Walking Through Life - how mental distress is caught and taught

As a child you watched how parents or siblings walked and then you began to copy them. So it was with everything else you learnt, as peers and other adults entered your environment. Experience and learning are inseparable. The more you practice existing skills, the more you try to reproduce today, the world as it was yesterday. All learning consists of first imitating (copying or modelling) how others behave, then repeated practice (trial and error) - both mentally and physically - until you gain a skill. All behaviours are habits. And the only way to overcome an unwanted habit is to copy a better one from someone else. We are social animals with a social brain.

At some point you learnt to walk down the street and avoid eye contact with someone (the invitation to normal social interaction), if that became a habit, not just towards those you disliked for a reason, but a practice applied to the whole social world of others you acquired a mental 'illness'. The classic way of avoiding eye contact is to look down and away (a gesture normally reserved for the occasional experience of shame), but if you stare at the pavement for a lifetime - rather than naturally allowing the eyes to return to the horizon giving an automatic upright posture - then you become a physical cripple because of your social isolation.

Another form of isolation is when we look through people, being physically present but mentally somewhere else. But that leaves the person terribly exposed, you can't do two things at once - fantasise and be in the present moment. Very quickly others notice that your speech simply doesn't fit the situation. The so-called 'psychotic' person follows an erratic path and easily becomes disorientated because they are disorganised. Eventually, they too will look down and away.

Sometimes people come to believe that hanging-on to familiar, habitual, well understood, fears will keep them safe, not just from occasional real physical danger, but from other anxieties in everyday living. The desire to be in control too much - causes more isolation from others. But when you make eye contact with others, when you operate your body in the same way as someone else, you begin to have the same kinds of thoughts (though the content may be different). The desire to belong, which is in all of us, is rewarded.

(See previous posts on meditation, and physical therapy for the 'up' side of the story. The acquisition of new social skills and better habits will be discussed in future posts).