For those of you who have followed my Instagram for a while, you might know that I own a 2-year-old golden retriever called Heidi. Heidi can be the sweetest girl in the world. Below is a photo of her and I in our first few days together.
Jekyll becomes Hyde.
However, perhaps to your disbelief, Heidi has an alter ego. Though it often seems that there is no rhyme nor reason behind her turn, something darker that has been lurking beneath her quite charming exterior emerges That ‘something', more specifically, is a little akin to a fluffy, blonde, four-legged, T-Rex with the sensory abilities of a mole, the recall of a badger and occupation of a hoover. In this phase, she also has a Shrek-like affection for swamps that is otherwise very absent. I have taken the time to create a rather nice collage to demonstrate this should you not believe me. See below.
Am I not concerned that my dog frequently becomes a wild and untameable hellhound?
No! The irregularity of her behaviour is rather thrilling!! Who knows what you're going to get one day from the next!
(I’ve been informed that most golden retrievers adolescents sporadically transfigure in this way until they reach maturity. So, it seems, Heidi is no anomaly.)
When this 'maturity' quite is is my real concern.
Why?
Well, nobody on earth seems to know.
Some dog trainers say 2. (They were wrong!!!).
Some estimate a rather vague 4-8.
Many local golden retriever owners, however, say never.
Anyway, Han, what's with the blog about your dog?
I'm glad you finally asked. Let me explain.
The reason I am writing about Heidi is that, in many ways, I believe that there are huge parallels between the state of being in quasi-recovery & Heidi’s training.
Since we bought Heidi home in June 2021, she has had 3 main mums (my mum, my sister and me). Due to having 3 ‘masters’ (I feel like calling us 'mistresses' would make us sound like Heidi’s back alley side-chicks), Heidi's training has been littered with inconsistency. Or, put another way, as has been learning, she’s been receiving very mixed messaging on what is right and what is wrong.
I’ll give you a short example.
Heidi very much enjoys sitting on the sofa. This is something she is not permitted to do.
Her strategy - to take things slow - involves a paw-by-paw approach. No eye contact is made all the while.
On these occasions when she tries to creep up onto one of the sofas, my response is mixed. Sometimes I nudge her off, sometimes I laugh and welcome her on. My sister, meanwhile, actively invites her up! My mum and dad on the other hand, usher her off straight away. In this way, Heidi is getting some permission, some rejection.
This mixed messaging on permissions is exactly why her training links so closely with quasi-recovery. For in the state of quasi-recovery, we are trying to heal our brain by retraining it out of disordered actions, whilst continuing to tolerate those same disordered behaviours. One minute we are showing our brain that something is safe and ok through our behaviour, and the next moment our behaviours are very much saying otherwise.
Put another way, when we are trying to ‘do’ recovery whilst also appeasing the eating disorder, jumbled messaging is precisely what we are providing our brains.
Here's an example to show this type of thing in action:
Rewiring a fear of fat
When I was in recovery, I was trying to rewire my belief that fats, as a macronutrient group, were safe and nothing to be concerned about. To do so, I began adding grated cheese to my pasta every time we had it. Observably and outwardly, that was fantastic!
Yet, several months later, after doing this each week, I still feared fats. And on reflection now, it's no bloody surprise! Away from pasta night, almost all of my communication was suggesting to my brain that fats should be avoided. I opted for poached eggs, rather than scrambled or fried. I asked for naked feta salads, to ensure them I could dress them (scantly) myself. I ordered burgers without cheese or caramelised onions. I picked out some hazelnuts from my nutty muesli. I spread peanut butter as though I was working my way through the last jar on earth. If my Weetabix had hoovered up the last of my (low-fat) plant milk, I'd eat them dry as sawdust before I considered to just splash over the milk used by my family.
Honestly, what on earth did I expect my brain to think after having been sent such contrasting messages???
Irrespective of the partial permission with the grated cheese, the eggs, the feta, the burger (and so on), there were also very firm statements within my daily behaviours that said directly otherwise. It is these inconsistent messages that resulted in my lack of neural rewiring. Simply put: The brain cannot learn when it is observing behaviours with directly contrasting permissions.
Neural rewiring
The vast majority of you reading this will know exactly what neural rewiring is. But I want to write out a quick summary just to really demonstrate how essential consistent messaging is. We’ll use the age-old analogy of neural pathways being like hiking trails.
When you first think of a thought, it is like walking across high grass. It isn’t automatic or easy or familiar. When you keep repeating that thought, the path is further worn and established. As you continue repeating that thought with supporting behaviours, you will eventually be left with a well-trodden route. Because of how the brain is constructed and functions, with axons, dendrites and synapses, the more we repeat something, the deeper the path is. This means that in time, it becomes easy for repeated thoughts to go through the brain without meeting resistance.
Changing thoughts, beliefs and values, then, must involve consciously forcing new channels of thinking down different pathways. As we do this over and over again, the new pathway becomes deeper and deeper. As the old pathway gets less use, like an old footpath trail that is no longer walked, the neural pathway begins to ‘grow over’. That's where the expression: “neurons that fire together wire together” comes in: When a thought is repeated over and over, the neural components in your brain literally wire themselves together, strengthening that way of thinking. However, what is really key here, is that the new thought cannot consistently be contended with by directly opposing thoughts and behaviours. If it is, the new pathways will not establish themselves and the old ones will not die out.
Spaced repetition is also an important concept too. This is the idea that one must repeat exactly what you are trying to retain over a period of time with gaps in between. Because neural rewiring involves actual physical changes in the brain, time is required between repetitions to build the pathways.
Anyway, all of this demonstrates that there are 3 key ingredients for neural rewiring: intentional repetition, consistency in messaging and time. If you feel as though your attitudes, values and thoughts aren’t changing, I invite you to really reflect on which of these ingredients is missing. Perhaps the following questions will help you start that reflection:
1. Have you repeated the behaviours enough?
2. Is there consistency in your messaging? E.g., Are all of your behaviours throughout the day communicating the same concepts to your brain?
3. Have you been showing your brain the right things for enough days and weeks? E.g., are you being patient enough since starting the change to allow time for the physical changes to happen inside your brain?
If no to any of these, there lies your answer.
Neural rewiring is no magic trick. It is a biological process.
If it isn't happening, get brutally honest with yourself. Where are you side-stepping? What mixed messaging are you giving?
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