TIFT #126: Understanding and Working With Motivation

In a recent psychotherapy coaching session, an experienced therapist brought up the problem of a client who seemed to be moving away from the therapy, disengaging. She was afraid he would drop out. In thinking about it, first we applied the consultant’s cardinal rule: “It’s staring you in the face and it’s about the relationship.” When we find ourselves stuck, that almost always captures the answer. I’ll get to the answer later in the post, but it has to do with motivation.

The way I have come to approach situations like this is to combine two hugely important principles. The first is how the brain’s motivational system works, and the second has to do with the deepest emotional needs and how motivation supports them. Let’s start with a look at how motivation works.

The SEEKING system

One of the late Jaak Pansepp’s most valuable contributions is the way he describes the motivational system as a SEEKING system. (It’s his convention to give a name in all caps to each of the more or less distinct emotion processing systems in the brain.) The features of this complex neurobiology that are most relevant to us are that dopamine has a central role and that the nucleus accumbens is the brain structure activated by every substance with addictive potential. What really makes this system come alive as a concept is Panksepp’s description of how the SEEKING system can become focused on literally any goal or objective. It might be putting a golf ball into the next hole, becoming President, getting the love we need, or any goal imaginable. These are the things that keep us on the edge of our seat hoping, waiting, striving to reach them.

When we are on the path towards the current goal, the pursuit is exciting and pleasurable, especially when we are close. Think of the carrot in front of the donkey. If it gets too far, the donkey loses interest. If it’s too close, the donkey will eat the carrot and that’s the end of it. When it is at just the right distance, the donkey is maximally motivated. When the goal has been achieved, first there is elation, then a letdown, and the pleasure of the chase fades. But there are ways to keep the game going. After each golf hole there is another, then the final score, and off in the distance, the club championship. Maybe the slot machine will really pay off next time. Think how many billions have been made by dangling carrots at the right distance to induce humans to give up their money for something on which their SEEKING system has set its sights.

The SEEKING system has a down side, too. When the goals is too far and seems impossible to reach, the system shuts down. What we experience is depression. The chemistry of disappointment takes over and we feel dejected, discouraged, demoralized, even dead inside.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in his book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience is describing the same system. He adds the dimension, that of peak motivation, the condition of flow where it is at its most intense. He describes flow as a state of heightened concentration where we lose awareness of surroundings and are solely focused on the pursuit. This happens when the factors favoring a prediction of success are high but still uncertain. The goal is achievable but seriously challenging and success depends not on chance but on our own agency. With a balance between possibility and difficulty, the pleasure of the chase is maximized. Besides that, clear feedback about progress keeps the system energized.

Not all desires are the same

The other principle, a critical aspect of the SEEKING system, is the importance of understanding the nature of each person’s deepest desires. Not all desires are created equal. What is a person’s innermost motivation. How can we come to know its identity? Why is it so important? And what issues govern how close or far, possible or impossible the goal appears to the inner mind where the bulk of the motivational apparatus lives.

The answer

In the Coaching Group, discussing how the client’s engagement was fading, the answer required understanding just that, what did the client most want. I asked the therapist to tell me a bit more. The therapy had been going very well for about six months, but now, the client wanted to reduce to every other week. I asked for more about the client. “He’s a person who takes care of everyone, his wife and everyone.” That was what I needed. It’s not always that easy, but in this case the answer was indeed “staring us in the face.”

When people focus on doing for others, whatever they are doing is what they, themselves, most want. His disengagement meant his need was not getting met in therapy. Though far from consciousness he must have wished to receive the kind of attention he gave so generously. For the first few months of therapy his SEEKING system was hopeful. That’s why he was so engaged in the work and the alliance. The carrot seemed to be near. Then something happened. From the coaching group, I knew the therapist to be very generous and giving. Her giving could not be the problem. I said, “His intake pipe is clogged.” His problem is that he is blocked from receiving what he most wants. The therapist confirmed that he has trouble letting others help him. His inner mind was both craving support and blocking it. She will need to help the client realize he has a problem in that area in order to re-energize his motivation. When he sees that the problem can be repaired, that relief is possible, then motivation will return. In other words, identifying what happened to the carrot, and that it remains reachable, will bring it back into range.

In fact, this operation will not be so easy. The reason he has trouble receiving is a problematic value system that makes neediness a source of shame. Pointing out faulty values runs the risk of feeling like criticism and will have to be done with a lot of delicacy. Once the problem has been brought to light, changing a pathological value is still challenging (See TIFT #98). 

Engineering

If this analysis seems like engineering, there is a resemblance. When we understand the principles of how motivation works and how the inner mind SEEKS what it needs for growth and for survival, the answers come from analyzing and re-balancing motivational factors.

In case the word, “engineering” worries you, I don’t mean it at all in an objectifying way. We are all made in similar, understandable ways but our needs are totally unique, as are the strategies our inner minds have found to help us achieve them. Accurate empathy/complex caring combines both the need and the path to it. It requires being able to see and describe the specifics and how they are working. It’s combining the unique stories that are our lives with the principles that make humans “tick.”

Learning what a client is SEEKING

What does my client value most? What do they pride themselves on giving to others? What are their dreams and ambitions? What do they want to protect their children from? What career choices have they made? Where have they been most successful? What struggles have they never mastered? These are some of the things to listen for as we ask ourselves, “What is this person’s life really about?” After listening and maybe asking a few very open questions, it’s time to learn about their background. That will often confirm what we are already beginning to think.

