Real Magic is in The Mind 🧠
I introduce five operating domains that affect our interaction with our environment. I suggest different theories of healing map onto these operating preferences
Our brains work in mysterious ways.
One way our minds get swayed by our perceptions is with magic tricks, which get our minds to believe in illusions, and temporarily alter our sense of reality.
Although this is a simple optical illusion, the fact that our minds can perceive something as real — even when we know what we’re looking at is not actually real, can tell us a lot about how we process everyday events - from the everyday “mundane” experiences, to the traumatic.
Five Domains
The five operating domains are:
(1) Sensations, (2) Perceptions, (3) Feelings, (4) Thoughts, and (5) Behaviours
(S>P>F>T>B)
Sensations: Raw sensory data from our body’s sensory systems, such as our skin, eyes, and nose
Perceptions: Our brain interpreting raw sensory data and creating meaning from the sensations
Feelings: Embodied emotions felt by the mind and body, like sadness, jealousy, and withdrawal
Thoughts: The inner voice in our heads that tells us what we should, want, and expect to happen
Behaviours: The things we do or don’t do — the way we interact with the environment around us
Whether we are conscious or unconscious of it, we are always interacting with our environment. We process raw sensory input and react to it in a near instantaneous manner. This is what keeps us ultimately safe and secure from potential threats and dangers in the world, and is what enables us to be conscious beings.
Sensations
Sensations are the raw sensory input that your body automatically picks up. Our primary senses include vision (eyes), sound (ears), smell (nose), touch (skin), and taste (tongue).
From the perspective of our brains, we are always taking in environmental signals, near instantaneously and automatically. Most signals are sent to the brain for processing. However, for some signals, our bodies have natural reflexes that respond to an environmental stimuli, without the brain needing to receive a signal and send back a response.
Reflexes are involuntary, automatic actions that your body does in response to something — without you even having to think about it. When hit in the right place, you don't decide to kick your leg, it just kicks. There are many types of reflexes and every healthy person has them. In fact, we're born with most of them.
Reflexes can also be built over time. For example, firefighters can learn to quickly respond to high-stress situations, and their bodies build reflexes to help them respond swiftly in life-or-death situations.
Perceptions
Environmental signals are picked up from our senses, and sent from the body to the brain, to be interpreted. This process is what allows raw sensory input to be experienced as sound, sight, and smell. The ability to perceive and interact with our environment is generally agreed as a hallmark trait of human consciousness.
Near instantaneously, these electrical signals are sent from your sensory receptors (eyes, ears, nose, skin) to your brain, where your brain and body interpret these signals, generating a perception of the world around us.
If for some reason our senses happen to work and our perceptive abilities stop operating, our body would still pick up sensory information from our eyes, ears, and skin to see, hear, and feel things. However, we technically would not be able to interact with our environment and respond to these cues. The body is picking up signals, but the brain is unable to interpret, respond, or make meaning from these signals.
While I’m not a medical expert, its possible that in certain stages of comas, one might technically be alive — they are breathing, their senses are working, and some signals are entering the brain, but the person is unable to interpret or respond to the signals and cues. Meaning, they remain in a vegetative, semi-conscious state. Not dead, but not “alive”.
Feelings
Even as a therapist, I admit that feelings are seemingly weird, complex, and don’t always make sense. There’s a reason why sometimes people will say we have a “logical side” and an “illogical side” — feelings are largely irrational and illogical, but they tell us something very important about how we perceive the world around us in any given moment, and what is going on inside the mind and body.
I like to think of feelings as embodied states — in which the mind and the body are congruently reacting to the world in a very strong, specific way. When we feel curious, how is it different from when we feel skeptical? How do those feelings differ from feeling provoked, or feeling rushed?
Take a minute to think about the last time you felt these feelings - what was going on with your body? Were you clenching your fists? Was your face red? Did your heart-rate change? Tightness in your shoulders? How was your breathing? Were there other secondary emotions that followed the initial emotional response, like guilt, or shame? Were you too overwhelmed to even remember what was going on?
