Unconscious/Suppressed Memories

Remember yesterday our friends the ego, id, and super ego. Today we will explain how Freud saw them in our mind. The ego is the conscious part of our mind. It is what we are aware of.

The unconscious mind has two parts where the id and the superego reside. In Freud’s view the unconscious is not all things that are unconscious but just the things that have been repressed. They are the things that the ego has deemed necessary to be "forgotten" so that a person can survive.

So there is a kind of war that is going on between the conscious and the unconscious. The conscious tries to keep memories, feelings and thoughts repressed so that they do not disrupt our lives. On the other hand the id and the super ego are trying to be heard and are at times, which is why we have moments of disruption.

The idea from Freud’s perspective is that the unconscious must be made conscious and dealt with. There were two other people who revised this idea of the unconscious Carl Jung and Jacques Lacan. There is also a lot of debate around the idea of the unconscious mind and suppressed memories, whether they are fact or fiction.

Now how does this relate to writing? Many times our characters may act out of character. They may do things that they normally would not do, just like we do. One explanation of this would be to help the reader see that there are other things driving the character that the character does not realize, until later. A suppressed memory of seeing a person getting murdered or of being abused as a child or…. You get the picture.

How would you, or have you, written about suppressed thoughts and memories? How could you write about the unconscious and reveal it to the reader but not the character?

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Schema’s and Traits Part 3

There are several different domains that schemas fall into. The first domain is Disconnection and Rejection. Within this domain are the Abandonment, Mistrust/Abuse, Emotional Deprivation, Defectiveness/Shame, and Social Isolation schemas. I will not be able to go into huge amounts of detail for each schema but just a little of what they look like. I am getting my information from “Schema Therapy a Practitioners Guide” by Jeffrey E. Young, Janet S. Klosko, and Marjorie E. Weishaar. Today we will be looking at the first two schemas.

People who have a high abandonment schema are always feeling like they are going to be abandoned or lose people close to them. They believe that these people will leave them in many different ways, from death to leaving them for somebody else. A person with an abandonment schema will be constantly looking for signs that show that they are about to be abandoned. These people are highly anxious about losing people. People with this schema need to learn to be more realistic about the stability of relationships.

Mistrust/Abuse schema is characterized by people who believe others are going to take advantage of them and lie to them. People with a high mistrust/abuse schema do not trust others and are on the constant lookout of people taking advantage of them. They are very guarded and suspicious of others. These people do not share their thoughts and feelings and do not get close to others. Those who have overcome this schema have learned to distinguish between those people they can trust and those they can not.

In better understanding these two schemas we can begin to visualize challenges that our characters are trying to overcome. In my first novel I write about a boy who flees his home as a young child and feels abandoned by his parents. Throughout the novel he is learning that he will not be abandoned by those around him and even that his parents did not abandon him. He learns to trust and love and to open up to those who are trying to help him. He then is able to not only rely on others, but in his own inner strength.

How have you, or can use these schemas to create motivation in your characters? Challenges? Stories?

Memories, emotional or cognitive?

There is evidence showing that we have different areas in our brains for cognitive memory and emotional memory. The interesting thing is that some studies have shown that emotional memory comes quicker to the forefront than cognitive memories. This means that when we start to experience a situation, if it is similar to past experiences, we remember the emotions behind that experience before we remember the exact details of the experience.

Before we go on, let's understand the difference between the two. When I say cognitive memories, I’m referring to the cognitive thoughts that we have about a situation, the layout of the room, the people that are there, what was said, the thoughts that we had, and other physical attributes of the situation. When I say emotional memories I’m referring to the feelings we had about the situation, were we angry, sad, happy, excited….

This means that when we go into a stressful situation, our initial reactions will be emotional rather than cognitive. Although not always bad, many times it can spell disaster for us and the situation we are in. This is why we are taught to take a deep breath before responding to stressful situations, to take time to think things through.

It is very easy for us as writers to get caught up with the cognitive reactions of our characters, because we are thinking about what we are writing rather than feeling. We need to remember that reactions are fueled by memories of past experiences that were highly emotional. Those emotional memories will often cause the character to react on an emotional level rather than a cognitive one.

Writing about the emotional reactions that characters have is a great way to setup problems for our characters. They see a person that is similar to their father who beat them every day, they see a man that reminds them of their father who loved them but he turns out to be a creep.

How do you react to stressful situations? Is it because of past experiences and what comes first the emotional memories or the cognitive?

