From Perception to Insight: The Journey of Psychological Processing

We’re all being encouraged to process, and if we can’t do it on our own to go to therapy. But what does ‘processing’ actually mean? 
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In some sense it involves ‘understanding’ which is what a decent investigation strives to do. That’s perfect when policies have not been followed or materials fail, but less so when you’re feeling confused, upset or just strange about something. Organising information so that it makes better sense is important, it’s why people who’ve been impacted by failures so often get involved in working to reduce the likelihood of a recurrence.

Neuroscience offers clues. The following is simplistic but since we’re not attempting brain surgery it’s a useful metaphor.

Routine events become memories that are efficiently stored and retrieved, it’s how we learn. You don’t want to access information about how to eat when you’re driving, and a smell might spontaneously remind you of a holiday. But events that are less routine create memories that don’t get stored as efficiently.

Imagine a warehouse carousel and storage system. Regular boxes - ordinary memories - are simple to stack, less likely to fall and easy to retrieve without disturbing the entire system. Irregular or fragile boxes need more attention but one or two don’t cause too many problems. An increase in strange shapes or boxes held together with sticky tape and hope increases the likelihood of disruption to the whole system.  Irregular boxes can be left to go round and round, or they can cause instability to the stack, get crushed or spill their contents. They require more attention and work to store or retrieve which means they may be less likely to be stored at all or may cause problems to the stack when they are.

The irregular boxes are not solely related to trauma. If there aren’t enough staff the boxes pile up, bash into each other and lose some of their form. You can imagine what happens if the fuel for the carousel runs out but the boxes keep coming, or if storage space gets crammed.

We know that people who are bereaved need time to come to terms, we expect them to be upset and fragile, to not be their usual selves. We understand that they are processing shock, loss, sadness, disorientation and so on and if they return to their usual selves within a week, we anticipate and are sympathetic towards the idea that they may suddenly begin crying or zone out. Their entire storage system has just been in an earthquake, they’ve got a great deal to manage and few resources. 

Even so, there’s an expectation that they’ll have the entire warehouse, equipment, staff, supply lines and ops up and running to full capacity within a few months. That’s one thing when we’re working with actual material items and processes, quite another with the intangibles of existence.

Every single human, and many other animals’ cultures have created rituals. While we can’t point to an X ray and say, ‘This structure is the unconscious,’ rituals are pretty good proof of concept, we are compelled to create and perform non-productive acts that have no purpose, indeed would be bizarre, in any other context.  We have lost almost all of our most important ones. Responding to bereavement, birth, coming of age, accidents, all kinds of events, once meant sets of actions involving the whole community, there was no “I don’t know what to say or do,” because we knew what we were required to say and do and even when performing these things became difficult, moving through them was a mark of the passing of time and an acknowledgement that we had experienced something. We knew what to do and how to behave at the moment of death or birth or coming of age on the day and in the days, weeks, months, years afterwards, and while a great many rituals or parts of them were or became dubious, in effect they created boxes and the warehouses in which to store events. Very few of us have access to anything like this now.

I really want to reiterate that processing is not limited to huge or traumatic events. I use the example of bereavement because we all feel sympathetic towards it, many of us have experienced it, but it’s an extreme example.

In therapy and outside of it, processing can be understood as taking the time to think, feel, wonder about and express something in the service of adapting ourselves to take events into account. We take a memory out and remember it, become curious about how it may relate to other events and circumstances, widen our knowledge and appreciation of the environment in which it occurred. We might talk about it, finding more accurate language to describe it and the impact it has had. We might write, paint, whatever to better understand it; in some sense when we process something we are symbolising it, allowing less cognitive parts of ourselves the opportunity to communicate how they experience it. In it's own way, processing has a lot in common with ritual. 
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An inquiry gets all the evidence in one place and examines it. It’s vital. But it does not - it is not intended to - also attend to the visceral impact of events. Therapy aims to do both. It takes as long as it takes and this can be frustrating, but knowing that processing is very much more than a logical inquiry can help patience. 

When we process, we are allowing ourselves to re-view, re-experience events, so that we can create a box in which it may fit more comfortably and be stored with greater ease.

The aim is not to stuff things away forever and return to our pristine, unchanged selves. That's not possible and also not desirable, we need to learn from experience, and the trick is to learn the lessons that can offer a more satisfying life. We don’t get over anything, we learn to make deeper sense of events, make room for them, to live with them. They can inform us about the need for different boundaries, different ways of being, the possibility of different choices, altered opinions. When they're not endlessly going around a carousel or rattling about and destabilising the whole storage system, when they're not kept separate from us but attended to and accepted, there’s a chance that they can teach us something like wisdom.