Feelings are the combined experiences of the mind, enacted through the body. Looking at the feelings wheel, the further out we go from the centre of the wheel, the more specific the feeling word/emotional descriptor gets. Meaning, the more specific language we can use to more accurately describe our physiological states of arousal.
As you look through these different emotional states, especially the negative emotions (which is most of the wheel), you can think for yourself, how you might feel your own negative emotions. Notice how the same emotion can be expressed so differently by others, like friends or family members.
The felt sense in our body, mind, and how we react to our feelings, is very unique to who we are, our past experiences, and our unique inner patterns of reacting, regulating, and emotionally expressing ourselves.
Importantly, we can only feel and react if we perceive something. We can only perceive something if our senses can pick it up.
Thus, our sensations and perceptions are precursors to how we feel. We need to sense and perceive, before we can emotionally respond to something.
Sensations lead to perceptions, which lead to feelings. Subjective, subjective, subjective. No two people experience the same event the exact same way, and it doesn’t even matter if what you sense, perceive, or feel is real or not.
It’s the illusion that it is real — and that makes it real to you, in the moment. Just like a magic trick.
Even if you watch a movie with a friend, you both walk away from the experience with your own different interpretations, memories, favourite lines, jokes, and perception of the movie as a whole. Movies are carefully crafted experiences. Even a consistent stimuli like a movie can evoke different emotions and thoughts in different people.
This chain of events from sensations>perceptions>feelings is almost automatic, with human reaction times being in the milliseconds (1/1,000th of a second).
Thoughts
Our thoughts can come from our interpretation of our feelings/emotions.
If you’re feeling paranoid, your thoughts might be about how you might be in danger, where you can get to safety, and who might be out to get you.
If you’re feeling happy, your thoughts might drift towards positive memories in the past, or you could be daydreaming about an event you’re looking forward to, coming up in the near future.
If we were robots, our thoughts would probably be very logical, not influenced by our emotions, and our thought processes would be more linear and predictable. Since we’re complex bags of human flesh with our own desires, personalities, and needs, our feelings and emotional states can heavily influence the content of our thoughts.
Behaviours
When we have thoughts, it is ultimately an inner narrative or interpretation that our mind is telling itself. If we believe our thoughts, our thoughts will dictate our actions, and that might cause us to do more or less of something.
Ultimately, we can have a million different thoughts and ideas about making some kind of change in our lives, or acting a certain way. Maybe you’ve been wanting to build a workout routine and get back into shape, but the thought remains a thought if there is no behaviour or action springing from the thought. Maybe the thought is very negative, or an underlying feeling is dictating the negative thoughts in the first place, affecting your behaviour.
It’s not possible to act out a behaviour without first consciously thinking about it — although there are some exceptions. For example, reflexes are in the domain of sensations, since they are automatic (S>B, skipping the perceptions, feelings, and thoughts stages). Reflexive responses don’t enter the thoughts domain at the moment of the event - but of course you can have a feeling or thoughts about the reflexive movement, after it happens.
You could also be acting out during your sleep, subconsciously, while you experience a vivid dream or nightmare, without consciously “thinking” about your behaviours and actions (P>F>B, skipping thoughts).
(1) Sensations, (2) Perceptions, (3) Feelings, (4) Thoughts, and (5) Behaviours
Working backwards…
-We think before we act (except situations like reflexes and sleep)
-Feelings are embodied states, so we experience them before we can think about, and interpret them
-We can only respond to emotions/feelings if we can perceive
-We can only perceive something that our senses pick up from our environment
Implications for Healing
While I laid out the chain of command in a linear fashion:
Sensations » Perceptions » Feelings » Thoughts » Behaviours
(S>P>F>T>B)
The reality is that each of these operating domains can have an influence on each other. However, we don’t get to the (F>T>P) stages without the (S>P). You can’t feel, think, or act on something that your body and mind aren’t sensing and perceiving, in the first place.
If you feel bad and have negative thoughts about yourself, then you might start behaving in ways where you are self-isolating and doing less and less in your daily life. By reducing your behaviours, you might further think worse about your life and situation, which might make you feel worse, and further propagate the cycle towards something that might describe depression.