The Things That Change!!!

Well, over the past week we have talked a lot about static things that don’t change much, but in the beginning we talked about the importance of change. So today we will be looking at the things that do change. Now this of course depends on the person you are talking to and these are my own personal feelings (interesting how I put feelings here and not thoughts what does that say about me?)

I think (and then think here very interesting) one of the main things that changes are behavior. A person’s behavior can change, we see this all around us every day. The behaviorists use the ABC theory to explain why we do things. A = Antecedent, B = Behavior and C = Consequence (very simplified version here much more to it). So looking at this we can see that we can’t really change the Antecedent but we can change our behavior which changes our consequences. So when we are working with clients we look at the antecedents and the behavior that follows and explain the consequence of that behavior. We then look at what would result from different behaviors. This will hopefully help the client see that a different behavior brings about better consequences, and they change.

Another thing that I feel (feel here) can change is perspective. I use guided imagery to help people see past experiences and then work with them to see those experiences through “healthy adult” eyes. By understanding past experiences through the healthy adult perspective they are able to understand why things happened and/or if they should have happened. For example the kid who is running toward the street hears his mom yelling at him. All he thinks is mom is mad… I’m a bad person… You can see where this can go. When we take them through guided imagery the healthy adult sees the scene from the mother’s perspective, who is scared to death that her child is going to get hit and die.

Emotions and feelings can change as well, in my opinion. This is explored through guided imagery as well. It is important to help the client see how and where these feelings are coming from.

Irrational thoughts are also changeable. Cognitive behaviorists employ many different tools to help modify irrational thoughts. Thoughts are confronted and challenged; they are looked at with a different perspective. (So all those who say they can’t write or they are not good enough to get published… I challenge you to think long and hard on this IRRATIONAL thought).

So what does this have to do with character development and knowing your character? It is important that we as writers setup situations that will change the behavior, thoughts, emotions, perspective, and feelings of our characters. It is the letter that is found, the loved one who dies, the sermon that touches the heart, the challenges that bend but do not break the person, and the unconditional personal regard from a person whom we respect.

How do you change? What other things do you believe change?

Schema’s and traits part 2

Yesterday we talked about schemas and traits. In schema therapy, developed by Jeffrey e. Young, Janet S. Klosko, and Marjorie E. Weishaar, there are 18 different maladaptive schemas. All of us express these maladaptive schemas to some extent. It is when you get into the extremes that they become a problem. Most of the characters that we create will not express these schemas. Villains on the other hand are villains because of these schemas. There are very few villains that are just pure evil; they had to come from somewhere. (Disclaimer this in no way insinuates that if you or someone you know has these schemas, are evil or a villain, only that truly evil people generally are that way because of maladaptive schemas.) From time to time I will be going over these schemas in greater detail but for now I just want to list them and talk about coping styles. The 18 maladaptive schemas are: Abandonment/instability, mistrust/abuse, emotional deprivation, defectiveness/shame, social isolation/alienation, dependence/incompetence, vulnerability to harm or illness, enmeshment/undeveloped self, failure, entitlement/grandiosity, insufficient self-control/self-discipline, subjugation, self-sacrifice, approval-seeking/recognition seeking, negativity/pessimism, emotional inhibition, unrelenting standards/hyper criticalness, and punitiveness. Like I said I will be discussing these more over the coming weeks and what they would look like. In the meantime imagine what maladaptive schema your own villain has, he probably has several.

Now, on to coping styles, there are three different styles and they correlate with our basic instincts of threat: fight, flight, and freeze. The three coping styles are overcompensation, avoidance and surrender. Coping styles are how a person reacts to his schema being threatened (the way he/she believes being attacked).

In a nutshell overcompensation is when people react by believing, feeling and acting as if the opposite is true. If, for example, as a child they felt worthless, when they acquired the schema, as adults they will do anything they can to be perfect. On the surface they are confident but underneath they are falling apart. Avoidance is when a person does all they can to avoid the maladaptive schema, they pretend it does not exist, they do not acknowledge it. They do this by using drugs, alcohol, become workaholics and other activities to avoid (trying to take over the world and be an evil dictator). Surrender is when a person does not fight or avoid the schema they believe the schema is true, they feel the pain directly. They are passive and choose partners that caused the schema to form in the first place (the evil sidekick is born).

