The House Plant Analogy
Your brain and coping.
When people come to therapy, they are usually hoping to improve on a particular issue, or address an unsustainable way of coping.
This is because we all develop what I would call ‘default coping’ strategies. These strategies are learnt by observing others do it, or by us finding that they help to reduce stress, anxiety, or worry.
Default coping is any form of dysfunctional use of one of the following behaviours:
Under/over eating
Over exercising
Drinking alcohol or using drugs
Having sex
Spending money
Getting angry and lashing out
Isolating or avoiding
Self-harm
The reason I refer to these as ‘default’ coping is because I am careful not to shame or blame the use of these behaviours. They developed to keep us safe, to cope when nothing else worked.
Perhaps it was normalised by those who raised us. It is important to recognise what they once offered us, and how they may no longer be serving us.
However, behaviour change can be difficult. Perhaps the most important step for people is recognising a behaviour is destructive, or no longer helpful. Holding this awareness doesn’t necessarily lead to an ease in behaviour change. It is often much harder than having a good intention to improve your coping.
And this is because of how the neural pathways in our brain develop.
Neural Pathways explained:
A neural pathway is a series of connected neurons that send signals from one part of the brain, to another.
An example of a neural pathway is if a baby smiles, and are rewarded with a smile in return, or a cuddle; they learn this behaviour generates a result. The more this behaviour is practiced, the more prominent the neural pathway becomes.
Similarly, if a child touched a hot kettle, they learn this is painful, and a neural pathway forms that establishes an associative learning experience.
We already have billions of neural pathways established as adults, some of which is how we react in response to certain contexts or triggers.
Neural pathways are essential, however not all of them are beneficial. Some can even become unhelpful habits. For example, the more one hits the snooze button, the more likely they are the continue hitting the snooze button and struggle to get out of bed on time.
The House Plant Analogy:
To better understand neural pathways, I’d like to introduce an analogy I pulled out of my arse one day. It was group therapy in a psychiatric clinic, everyone was pretty zonked out on their medication and here I was attempting to educate on neuropsychology. But this analogy seemed to stick.
Imagine as a young person you’re given a small plant. You don’t know what it is, but you water it and tend for it. You become quite habituated to caring for this plant, moving it around the room to find the right light. After some time you witness it’s growth. But as you do, you realise it’s not a pretty house plant, it’s a weed. And not the fun kind.
It starts to grow rapidly, and you find yourself routinely watering it. One day you decide you don’t want this weed to grow and more, that it’s not longer the right kind of plant for you. This is your ‘default coping’ strategy neural pathway.
You go to therapy, and your therapist suggests a new house plant. It’s small, and weak in comparison to your weed. This represents your new and healthy coping skill.
You take it home but find it hard to commit to it’s nurturance and find yourself watering the weed, because it’s already so big, strong, and reliable. This is relapsing into old default coping.
However, after some time and practice, your new houseplant starts to grow. And as you witness it’s progress, you find yourself being able to resist the urge to water the weed. The weed starts to shrivel, and slowly die.
Much like a plant, neural pathways never fully disappear once established. So if you are to water the weed again, it will revive. For example, if you’re under extreme stress, or a particularly hard trigger arises, you may resort back to the default coping because it’s still a well established behaviour even if you haven’t used it for a while.
Our strength to establish healthier forms of coping come from our ability to be patient, and nurture our new skills, until they become as reliable, and strong as our default coping.