Here is an example of how values can grow and be shaped from early life. A girl’s father is mysoginistic, impossible to please, and judgmental, but shows interest. From age two or three, she understands that getting his love requires being pretty. She has some success with that, but he is always holding the carrot out of reach. She learns that pretty is everything and gains skill at succeeding. That pays off when she begins school. She is appreciated for being pretty and trying to please. Her values and identity are shaped by the experience. She goes on to a career as an actress and finds a man as difficult as her father. Both adult choices recreate the childhood struggle to please an impossible audience, and they bring with them many of the same triumphs and disappointments. Her SEEKING is about getting “Yes” from a stone. In her therapy, the goals might be helping her let go of trying to please the unappeasable and finding satisfaction in give and take with people who are capable of reciprocating.

Factors influencing development of deep wishes

Three factors come together to determine what the inner mind holds in its sights. The first is whatever fundamental, existential need might have been in question. The second is the level of development at which the initial solution was invented. And the third is the particular strengths and skills or weaknesses that the child was able to bring to the challenge.

I think of development in terms of challenges. What makes development relatively similar between people is that the challenges of life tend to be the same. However each person’s experience of them and their strategies for solving them are unique and individual. No two people live the same lives.

In chronological order, some of the earliest challenges are being able to connect with important others. Watching babies, the first thing about them is how avidly they respond to eye contact. Next is dealing with battles of will, the basis of two-year-old tantrums. After that, the central challenge is to be “good” and receive love. The next is finding conditions that support growing and becoming all one can be. Adolescence brings the huge and prolonged challenge of letting go of the innocence and safety of being a kid and embracing a scary but rewarding future in charge of one’s own life. Here are some examples of struggles with those challenges:

• A woman couldn’t understand why relationships never worked out. She would always find something wrong with the other person and end it. Her fear of closeness and premature flight were entirely nonverbal and non-conscious, governed by difficulties with early attachment. 
• Another client got into power struggles with her professors. She was very bright and couldn’t help showing them how stupid they were. Life seemed like a zero-sum game, a choice between dominating and capitulating. Neither worked well in adult life.
• A woman seemed perpetually driven to show her husband how immoral he was and how he should admit to living a life of moral failure. 
• A client was obsessive in adherence to the rules, and could not understand that this didn’t motivate others to do the same.
• So many adolescent and young adult clients struggle with adulting, being tugged forward by the freedom of owning one’s life versus staying with the comfort of holding others responsible for their success or failure. 

Each of these examples represents a common issue but an individual struggle arising from the typical challenges of different eras of development. They embody the inner mind’s best efforts to find a solution based on available resources. In each one, the strategy becomes an EMP, an entrenched maladaptive pattern, carried into adulthood and eroding the satisfaction of life.

Finding better solutions

One way to describe the job of psychotherapy is that we are there to help our clients discover better answers to the problems their inner selves are still trying to solve. We may have an initial vision of the answer, but the client has ultimately to buy into the project because inner change is never easy or cost-free. Getting over fear and resistance to change always involves some stress and risk taking. We are hoping to engineer a balance where motivation to reach the carrot is sustainably stronger than that resistance.

Acceptance

One broadly applicable solution, out of reach of most children, but available to adults is acceptance. It is human to resist acceptance and treat it as a last resort but acceptance of failure of a parent or a shortfall in receiving vital support is usually not an option for children. They resist having to accept failure at any cost, even if it requires blaming themselves or changing reality. However, for adults, when we perceive that we have come to the end of our resources, most of us are able to accept that certain truths and realities can’t be changed. Reality doesn't negotiate. Then it’s time to accept. Acceptance is a learned skill. While a few individuals continue to deal with unacceptable realities by changing reality, most of us can’t. For most of us, reality is the ultimate referee in the fight. When reality says you have no more options we accept. When we do, we find peace and closure. “OK, I give up, reality wins and that’s how it is.” For a great many of the problems with which psychotherapy can help, the final resolution is finding inner peace with reality.

Choice

Another very common way adults can resolve the unfinished business of early life is realizing that back then, they had no choice about the people they had to depended on. In those cases, children make drastic and costly adjustments in order to hold onto the relationships on which they depend for survival. They learn to negate their own sense of truth. They blame themselves for things that were not their responsibility. They split into multiple selves. They take the side of people who are not trustworthy. All these are adjustments that, at the time, were judged necessary for survival.

In adulthood, things are different. We have choices about whom to trust and how to see reality. Support makes the carrot seem reachable. Letting go of compromises and capitulations begins to appear as a real possibility. Having faith in our own sense of truth can lead to letting go of toxic arrangements and demands of allegiance to false values.

Individual Resolution

These are the most common of the new vistas brought by adulthood. Helping clients make the leap from old solutions, based on non-acceptance and on trauma bonds is a challenging operation, but one that leads to a new kind of peace and a far wider range of possibilities. These new realities are often at the core of the antidotes we need to deliver to subcortical structures where the old truths are tightly held and defended against disruption. That is the job of memory reconsolidation.

When motivation meets family and environment

Those paths to health sound good, but what adult is not embedded in a complex social network. That’s where the engineering becomes complicated. What if the client committed to a marriage where the demands are similar to those of the original toxic family? What if the price of freedom is supporting what isn’t true and healthy? Let’s say we are working with a spouse whose other has learned to give too much to others or who enables an addicted child. Should the client support that in order to preserve the relationship? This and many other permutations happen in every practice.

We may become helpers as clients weigh difficult choices. They aren’t our choices, but we have a role in facilitating our client’s process of change. It helps greatly for us to be aware of the tangle of conflicting motivations within individuals and in interpersonal systems. What kind of balance might work? Who is capable of changing and under what conditions. Is honest communication possible? Is the other person at the limit of their flexibility? Must communication be by actions, rather than words? All these considerations go into helping our clients break free from old, maladaptive solutions to become full owners of their decisions and lives. 

Jeffery Smith MD

Photo credit,  Marek Mucha, Unsplash