are carved into the portico of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi.   The first two are so obvious that hardly anyone pays attention to them, and the third gets ignored because most everyone is certain that their particular interpretation of reality is valid and complete. 

It’s not perversity, stupidity, or a disease that causes our heroes to repeat the same disastrous errors of judgment; it’s the dogma that they have immaculate perception.  As dispassionate observers, we can see that their judgment is state-dependent.   For example, when Mimi feels safe and confident, she interprets her boyfriend’s actions differently than when her perception is distorted by the terror that he will abandon her.  The only constant: She feels certain that her current judgment is valid. 

The downside of state-dependent judgment shows up as Mr. E.’s voluntary decision to drive himself to Las Vegas.  When he imagined his wife’s expression if she found out, he checked his reasoning and decided that his judgment was sound.  Of course, appraising the validity of his own judgment is pointless.  For example, at the next choice point along his path to ruin, the same distortions responsible for his judgment “that a few bets couldn’t do any harm” would also bias his appraisal of the validity of that judgment.   Most observers would judge his voluntary decision to drive himself into peril as insane.  He recognized that others would disagree with his choice, so he consciously reappraised his options and concluded that his judgment was sound; after all, he could leave whenever he chose.

So, given that you can’t select a map of reality on the basis of your appraisal of its validity, how should you choose the map of reality that will guide your voluntary actions?  Nietzsche has a recommendation!

Before you read his, think for a moment: What recommendation would you give to Mimi about how to choose a better map of intimacy than she was given by her incompetent caretakers when she was a child?

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote this poem about his daughter. Mimi’s former lovers recognize the description and still marvel at how the same person could be so wonderful at one moment and so horrible the next. Mimi explained to her favorite cousin what it was like to be Mimi: It’s like there are two versions of me: The normal me is very nice, but when I think that my lover will leave me for another woman, a different me comes out.”

Stevenson artfully portrayed the transformation from the nice Mimi to the horrid version in his masterpiece, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. If you want to be scared, Stevenson has just the imagery to do the job, but you have to do your part. Not everyone who reads Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde gets goosebumps. The adrenaline rush emerges from the collaboration of artist and audience. Stevenson’s writing is clear and evocative, but unless you invest your attention and imagination to transform it into subjective reality, it’s just a string of letters on the page.

The better you perform your part of the collaboration, the more fully you can enjoy the ride Stevenson has prepared for you.  Your tasks as the artist’s collaborator:

1. Suspend your disbelief and accept the artist’s premises as though they were true.
2. Exercise your faculties of attention to focus on the content.
3. Exercise your faculties of imagination to create subjective phenomena from the content.

Parsing the stimulus elements into a story is a necessary part of your contribution, but unless you give your assent to the fictional premises — that is, react to them as though they were true — horror stories are no more than a bore. To get the thrill, your first-person experience must be trance-formed — that is, attending to the story must alter your emotional state.  If you bought a ticket to a horror movie, you were seeking that “adrenaline rush,” so your collaboration with the artists who produced it was effective in that it resulted in: Intentional Trance Formation.  Mimi’s transformation from the young woman her boyfriend loved to the monster who scared him away was unintentional.

As talented as Stephenson was, his ability to create fictions that evoke terror pales in comparison to Mimi’s.  The thoughts and images she created during the 20 or so minutes she spent waiting for her boyfriend to show up for their date, “without at least calling to explain his absence,” triggered the release of fight-or-flight hormones, such as adrenaline and cortisol, acting like Dr. Jekyll’s transformative potion. Once her sympathetic reaction trance-formed her into Ms. Hyde, she was no longer the lovely and warm young woman her boyfriend wanted as a partner for life; she was now a monster with thin skin and sharp claws.  Ironically, the bogus assumption that her partner didn’t really love her and was bound to abandon her set in motion a sequence of events that transformed her fiction into objective fact.

Not all self-sabotaging patterns have this recursive feature, but all involve Unintentional Trance Formation. When Mimi recognizes that her episodes of rage contribute to the failure of her intimate relationships, she explains: “I can’t control my emotions.”  Nevertheless, without depending on drugs or any other external assistance, she was able to do what it takes to induce the trance formation — that is, she was able to suspend her rational beliefs and exercise her faculties of attention and imagination well enough to change the course of events.

Exercising volition is an art form, similar in some ways to photography. Perceiving an event is like taking a photo. When the shutter triggers, the camera records how things look from its perspective at that moment.  There are many possible camera angles from which to take a photograph of a particular subject. Professional photographers take care to position the camera to capture an image that serves their aesthetic or commercial purposes.

There are many possible explanations for Mimi’s boyfriend’s tardiness. But unlike the professional photographer who intentionally chooses where to place the camera, Mimi didn’t choose a point of view from which to interpret her boyfriend’s behavior; her interpretation was biased by factors outside of her control. The camera’s point of view was selected not because it was most likely to reveal the truth or promote an advantageous outcome; it was the most salient and attention-grabbing one.

