Unwinding Original Spin

A case study in removing shame

Yesterday I had a kind of last-minute coaching call. The person wanted my help with a kind of trick that Malcolm Ocean and I have called “unwinding Spin”. It’s sort of a shame removal process.

The coaching session was a particularly clear snapshot of how the trick works. I want to try anonymizing the example and use it to lay out how to get a special kind of relief here.

“I messed up because I’m stupid”

Photo by Jordan Whitfield on Unsplash

The guy in question was trying to practice piano. He’d sometimes hit a wrong note. And then he’d get this sharp jab of pain about how “God, I’m so stupid, I keep making these screw-ups!”

I think there are actually two different pains going on here:

1. There’s the pain of the error. It’s a simple thing: he wanted to hit a certain note, and that didn’t happen. The pain here is a correct signal that there’s something for him to attend to and to learn. It’s what feedback feels like.

2. Then there’s the pain of twisting the error into meaning something about him. Instead of “Oh, I missed a note, I guess there’s something to adjust there” it’s “I’m such a screw-up” or “I’m an idiot.”

Malcolm and I have been referring to that second twist as “Original Spin”. It’s a multi-layered name. In part it’s meant to be a pun on “Original Sin”. The relevant part here is that it kind of spins your discernment around so that instead of serving you, your discernment attacks you.

The core way Spin twists perception is by getting you to think something like “There’s a problem because there’s something wrong with me.” It looks for an essential quality (like “I’m stupid” or “I always mess things like this up”) and then suggests that the simple error occurred because of this essential quality. The implication being that you’ll keep having this problem if you don’t change your essential nature somehow.

So in this case, this fellow would have to stop being “stupid” in order to stop messing up piano notes. Since it’s unclear how to do that, each error becomes a reminder that he’s “stupid” (and possibly that he can’t learn).

Rename the problem without you

A simple way to fix this is to redescribe the problem under one constraint: you cannot be part of the problem. You can have a problem, but you cannot be the problem.

So for instance, here the fellow’s issue was that his finger hit the wrong key. That’s simple. It’s not the outcome he wants, but that’s all there is to it. No need for angst. Just “Oh, that’s not what I wanted. How can I make what I want happen next time?”

Maybe there’s actually some content to the “I’m stupid” thing. Like maybe he has some tendency to forget to adjust his finger at that point in the musical piece he’s working on. Maybe that’s even something he tends to forget in general. But if so, that’s a tendency. It’s a limitation to his ability to remember in a useful way while playing a piece. So that becomes a simple parameter for solving the problem: “Okay, I keep meaning to adjust how my finger moves at that point, but I keep forgetting. Whatever in me is responsible for remembering at that moment isn’t doing an adequate job. How can I play that part correctly given that the current strategy hasn’t been working?”

Notice that there’s a simplicity here. There are no emotional knots. No “How do I deal with being such a screw-up?” No “How do I account for being so incompetent?” It’s very simple: “I don’t seem to have this capacity available. How do I solve the problem at hand given this limitation I’m working with?”

When Malcolm and I talk about “unwinding Spin”, we’re referring to this kind of reframe that lands on emotional simplicity. The situation might suck, and it might even suck a lot, but that’s just because some problems are real and meaningful. After unwinding Spin, there’s no extra impression that the situation sucks as a result of there being something wrong with you.

Spin served a purpose once

Lots of people have an urge to fight back against unwinding Spin.

That might be deeply wise. It might be that this trick is actually unhealthy in some way neither I nor Malcolm have pinned down.

But in most cases, I think it’s basically a natural echo of the reason why so many of us started doing Original Spin in the first place.

This fellow, for instance, felt uneasy about releasing himself from the shame of having messed up on the piano. As he described it, he might become this big confident person if he weren’t making himself a bit small with this shame, and being that big and confident seemed scary to him.

There might be something real to that perception. There might be a real problem in his life if here were confident. But my guess (which I told him) was that he’s remembering what it was like to be a child.

As far as I can tell, Original Spin arises because it was in fact an effective strategy for dealing with some kind of social problem in our earliest environment. I talk about a version of this in The Hostile Telepaths Problem. The issue is that sometimes our nature as learning beings was kind of overwhelming to some of the adults taking care of us. So we had to find ways of putting blockages in how we learn so that we could stay in sync with our caregivers.

Sometimes there’s something similar going on as adults. Someone who’s in an abusive relationship might make their situation worse if they suddenly drop shame and aren’t doubting themselves anymore.

But in most cases, Spin is just a habit. And unwinding it requires encountering something like the original fear that caused the Spin to happen in the first place.

