A lot of this thinking is driven by the book Impro by Keith Johnstone which is less a book about improvisational theater and more a life treatise.
So two thing you have to understand as very basic facts about the world are:
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Our reactions to any individual circumstance are beyond our conscious control and can only ever come from our gut. We hear a joke and we either laugh or don’t laugh, we don’t get to decide whether we find it funny. We go through a bad breakup or the loss of a loved one, at no point can you say, ok, time to stop being sad and be not sad instead and then be not sad. We get a dream job on paper and go into the job and find out we hate it, your rational brain cannot show the spreadsheet of pros and cons to our subconscious brain and have it be like, yup, that makes sense, I’ll stop feeling those feelings now.
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Our brains evolved to be massive prediction machines. That’s most of what the brain occupies itself with on a day to day basis. We have a slightly awkward conversation with someone, they think nothing of it but we replay that conversation over and over again in our minds gaming out different scenarios to see if it could have gone differently. We’re about to have a difficult conversation with someone close and we pre-prepare by gaming out every single response they could have and what our response will be and so on and so forth and we end up having the convo and it invariable veers into an area we hadn’t even considered. All of our prediction architecture is solely geared to your gut reactions, we are driven to act in ways that we predict will maximize or minimize pleasant and unpleasant gut reactions solely.
The basic tenets of Impro are that, as children, we emerge into the world as creatures solely driven by impulse. Why we feel drawn so much to “childhood innocence” is we see in children a purity of spirit in living a life that is unencumbered by the control of the conscious mind. He says that the act of development is one in which we receive psychic injury, that is, we act in a way that we expect one type of joyous reaction, then we are shocked to find a violently different reaction and we react with shame and submit our gut to our brain so it will never happen again. Like, a kid does something they think other kids will find delightful and they make fun of her for it instead and she learns that it’s no longer safe to be that free spirited youngster and she must hide that part of herself.
Keith calls the act of schooling, as practiced in the modern Western world, a systematic form of violence in that it was intended to take all of these fractally shaped pegs and cram them into industrialized square holes to serve as interchangeable cogs in a mechanistic society.
The output of such a system is “adults” where the primary skill that has been taught is that such a strong filter is placed on the conscious brain that what makes it from the subconscious to the conscious in the first place is only the thoughts we regard as “socially acceptable” and the job of the conscious brain is to pick from among the socially acceptable choices, which one best serves your interests.
His major thesis about Improv Comedy is that teaching Improv is an act of unlearning more than it is an act of learning. The reason we find Improv funny is different from the other comedic arts in that we find a catharsis from seeing other people let their impulses run wild within a safe environment and there is a comedic release that happens from the surprise of recognition.
His entire practice of teaching Improv centers around how do we get adults to first recognize that this filter is there and then be able to adjust this filter on a situational basis to let more of the gut instincts filter into the conscious brain. The rest of the book is then various techniques he has found to make this practice happen and produce great improv performers.
But it’s this act of unlearning which I think is the key message because many people are incapable of following their gut because their brain is so afraid of their gut that they aren’t even able to listen to what their gut is trying to say in the first place. They are confused as to why they act the way they do and why certain impulses seem to drive them regardless of their will because they don’t understand themselves enough to know what the gut is trying to protect them from.
But the gut is, not by any means, a perfect prediction machine, it’s the byproduct of several billion years of evolution and whatever life circumstances have impinged upon your life so far. The gut’s job is to predict what will make future you’s gut happy but it makes systematic errors, often grievous ones in its attempt to predict. This is “trauma” in the pure clinical sense of the word, it’s an experience that impinges upon your gut instincts so strongly that it sends your prediction engine haywire in systematically unhelpful way. PTSD or OCD, among other clinical diagnoses are trauma diagnoses and the therapeutic goal is how to repair the subconscious to bring it back into a more healthy state.
But regardless of whether you’ve suffered clinically defined trauma (and far more people in the world have than ever get diagnosed), your gut is prone to leading you in dangerous directions which is why we felt the need to protect ourselves from it in the first place. But the realization is that the gut can be trained and that the proper place for the mind is not to wrest control from the gut and scold it from going wrong, but how the proper place for the mind is there to train the gut and turn it into something you can increasingly trust.
So in my mind, it’s a three step process:
- Listening
- Training
- Trusting
Where the steps don’t happen in sequence, it’s a constant jumble/negotiation between them and there’s no end point, it’s a lifelong process in which you strive to get a little bit better every day than the day before but the output of such a process is a more “integrated” person who lives a life more authentic to their values and has a clearer sense of who they are, who they want to be, and a path to get there. And while it’s a simple process, it’s by no means an easy process and the act of doing so is a constant act of bravery within yourself to confront and overcome the things that you find most scary about yourself which is why so few people end up embarking down this road, despite the legions of self-help books that all dress this up in some flowery language.
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