Understanding The Paradigm Shift

The other day, during one of my commutes out of the city, I found myself stuck in more ways then one.  I was stuck in gridlock traffic, and I was stuck with a hard case of writer’s block.  For almost a week I had been trying to come up with the perfect way to explain the concept of the paradigm shift.  After all, finding the power to make a paradigm shift is critical in making the best out of one’s recovery.  But it is also a tricky idea to grasp.  Our personal paradigms are slippery creatures.  We can be fooled into thinking that they are objective and somehow unchangeable, and, as such, we can become trapped by them.  I was looking for an illustration that was simple, non-threatening and completely universal.  At that point, I was at a loss.

I turned on the car radio for inspiration.  Flicking through the channels, all I heard was a litany of sad and angry songs about heartache.  I rolled my eyes.  The last thing I wanted to hear was the sound of people complaining about their love life.  And then it hit me: A broken heart! A lost love!  All those sad lyrics…

Almost everyone in the world has had to keep company with a broken hearted friend looking for sympathy.  In each case, although we feel sorry for their loss, their situation never seems as bad to us as it does to them.  We can see the light at the end of the tunnel when they cannot.  We can see that they are stuck in a paradigm that is only worsening their situation, but they don’t.  The story of a heart-broken friend I heard in a pop song in rush-hour traffic was just the analogy I was looking for!

Paradigm is a term that is tossed around a lot these days, and it would be useful to have a clear definition of what the word actually means. 

In the context of this book, a paradigm can be defined as a set of assumptions, concepts, values, and practices that form a way of viewing reality.  So a paradigm shift constitutes a significant change in the way a person sees themselves and the world they live in.
 
This definition is effective because it implies that we all have different ways of viewing reality, and that our attitude is the key factor in how we see our world.  Not everyone is comfortable with this proposition.  In fact, before my accident, I was one of those people who would have dismissed this idea without a second thought.  “Different ways of viewing reality?  Nonsense!” would have been my response.  My belief at the time was that there was only two ways of seeing the world: My way and the wrong way.

I was not alone in this assumption.  Through out time, people have defended their paradigm, their point of view, as being correct when others are just plain wrong.  Isn’t that the basis of every political debate you have ever witnessed?  People tend to defend their paradigm by saying that their view is realistic, that it is based on the objective interpretation of the facts.  But, as one progresses along the road to recovery, one learns that there is simply no such thing as a fully objective interpretation of factual data, especially when that data has to do with our own lives. 

This does not mean that the facts are unimportant.  On the contrary.  Factual evidence cannot be ignored when developing a point of view.  But, what were learn on the path to recovery is that facts can never tell the whole story.  There are often gaps between the facts.  And we fill those gaps with assumptions and judgements.  These assumptions and judgments are not factual, but are based on our worldview, our ideology, or our personality, or our idea of how the world works.  If you think the world is an immoral cesspool and everyone is out to get you, such an assumption will influence how you interpret the facts.

And now, back to my epiphany in the traffic jam.  Lets suppose you have a friend, a young man, who has fallen madly in love with a lovely young woman.  He asks her out on a date, and eventually she consents to be his girl friend.  Now he is the happiest person on earth.  Then, one day, she walks out on him.  Suddenly, he is all alone and heart-broken.  What happens next?  Maybe he begins to tell himself that he is a loser, or that he will never fall in love again, or that he will never get over her, or that he will spend the rest of his life alone.  Now he’s horribly depressed.  He calls you on the phone and cries that he is doomed to spent the rest of his life alone.  What do you tell him?

You might start by looking at the indisputable facts with him. First, he had a love affair with a lovely girl.  Now she is gone, and he misses her intensely.  These are the facts.  From these facts, no person can logically extrapolate that your friend is a loser, or that he will never meet another person again in his life.  For all we know, he might meet someone new tomorrow, or next week.  There is no evidence in the world by which anyone can reasonably deduce that he will end up lonely forever.  That simply is not a fact.  But try telling that to a poor heart-broken friend!  His sense of loss and a lack of confidence has created a paradigm wherein he sees himself in a world where he will never know love and romance again! 

