What is Mindsight?

Goleman: You know, in my model of emotional intelligence there are four domains. The first and the most fundamental is self-awareness, which is Mindsight into your own mind. The second is using it to manage your emotional world or inner world well. The third is empathy, or in your terms – Mindsight for someone else. Then the fourth is putting that all together in effective relationships. So it’s interesting to me to see that we’re talking about the same territory here from slightly different angles.

Siegel: Absolutely. And the really exciting thing is that its never too late to develop Mindsight. I work with people as old as in their nineties, and they can learn this skill of Mindsight.

Goleman: Well, what does it look like? Can you give an example of someone learning it?

Siegel: Sure. Well, this one particular person is a woman in her nineties, grew up in a home where no one really recognized her emotions, they never addressed them. They didn’t have what’s called mental language, or language that talked about the mind.

Goleman: When you say mental language, what kind of words are those?

Siegel: Well, for example: thoughts, feelings, attitudes, intentions. What are you believing? What are your hopes? What are your dreams? Those are all words that reflect the mind. So mental language means, does a family actually talk about the mind. A term I use is reflective dialogs. Do they get into a dialog with their children that reflects on the internal nature of our lives?

Goleman: Dan, what would such a dialog sound like?

Siegel: Well, it would be something like this, this ninety-year-old woman, let’s talk about her. If she had had this as a child, this is what it would have been like, and this is actually what I said to her in our sessions. It would have been something like: You’re really hoping to be in the school play and I hope that your audition works out. She comes home, she’s very sad because she didn’t make it in the audition.

Goleman: This is something that happened to her?

Siegel: This is actually something that happened to her, and a family with Mindsight would say, "You’re really sad. How did the audition go?" And she would say, "Oh, I didn’t get it." And they could say, "I get it… it’s disappointing because you were really hoping to get the part and you didn’t get it, and let’s talk about what you can do next time, or let’s do something with your sadness." Instead, in her family, she would come home sad and she would be punished for not being more upbeat. She would be given chores to do because she was crying and they would say, “Stop crying.” So, everything was focused on behavior. Now what’s interesting is that what we do as parents to focus the mind of our child on certain things like behavior verses mind-plus-behavior can determine the kind of perception that a child develops. So in her case, when I saw her for the first time in therapy as a ninety-one-year-old, she really didn’t have much vocabulary of the mind. She was a really good person, focused on behaviors, had accomplished certain behavioral things, had raised her children, and interacts with her grandchildren about their behaviors so its not like she’s just not social, but she’s only focused on the behavioral side of reality, the physical side of reality, not the mental side of reality. So that’s what teaching her required. In our sessions together I needed to talk to her about her mind. What’s interesting is that we’re then entering the whole world of subjective experience, which raises lots of fascinating points of view about what’s the relationship between one’s inner world and what’s going on in the outer world. How is the mind related to the brain? All these things, which actually came up in our sessions.

I can tell you by the end of the year of therapy, she had developed an awareness of her body that she didn’t have before. That is, the subjective sensations inside. She developed a vocabulary of mental language to actually put words to her inner world, which is actually a fundamental part of something called mindfulness. This ability to label and describe in words the inner life of your own mind. She really developed this at ninety-one-years of age.

Goleman: That’s astounding. I want to pick up on something you said that when she came home sad because she didn’t get in the play, that she was punished for feeling sad. One point I make in Emotional Intelligence is that emotions come to us from the part of the brain that is beyond our self-control, initially. We can’t determine how we’re going to feel in any given moment. What we’re going to feel, how strongly it will be, how powerfully we will be in its grip. Our choice point only comes after, but it sounds to me that she wasn’t given a choice point but simply punished for having had the emotion in the first place, which is a no-win situation for any child.

Siegel: That’s absolutely true. If you follow what you’re saying Dan, you can come up with this really intriguing insight from therapy and also combining that with the science of attachment. Which is to say what happened to her brain. The lower structures of the brain were having emotions, but parentally she was receiving the message, don’t have those feelings. One proposal you can make is that the higher parts of the brain, especially the left side of the higher part of the brain called the cortex, actually becomes incredibly dominant in controlling the other processes that go on inside the brain. Then when you see this person as a teenager or as an adult or as a ninety-one-year-old, what you find is an incredible activity of this logical, linear, language-based system and not much access to things like bodily sensation, affect or feelings in oneself, or being able to recognize those feelings in others.

Goleman: It suggests to me something that I wish I clarified when I proposed a model of emotional intelligence: that self-awareness and self-management need to be in balance. Self-management does not mean suppression. You’re describing suppression, and many of us have been raised in ways where we were told to focus on squelching emotion and being in our minds but not in our feelings. To be healthy, self-awareness must also entail the ability to experience the emotion fully, not just manage it.

Siegel: Absolutely. That’s where the whole idea of being receptive to your own internal experience comes in. The idea of – how do we help children in the next generation be reflective to whatever arises inside of themselves: emotions, bodily sensations, thoughts, feelings. It doesn’t mean you act on those feelings or act on the impulse, but you allow them to be there in an open and receptive manner.

Goleman: You mention that a part of the brain that was affected by how this ninety-one-year-old had been spoken to, had been treated, as a kid, and here at ninety-one she’s still dealing with the same pattern. That suggests powerfully that what happens to us in childhood can shape us lifelong, and that this has a neural basis.

Siegel: Yes, I would say that’s true. To tie those two together from the point we were talking about just a moment ago on making sense: in her case, as in lots of people’s situations, when you have not made sense of what’s happened to you, you just carry out those patterns of learning that are ingrained in the neural connections in the brain.

Goleman: Like what?

Siegel: Well, in her case for example, the pattern would be, I will not be in touch with my body, I will not be in touch with my emotion, because I have learned those get me into trouble. I will just be a logical, linear, language-based thinker.

Goleman: But, of course, she did not think this consciously.

Siegel: No.

Goleman: She learned it implicitly

Siegel: Implicitly.

Goleman: And that was her silent prescription for the kind of person she should be.

Siegel: That’s the way she had to adapt, and be that kind of person.

Goleman: But, what you’re saying is that it's not just that you have this implicit idea, but that somehow your brain is shaped along those very lines.