Estragon: I can’t go on like this.
Vladimir: That’s what you think.
– Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
When people keep doing something they claim not to want, the useful question may not be, “Why won’t they change?” but, “What is it still doing for them?”
That’s our topic today, but first:
Last week’s podcast was a rich conversation with Suneet Bhaat who is doing very cool things with purpose and self-awareness.
My awakening group began last week, and it’s ongoing. You can join anytime. Email me with questions or interest. If you are curious about meditation, awakening, or want your existing practice sharpened, this is for you.
Many years ago, when I first moved to Maui, I had a mouse problem.
Or at least I thought I had a mouse problem. It turned out I just had an incentivized mouse.
I kept finding evidence of mice in my place, so I went online and figured out how to make a humane mouse trap. It was wonderfully simple: a mason jar propped up on a nickel, with peanut butter smeared high enough on the inside of the jar that the mouse had to stand up to reach it.
The mouse would climb into the jar, stand up for the peanut butter, disturb the nickel, and the jar would fall down over it.
It worked perfectly.
I would find the mouse trapped under the jar, take it outside, and release it about fifty feet from my house.
Then, a day or two later, I would discover another mouse in my house. So I would set the trap again.
Again, it worked perfectly. Mouse under jar. Carry mouse outside. Release mouse. Problem solved.
Except there would soon be another mouse. This happened enough times that I finally mentioned it to a friend.
“I don’t understand what’s going on,” I told him. “I keep trapping these mice and putting them outside, but more mice keep coming back.”
He thought about it for a moment.
“It seems like that mouse has a pretty good system going on there.” He was an engineer.
I stopped.
“Wait. You think it’s the same mouse?”
“Yeah,” he said. “The mouse keeps getting peanut butter. Why wouldn’t he keep coming back?”
It had genuinely never occurred to me. I thought I had been imposing a consequence, but the mouse thought I was giving him free peanut butter.
From my perspective, the system looked like this:
Enter house. Get trapped. Get expelled. Surely the mouse would learn.
But from the mouse’s perspective, the system apparently looked more like this:
Enter house. Find delicious peanut butter in reliably the same place. Spend a little time in a jar. Receive free transportation fifty feet away. Return to house.
My trap was working exactly as designed, but my system wasn’t. This distinction is beyond mice.
We often think we’re discouraging a behavior because we have imposed something that we regard as a consequence. But people, and systems generally, don’t necessarily respond to the meaning we assign to our interventions. They respond to the actual incentives and constraints they encounter.
A parent tells a child repeatedly that a behavior is unacceptable but reliably rescues the child from real consequences.
A manager has the same conversation with an employee every few months, but nothing about the employee’s role, compensation, or responsibilities changes.
Someone repeatedly crosses a boundary in a relationship. There is an argument. There are apologies. Everyone feels terrible. Then the relationship returns to precisely the structure that existed before the boundary was crossed.
The same principle works in the other direction.
Suppose a manager wants employees to raise problems early, before they become expensive. She tells everyone, “Please bring me bad news as soon as you see it.”
But when someone does, she becomes visibly irritated, interrogates them about how it happened, and immediately adds work to their plate. Meanwhile, employees who quietly solve problems before she hears about them receive praise for being self-sufficient.
Her stated system rewards early disclosure. Her actual system rewards concealment.
If she genuinely wants problems raised early, she has to make early disclosure go well: thank people for flagging problems, distinguish identifying a problem from causing it, and make it easier to solve problems that are surfaced early.
Then the system begins teaching what she intended to teach.
We do this internally as well.
We repeat a pattern that we say we desperately want to change. The pattern hurts us. We regret it, analyze it, and promise ourselves that this time will be different.
And then we do it again.
It is tempting to conclude that we haven’t understood the lesson, and sometimes that’s true.
But sometimes we have misunderstood the system.
A behavior can produce considerable suffering and still be adaptive within the system that sustains it. It can protect us from something we are even less willing to experience. It can preserve belonging, continuity, identity, certainty, approval, or control. It can fail conspicuously in one dimension while continuing to succeed in the dimension that actually keeps it alive.
From the outside, we see the jar. From inside the system, there’s still peanut butter.
This is particularly important when we think about psychological compensation.
A compensation doesn’t necessarily disappear when it starts causing problems. It may continue for years precisely because, despite its increasingly obvious costs, it is still accomplishing something important.
And when one compensation begins to fail, we don’t necessarily allow its failure to reorganize us.
We may simply find another source of peanut butter.
We change relationships, change jobs, find another teacher, adopt another philosophy, or begin another spiritual practice. We may develop a more sophisticated explanation for why the same fundamental difficulties keep appearing.
There can be enormous amounts of activity without structural change.
Eventually, I caught the mouse again.
This time I walked it about a quarter mile away before releasing it.
The mouse never came back.
I didn’t need to punish it. I didn’t need a more frightening trap. I didn’t need the mouse to understand that it had behaved badly.
I needed to change the system enough that the mouse’s existing strategy stopped working.
The same question becomes more uncomfortable when we turn it toward ourselves.
Suppose I keep saying I want to write, but I rarely write. I conclude that I lack discipline, so I make schedules, set goals, and criticize myself when I fail to follow them.
But perhaps writing exposes me to judgment in a way that thinking about writing does not. As long as I am planning, researching, reorganizing my notes, or waiting until I feel ready, I get to experience myself as someone with something important to say without discovering what happens when I actually say it.
Suddenly the system makes more sense.
Not writing has costs. I feel frustrated and disappointed in myself. But it also has a payoff: I never have to risk finding out what other people think.
The question is no longer, “Why can’t I make myself write?”
It becomes, “What is good about not writing?”
And then change means more than trying harder. It means becoming willing to give up the protection the old system provided: to write something, finish it, and let someone read it.
The system changes when I become willing to pay the cost that the compensation was designed to help me avoid.
That experience left me with a question I return to periodically:
When a behavior keeps recurring, what if we stopped asking why the person hasn’t learned the lesson we think reality is teaching them?
What if we asked instead:
What is the system actually teaching them? Anything?
Because behavior responds to the system that exists, not the system we imagine we’ve created.
When my clients complain about a repeated pattern of their behavior that they’re not acting to change, I’ll often ask, “What’s good about this behavior you say you don’t like?”
Almost always, they’ll say, “Nothing,” and fall for my trap. To which I reply:
“If there was nothing good about it, you wouldn’t keep doing it.”
“Nothing” hides the unconscious benefit, the compensation mechanism, the deeper function the behavior performs. There’s no such thing as a “habit,” by the way. A habit is a series of choices we make unconsciously and prefer to pretend has no benefit. It always does, or else you wouldn’t do it in the first place.
This is what you must identify and be willing to lose for real change to occur.
In other words, when nothing seems to change despite all the apparent consequences, the explanation is surprisingly simple.
The mouse has a pretty good system going.