We can target one of these domains (say, thoughts), and focus on re-structuring thought patterns and identifying automatic negative thoughts. By doing-so, there can hopefully be rippling positive change in the other domains (maybe you’ll feel better or you’re able to do what you would like to do, by learning to manage intrusive, negative thoughts).
Healing is non-linear, after all. What works for one person, might not work for another person, and working on one domain, might lead to spillover positive effects and change in the other domains.
Mapping Healing
I’ve argued before that the contextual model of healing can best explain why there is no one-size-fits-all for therapy and that all theories and interventions of healing are mostly equivalent. Healing (with a trusted professional) works as long as the core ingredients for healing are in place:
1. Healing is done in a culturally approved healing setting, such as a counselling office or temple
2. There is a trusting and confiding relationship with the healer, such as a therapeutic alliance with a counsellor or emotional attachment to a spiritual healer
3. There is a therapeutic rationale and conceptual framework that provides an explanation for the individual’s presenting complaint, and justification for the efficacy of the proposed methods. This proposed explanation must be plausible within the broader cultural context and within the individual’s belief structure
4. The proposed rituals/procedures (i.e., proposed mechanisms of change) logically flow from the therapeutic rationale, such as specific psychotherapy procedures, religious rituals, or yoga practices. The specific counselling and psychotherapy techniques (or indigenous healing rituals) are not as important as the engagement of the individual and the healer through shared understanding and affective mutuality
Everyone has different problems (presenting issues), different operating systems (S>P>F>T>B), and different approaches to solving their problems (working with a healer, or doing their own healing in ways that work for them).
We can look at the contextual model and recognize that some people might naturally work better with different therapeutic modalities, which might target one or more of these five different operators (S>P>F>T>B).
If true, this might be a pretty huge deal.
If individuals and potential clients know that they are, for example, more cognitive in their approach (stuck in their head, having a lot of negative self-talk, like to think through their problems), they might benefit more from interventions that target the Thoughts domain, over another client who wants to better understand their emotional parts and learn to self-regulate, who might benefit from therapy work in the Emotions domain.
However in real-world situations, people are complicated. We can all benefit from processing and bringing awareness to all of these different operating domains through which we interact with the world around us, even if we might have “our favourites” (preferred ways of coping/understanding the world around us).
Who knows — the highly cognitive person might be under-serving their emotional side, rationalizing their way out of emotions. Perhaps the client might benefit from working on a domain outside of their preferred domain, in the first place.
Generally, I believe interventions should incorporate some psycho-education to help clients bring awareness while helping them notice how these different domains are interrelated and affect one-another, especially as they pertain to the unique presenting problems and issues in the person’s life.
For fun, here’s some examples of Western therapeutic interventions, and how they might map out on these five operating domains (S>P>F>T>B):
Art Therapy (P, F, B)
Music Therapy (P, F, T, B)
Narrative Therapy (P, F, T)
Emotion-Focused Therapy (P, F)
Humanistic Psychotherapy (S, P, F)
Psychodynamic Psychotherapy (P, F, T)
Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy (F, T, B)
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) (S, P, F)
Hardcore theorists likely disagree or will argue about the categorization of the above interventions and theories of healing. I’m simplifying here and using these examples to illustrate how different interventions and their underlying theories tend to root themselves in a mix of one or more of the above operating domains. You can imagine every therapy, theory of healing, or healing practice, falls somewhere in the five operating domains.
By bringing awareness to our sensations, perceptions, feelings, thoughts, and behaviours, we can begin to better understand the parts of us that feel stuck, overwhelmed, under-appreciated, or unacknowledged. In working with a trusted healer, friend, or professional, we can build the space to explore and contemplate the different ways in which our operating systems (and its domains) can affect our interactions with our environments in our day-to-day lives.
This increased awareness can better help us identify our problems, work towards solutions, express our feelings, learn to self-regulate our emotional responses, and integrate our experiences across our five domains. In doing so, we can approach recognizing the fullness and complexity of the embodied human experience, and the uniqueness of individual suffering.
Amazing Post!! it really shows how people with different experiences , subconscious mind react according to their feelings..
( as illusion)