The key to helping your lonely friend, presuming that he actually wants to be helped, is walk him through the process of separating the facts from his assumptions about those facts.  His lover is gone.  He feels a loss in his life.   Everything else is assumption.  Everything else is conjecture.  He can choose to make unpleasant conjectures about his future, or he can decide to make hopeful ones.  This choice will depend entirely on his paradigm.  If your paradigm is one that states that you are a loser, then you will suffer great loss in your future.  Even your successes will be tainted by a sense of loss.  You will feel like a loser even when you are winning.  You might even sabotage your own wins to justify your paradigm.  It happens all the time.  People choose to adopt a paradigm that will make them miserable

“But, Mike,” you might say, “I never chose a negative paradigm.  I don’t remember the moment in my life when I was offered a choice and I chose a paradigm that would make me unhappy.”

But you did.  Just today.  And you will again tomorrow and the next day, if you are not careful.   Take a good look at how you express yourself every day.  You just might find that, unintentionally, you are choosing to live by a self-defeating paradigm. 

Let’s go back to the example of our fictional heart-broken friend.   In the face of adverse conditions, our friend is having a hard time expressing his feelings.  He feels a great heart-ache, but instead of saying, “I feel a great heart ache,” or even “I feel lonely,” he expresses his feelings with an assumption, saying, “I’ll never love again.”  The assumption is a way of expressing his feelings through a thought.  But the thought is not based on fact.  All this assumption is doing is re-enforcing a negative paradigm. 

How many times have you heard people say something to this effect :

“I feel that you interrupt me too much.”

But is that really what they are feeling?  No! The above statement does not express a feeling but is actually a judgment call.  A more accurate way to make this judgement is

“I think you interrupt me too much.” 

Or, a more accurate way to express this feeling would be:

“I get annoyed when you interrupt me.” 

The first of these alternatives accurately reflects what you think, and the next accurately reflects what you feel.  By noticing that we humans tend to get our thoughts and feelings mixed up, we have made the first step to mastering the paradigm shift: start off by noticing how you feel, and express those feelings honestly, without turning them into assumptions about what is real.  Feelings are feelings.  Facts are facts.  Keep them separate and you are on the path to true self-discovery. 

This self discovery begins with understanding that, whether you are aware of it or not, you have created your own paradigm, and therefore, in a sense, you have created your own world.  To see yourself and your paradigm in the spaces between the hard data is the beginning of a great awakening. 

Remember that there is nothing wrong with the facts.  And there is nothing wrong with how you feel.  But there are bound to be problems in your recovery if you get the two mixed up. 

Before we leave this subject, take a few moments to ask yourself how many times today you made decisions about yourself based on assumptions that were not factual.  In the back your mind, did you call yourself an “idiot” today, just because they made a mistake?  Smart people make mistakes all the time.  A mistake does not make you an idiot.  In fact, many wise people around the world have often said that it is the brave and the bold that make mistakes, because they take chances, and they never stop learning.  What kind of a paradigm are you operating with that assumes that only idiots make mistakes?  Why would you want to live with that sort of paradigm running your life?  Wouldn’t such a worldview eventually only serve to defeat your every effort to be successful, as you gradually grow fearful of making a mistake, and therefore looking like an “idiot?” 

Fortunately for our fictional heart-broken friend, most people get over their heartaches, find someone new, and learn to give up the assumptions of a self-defeating paradigm.  People in recovery, on the other hand, have a much more difficult time finding a way out from under their negative worldviews.   Still, the process of shifting the paradigm is the same for everyone.  First, we have to see that the paradigm is there, that it has power and that we created it.  Having understood this, we can move on to the challenge of mastering the paradigm for our own benefit.