The guy I coached yesterday, for instance, probably figured out as a child that self-condemnation helped him avoid some kind of problem with his parents. I don’t know what that might have been; we didn’t talk about it. But the point is that I’m guessing there was something like that going on. Something like the parents needing him as a toddler to “behave” himself, but that’s too developmentally advanced for a toddler to actually do, so he had to mimic “behaving” by getting really nervous about whether he was doing everything right. Slowing down his learning process so that he could stay in sync with his mom & dad (or whoever his caretakers were).

If that’s the case, then when he starts unwinding Spin, he’s going to feel some of the same fear that caused him to Spin in the first place. Why? Because Spin was solving a (social caretaker) problem before, and now by breaking it down he’s again scared of the original (social caretaker) problem.

The thing is, he can’t automatically tell the difference between (a) his fear being a holdover from when he was a kid versus (b) his fear being an accurate reflection of a current problem he has that Spin is solving.

Which means it’s time to do science.

Treat unwinding Spin as an experiment

When there’s resistance to unwinding Spin, I think it’s helpful to do a particular process:

1. First check to see whether you can afford to pay the cost if the fear is correct. For instance, some people might fear that they won’t learn to play the piano correctly if they don’t make themselves notice that they’re stupidly screwing up the notes. (That’s said with Spin, to be clear!) So the question becomes: “Can I afford to learn nothing for a little while as I experiment with unwinding this Spin?” The answer might be no!

2. If the answer is “Yes, I can afford the cost of this experiment going badly”, then you try unwinding Spin as an experiment and see what happens. (Which is to say, you do the reframe so that you have a problem instead of being a problem, until the emotional simplicity clicks into place.) You’re not trying to unwind Spin forever here. You’re just trying it for a little bit, to see what happens.

3. As the results of unwinding Spin come in, you check: what happened? How does it compare to what usually happens under Spin? For instance, if you try practicing at the piano for a bit and you unwind Spin (as an experiment) while doing it, and if you were worried about not learning as a result of not beating yourself up… then how well or poorly did you learn? Honestly check!

Key to this process is that you’re not trying to unwind Spin forever. You’re just noticing what’s true when you try doing it for a little while.

And it’s also important that you’re doing this in dialogue with the fear. This dialogue lets the fear update in contact with the truth. The shift isn’t cognitive. It’s emotional. You’re showing the scared part of you what’s true about the situation in which it’s calling on Spin.

Worth noting, it’s possible (I think highly unlikely, but possible) that you actually weren’t scared enough. That has to be a possible outcome! The point here isn’t to bludgeon your fears into submission. It’s to unravel patterns of shame by noticing where they don’t serve you anymore. That works only if you’re willing to discover that they still do serve you! You have to be willing to look at the truth of reality, whatever it might be.

It’s just that as far as I can tell, in most cases adults simply don’t need Spin. Original Spin is purely anti-helpful in most situations. It handicaps your learning process and confuses you about what’s important to you, usually because some part of your emotional habits are still dealing with some situation you were in as a child but aren’t in anymore.

(And in my dream future, children don’t need Spin either! I want to see a world in which parents can track when they’re putting pressure on their kids to Spin this way, and can adjust to remove that pressure.)

It’s simpler than you probably think

From having helped a lot of people unwind Spin, it seems worth noting: just about everyone overcomplicates it. It really is incredibly simple. Much simpler than you might think at first.

Just redescribe the problem without you being the cause of any part of the problem.

Example: Instead of “I’m so lazy”, notice what the actual pain is. Maybe it’s “I’m scared of what others will think of me.” Why is that a problem, if you’re not allowed to be a cause of the problem? “Others might distance themselves from me if I don’t work harder. I don’t want to work harder, but I also don’t want others to distance themselves from me.” That situation is uncomfortable, but it doesn’t have to mean or imply that there’s something wrong with you. It’s just the situation you’re in.

Original Spin tends to make people actively consciously wrong about what the problem even is. Sometimes what they think the problem is doesn’t even make sense. “I’m such a loser” isn’t a coherent problem. What does it even mean?

After a while, you might start developing a “gut detector” for the “flavor” of Spin. “Why does he have to be so rude?” often has a bit of Spin in it: it’s trying to apply social pressure (in complex ways) by suggesting that the person being talked about has something wrong with him that he should change. (It depends on vocal tone though. I can imagine someone asking “Why does he have to be so rude?” in a way that’s sincerely curious! Generally speaking, curiosity is antithetical to Spin.)

I find Spin a bit nauseating. It literally feels kind of dizzying to me. And now that I’ve practiced spotting it in the wild as much as I have, it’s incredibly obvious. I suspect it can become obvious to you too. Learning to spot Spin isn’t all that mysterious. It’s very, very simple! It just requires some practice.

What do you notice about Original Spin? Is it a clear thing you can see in your own life? What happens when you try unwinding it?

I’m honestly curious! I think this stuff could become quite important. I also just find it fascinating.

So please, drop a comment below!