You Are
You Are
“You are what you habitually do.” Aristotle said that twenty-three centuries ago. What he didn’t say was, “You are what you think you are.” Or, “You are what you say you are.” He didn’t mention the unconscious or anything like that. The idea is eminently practical. Simple and practical. If you want to know what you can expect from a person, study what the person habitually does. You may think about why that person does what does. You may speculate on how he came to have those habits. You may theorize about his attachment style, his neurology, his eneagram number, his horoscope and all of that may help. Still, the most reliable predictor of what he’s going to do is what he always does, in short, his habits.
Animals cannot describe themselves to us. We have to describe them by talking about their behavior. Cows, birds, fish, lions, spiders, we know by what they habitually do: eats grass, flies, swims. hunts, is active at night. To understand such creatures, we have to talk about what they do. They cannot offer us their stories, their narratives. Most humans, on the other hand, are easily prompted to tell us who they are and will have the words to do so. Some will have as many words but not know themselves well enough to give us the true story. There’s the you that you say you are and then there’s your habits. The difference was succinctly captured by Thomas Carlyle, “A person usually has two reasons for doing something: a good reason and the real reason.”
The interesting question that remains is: Is the person who provides a good reason, actually aware of the real reason? I would answer the question this way: If he does, he’s deceiving us. If he doesn’t, he’s deceiving himself. For me, the real “juice” is in the second part, our not really knowing who we are or why we do what we do or sometimes even that we’re doing it. Habits are quite often things we’re doing without knowing that we’re doing them. Our brains are built that way. The general topic is “automaticity” and it’s a very popular idea these days.[1] To quote one of the first paper referred to in the footnotes: “automatic processing does not take up attentional resources.” Being habitual, that is automatic, doesn’t always mean self-deception. Sometimes it does. More frequently it is simply conserving “attentional resources”. Or as Timothy D. Wilson puts it, to “conserve consciousness”.[2]
When I begin to work with a client, I listen politely. I build trust and a good working relationship I have developed habits that serve this task. I do it almost completely automatically. I’m using my consciousness to look for the client’s habits. Wilhelm Reich brought the focus of his work to the bodily expression of what he called “character patterns”. He looked at posture and structure and worked physically with his patients to break down the physical tensions that were the embodiments of the character patterns. Whole schools of “body psychotherapy” followed. He also pointed out that the client’s history is “written in the body”. He said, it is how he shakes your hand, how he moves and sits and stands. The client’s history is written in his behaviors, his habitual behaviors. In what he habitually does.
It takes a bit of study and a lot of practice to be good at “reading” those habitual behaviors.[3] I no longer use or teach Reich’s “character theory. I look at habits the same spirit — as bodily expressions of the self — but in a more general way. I look (and listen) for all kinds of habits, all kinds of “qualities” that describe the client and I call these, “indicators”. I’ve talked and written quite a bit about them. You can find it on my website, http://www.hakomi.com.
[1] A search of these websites will provide ample information on the concept of automaticity. http://www.learninginfo.org/automaticity.htm, http://jackhdavid.thehouseofdavid.com/papers/brain.html, and http://bargh.socialpsychology.org/
[2] Wilson, T., Strangers to Ourselves. pg. 5 See also The Illusion of Conscious Will by Daniel Wegner.
[3] My old friend Hector Prestera and I wrote a book about reading bodies. Kurtz, Ron and Prestera, Hector (1984) The Body Reveals: How to Read Your Own Body. NY: Harpercollins