This has been a long post but I hope that you have gained some new insight into creating your villains and why they are the way they are. Can you imagine the maladaptive schema your villain has what coping style does he/she use?

I have added a new page called the trampoline analogy. It is an analogy of how I view raising children. Check it out and let me know what you think. 

How to think about change in our own lives, others and our characters.

So I wasn’t sure what to write about until I read a post from http://lisa-laura.blogspot.com/2011/04/on-writing.html. Then I started thinking about change, (You’ll learn that change is one of my big thoughts) what can change and how do we write change. So….

There is this thing called the “fundamental attribution error” it is an error that we make when trying to figure out why a person does something. Think about someone cutting you off in traffic, how do you describe that person, what are the first things that come to your mind. Studies have found that generally we overweight attributes that are stable (race, age, sex, things that don’t change personality) and underweight attributes that do change (pregnant wife in the car, texting on cell phone, sick, things that can be changed.)

One of the big things that we overweight is personality. Personality for the most part does not change and yet, how often do we try to change our own personality or someone else’s. A movie that has many different types of change is Lord of The Rings. Study the difference between how Frodo, Sam, Pippin, and Merry (spelling may be wrong sorry about that) change. Their personality, race, sex all stay the same yet their behaviors change drastically. At the end Pippin and Merry are still goofs but they take on more responsibility. Sam is still the “mother hen” but he has a lot more confidence. Frodo who has changed the most is still Frodo but has a much greater weight on him.

The way people change is most often slow and hardly noticed, like the hobbits. Other times we have drastic changes like in the case of Gandalf going from the Grey wizard to the white. Look at the people you have known the longest. How do they change? Have you noticed the changes?  This is how our characters need to change as well. They should change over time except for in extreme instances. The changes will be perceivable but only slightly. At the end of the book readers should recognize the change but while reading, it should almost be imperceptible. Once again back to Frodo think about how he changed, it was not unnatural and rushed but slow and steady.

How do you write change in your books? Do you think personality can change? Share with the rest of us so we can all learn together J

Functional analysis and functional assessment part 1:

So, in class yesterday we were discussing functional assessment and analysis. This is a very interesting thing because it is going beyond the topographic view of things. Topographic view is looking at the things everyone can see. For example look at the room you are in and describing it. There may even be a clear container that has liquid in it but if looking at it from a topographic point of view you really don’t know what the liquid is that is in it. You can make assumptions but you don’t really know (unless of course you put the liquid in it, but that is beside the point).  

When doing a functional assessment it is taking into account all of the things that cause the problem. What causes the character to blow his nose: because he is allergic to something, he has a cold, he just bumped it.

Functional analysis is going from learning who the person is to manipulating the person’s environment to see how that person reacts in the given situation. We purposefully change things in their environment to get them to react a certain way or see how they react.

When trying to create a believable character we need to go beyond what they look like and what they think to the point where we understand how they will react in certain situations. Four things to know about human behavior: is understandable and predictable (if we have all the information), is malleable and can be shaped, occurs within a context and not a vacuum, is learned (can be taught) and can be manipulated.

How well do we need to know our characters to write a good novel? 

How do our Protagonists resist the effects of PTSD?

Protagonists are an interesting group of people. They generally have some superhuman ability and are thrown into some horrible situations. This makes me think of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). PTSD is an interesting thing that happens to some people but not to others. The question is, since we are talking about protagonists, why do some people not get PTSD.

When I got into a car accident a couple of years ago I was deathly afraid to drive for fear of getting into another accident. I had run into the back of another person when they had stopped suddenly. My brakes were especially squishy that day and so I was unable to stop in time. I felt like I had little control over the situation. Discussing PTSD with my supervisor we both came up with one of the factors, probably the largest part, control. If a person feels like they have control over a situation they are much less likely to have PTSD following the situation. The key word is feel. Think about soldiers who go into combat situations and are on high alert for extended time. The majority of them come home relatively okay. But me in my car crash feared driving. (I can drive just fine and it wasn’t true PTSD just an example BTW).

SO this brings us back to our Protagonist who gets shot at, thrown into dungeons, faces aliens and dragons, is raped, sees loved ones killed before them and many other horrible situations. What makes our protagonist special? Why is she/he able to withstand these situations with little to no adverse effect? One of my favorite protagonists is Frodo from Lord of The Rings. Talk about change and the effect the war had on him. In the end he was not the same, he had to leave because there was no possible way he could overcome the effects of PTSD in his world.