Dr. Rick Hanson on Taking in the Good
If you grew up the way I did, this kind of experience matters a great deal. It can work against all that old material tied to feeling uncared for, left out, unseen, unwanted, not valued. When you hold a positive experience and a negative one in awareness at the same time, something useful happens. Neurons that fire together wire together, so the positive begins to associate with the negative, slowly draining it of charge and taking its place.
That fourth step is optional, for two reasons. You don't strictly need it to lay down beneficial experiences in your nervous system, and it asks a bit more of you. The first three steps, which I call have, enrich and absorb, mostly ask you to rest attention on something that feels good. The trouble is that bringing up negative material can hijack us. So the negative has to stay small, kept off to the side. When you can manage that, the linking step, the fourth part of HEAL, becomes genuinely powerful.
I want to be clear that I did not come up with this. It's a natural process. Every one of us already knows how to have an experience and enjoy it. We just rarely do it on purpose, and when the chance arrives, we often do it clumsily rather than well. We also tend not to go hunting for the particular antidote experiences, the ones that can fill a hole in the heart left by the absence of good, or that act as a soothing balm for painful material rooted in the presence of bad.
Either way, the linking step carries a lot of weight. I didn't invent that one either. It runs quietly through a great deal of therapy and many other routes of growth and healing. My broader sense, though, is that across the whole field of mental health, and I mean that in the widest way, taking in mindfulness training, human potential, transformation and self-actualization, and spirituality too, most people, me very much included in years past, have concentrated on activating helpful states: good thoughts, perspectives, inspirations, emotions, sensations and the rest. What we've skipped over is installation, and that's the part that decides whether a beneficial experience lasts at all.
Erik: That's great, Rick. I'm curious how practices like meditation and breathing fit into this process.
Dr. Hanson: Practice is work. And even when someone isn't deliberately setting out to take in the good, which is my informal name for what we're really describing, positive neuroplasticity, experiences still shape us. The ones that do tend to engage, whether we notice it or not, one or more of six basic factors that steepen the learning curve.