While Mimi’s childhood traumas distorted her perspective of intimacy, she is no longer a child. The passage from the mentality of childhood to adult responsibility comes with accepting the power to choose the perspective from which she judges her partner’s actions. Nietzsche recommends that she use utility rather than her appraisal of validity as the selection criterion. A good model for selecting a perspective is the photographer who knows that one camera angle is no more or less valid than any other, and so positions the camera to achieve the intended purpose of the shot.

Creating your subjective reality is an art form that has some commonality with photography. Both involve choosing a point of view that creates an experience for the viewer that serves the artist’s interests. To do your job, you have to make sense of the things that happen, but you are free to interpret the sensory data you receive any way you want. Nietzsche recommends interpreting the data in ways that are beneficial to you, according to your own appraisal of what is good.  Don’t let loyalty to your appraisal of truth hold you back. Nobody, not Socrates, not Tolstoy, not you, knows the truth; those who think they do are punished for their arrogance by the unwanted outcomes of their premature judgments. You can discover what is false, but not what is true. Seeking the truth by examining the same subject from different perspectives is a noble motivation, but expecting to find it is an example of “Einstein Insanity.“

Artistic ambition is one thing; actually evoking the intended reaction in the audience is another. Talented photographers improve with training and practice.  The thought experiment in which you pretended to be Mr. E. on the road to Las Vegas gave you some practice working with your faculties of attention and imagination to induce Intentional Trance Formation.   Now, you dedicate these same faculties to exercising with an old-fashioned hypnotic induction: the  “Heavy Leg Script” from the venerable Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scale.  The first listen will prepare you to do your part of the collaboration the next time you listen.  So, suspend your belief about what is true and give assent to these bogus suggestions.

Different ways of interpreting the things that happen are continually battling for your assent, because the winner gets to live as your subjective reality and so can influence how you react emotionally and behaviorally, while all the other possible interpretations are relegated to die in oblivion. Those rooting for you want you to choose an interpretation that evokes resourceful reactions, so you can follow your path of greatest advantage. Those rooting against you would prefer that you continue to interpret things according to the dictates of your biological predispositions and personal conditioning history.

For example, the root of Mimi’s problem is that she automatically gives assent to the bogus assumption: “Those who are supposed to love me will ultimately hurt me.” As a result, she tends to interpret the normal mishaps that happen to couples in ways that evoke reactions poorly suited to establishing a secure and loving relationship. Unfortunately, Mimi is stuck with the realities of her history, but she has the power to choose her perspective — the point of view from which she interprets the things that happen in the present. We, as spectators who can only watch as Mimi unconsciously chooses the interpretation that will determine how she interprets her boyfriend’s boorish, but typical male missteps. Will her judgment be biased by her conditioning history or her current interests and principles? She has the power to choose, and so do you.

Volition, the power to intentionally influence the course of events, is the reward for completing a developmental passage that nobody can take for you, nor spare you. The passage from the carefree mentality of childhood to the existential realization that you have a finite amount of time to do whatever you choose. The ancient Stoics studied how to maximize your powers of volition and cautioned against wasting your time being angry or frustrated by bad outcomes. They would much prefer that you dedicate your precious energy and talents to working with what you do control. The primary message of this school of thought is the Serenity Prayer: Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

As an adult, you have the responsibility to choose how you will use the time you have, for example: maximize your pleasure, do good works, accomplish what you judge to be important, etc.  The challenge is to get the creature you inhabit to act as you will  Perhaps you’ve noticed that your body has a mind of its own.  Freud used the analogy of the horse and rider.  “The ego is like a rider on horseback, who is able to guide the horse only when the horse is willing. If the horse smells a brothel, there’s little the rider can do.”  Here is one approach to enhancing the rider’s influence over the more powerful horse:

1. 1. Use the personal research method to observe the sequence of external events and internal reactions that typically lead you to bad outcomes.  That is, observe the sequence from the first- and third-person perspectives.  Review several examples of the sequence until you arrive at a collaborative understanding of the cause-and-effect mechanisms driving it.
   2. Know yourself well enough to recognize the sequence of external events and internal reactions that takes you to the outcomes you want.  Of particular interest is the high-risk situation that induced the Unintentional Trance Formation — that is, where state-dependent phenomena such as judgment, motivation, and response probability distribution changed.  [For example, that moment occurred for Mimi when her adrenal potion transformed her into the monster].
   3. Suspend your beliefs about what is true.  The Greek Skeptics recommended that you develop your ability to withhold judgment and simply collect data for as long as possible before you give assent and decide to accept a particular interpretation.  For example, for Mimi to prevent her fight-or-flight reaction from ruining her love life she must replace the map of intimacy that was conditioned into her when she was young with one more likely to help her navigate to the outcome she wants.
   4. Accept the suggestion by reacting as if it were true.   Hypnotic inductions are useful practice to enhance your skill of intentionally influencing your subjective reality.