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  The LearningMethods Library

Almost Dying in a Foreign Language

Copyright © 2002 David Gorman, all rights reserved world-wide
With thanks to the Queen of the Desert for transcriptions services.

NOTE: This is a record of a session that took place in a 5-day workshop. The names of the person who brought up the issue and the other participants as well as some of the details have been changed in consideration of everyone's privacy.

I have edited the flow of the spoken words to improve readability. Here and there, I have added some explanations of the work and its tools that the participants had at other points in the workshop. Aside from these edits, this article is almost verbatim from the actual session.

Because of the length of this article, it is primarily aimed at teachers, apprentice-teachers and those with some experience of the LearningMethods work, though others may find it interesting to pore through the whole piece. There will be a shorter version coming soon that just covers the main points of the problem, the tools used to explore it and its solution.

The session:

Raphael:  The problem I want to bring up revolves around being less skilled than I would like to be in something that is integral to my profession and I feel a great deal of shame and judgement about it. So this shame has tended in the past to prevent me from doing anything about it.

I am a rabbi and I am not literate in Hebrew and one is expected to be able to access texts in Hebrew and Aramaic in its many variations. I didn’t have much of a religious background in my family as I grew up. I managed to get through rabbinical school but, unlike most of the people there, I had not had the kind of education as a child that would lead to the level of work that is required of you in a rabbinical school, so I was behind from the onset. I did manage to do enough to complete the course work. But enough to complete the course work and feeling competent are two different things and also at this point I wouldn’t even be qualified to start…

David:  Just before you go any further, did you say that you didn’t have the normal background that most others might have had going into a rabbinical school and yet you managed OK?

Raphael:  I managed. It was painful and difficult.

David:  So that sounds like a good thing that you managed without that background.

Raphael:  Yes, absolutely that’s a good thing that I succeeded at what I did. That’s an incredible accomplishment and when I graduated I felt wonderful. However, it continues to be that what I never learned I still haven’t learned and it continues to be a problem.

David:  Is there a reason why you haven’t learned it? Is it what you are saying that because of the way you feel you haven’t done the work you might have done?

Raphael:  Well there are two possibilities, or more perhaps. One is that it is awkward, incredibly awkward, to say to somebody, "Will you be my teacher and help me break through this language barrier?" when the person you are approaching to be the teacher has assumptions and expectations and judgments about what it means to be a rabbi and what skills I should already have. And I have been very shamed in that process, so I stopped.

David:  Just before we go on here… I’d like to check something out here so we can make sure of being as accurate as possible… Do you know for sure that the person you are talking about had those actual assumptions and thoughts? Have they have actually said so or are you…?

Raphael:  Yes. I meant my dream. Though the larger one may have crashed and burned too.

David:  Just to be clear. What was the actual negative component of that experience? It sounds like you are saying that it was the fact that you didn’t know the language that was the negative thing.

Raphael:  Well, I have a very clear experience of the medical staff, between their English and my Hebrew, trying to tell me something and me understanding that what was going to happen was that I was going to have a shot in the back. And I couldn’t figure out why a shot in the back. Then after they did it I realized, Aha, this is called a spinal tap. But it was excruciatingly painful, both the physical thing and the not understanding. There was a lot of fear wrapped up in it as a young kid in a foreign country.

David:  But the point I am wanting to clarify is this: for you, is the negativity because you didn’t understand the language rather than because of the language itself?

Raphael:  Right, the negativity was because I didn’t understand.

David:  This is relevant because it sounds like you have it framed that the negativity stops you from learning it. But if, in fact, you were there in that hospital situation and it was the not knowing of Hebrew that was negative, and now you still don’t know it, then the possibility of having that negativity again still sits there because you still don’t know it rather than already knowing it.

Raphael:  Right.

David:  Which is kind of the opposite of the statement that I am not learning it because of the negativity. In fact it is the not already knowing it that was the cause of the negativity. That is, if you still don’t understand Hebrew now, perhaps any negativity you have at this moment is not because of anything to do with the act of learning it, it is because you have not already learned it!

Lisa (another student on the workshop):  I’m missing this. Can you say that again?

David:  One part of what Raphael said in the beginning is to the effect that his block of learning is connected with that negative experience, as if the negative experience stops him from learning Hebrew. But—subject to this being accurate as we keep looking at it—if the actual negativity of that experience came because he didn’t know Hebrew, and he still doesn’t know it, then there is a very good possibility of having another negative experience because he still doesn’t know it, rather than having a negative experience from trying to know it. It is the not-knowing it that is the negative. As opposed to ‘it blocks me from learning Hebrew’, it is the ‘not having learned it’ that causes the negativity.

In other words, if the negativity was caused by not knowing Hebrew, the solution would be to know it so you can’t have a similar negative experience again because you still don’t know it the next time.

Raphael:  And the not-knowing is still the source of the negativity. It compounds itself over and over again.

David:  A question for you. If you did know Hebrew at some future point, would that source of negativity disappear?

Raphael:  Yes.

Lisa:  Process question here. Time out. Are you on purpose not bringing in the process or are you information gathering?

Raphael:  What’s the process that he is not doing?

Lisa:  Like could Raphael do this for himself? Again, it is that thing that you are coming up with stuff here that I wouldn’t have come up with and he didn’t come up with. What are you actually doing here? It’s very impressive. Is there anything you could say about how you are hearing things or is it a process going on in you?

David:  Yes, there is a process, and I was going to go through it all before explaining the process I was using so we’d have the material already out there to understand the explanation. Sometimes it makes sense to point out process tools right at the beginning of using them so the person is aware of how it is being used. Other times you need the material to come out first to have something to point out. This is one of those.

I am pointing out that I heard a statement—‘the shame prevents me from learning the language’—and then an example of how his illness gave him negative associations to the language. The process was to explore that more to see if that is really an accurate way of interpreting what happened.

So far, as we look closely at it, it is turning out to be almost the opposite. Raphael is certainly feeling that because of that painful, fearful experience he is blocked from learning Hebrew…

Raphael:  I assumed I had an emotional block that prevented me from learning the language because it is wrapped up with so much pain for me personally.

David:  …And it probably is wrapped up in pain, but in the way you are saying it, it is like it is the language that’s the source of the problem. And yet when you look closely at the situation, the source of the negativity was not having the language.

Don (another student on the workshop):  I get it.

David:  In other words, the negativity didn’t come from Hebrew, it came from not having Hebrew, And in that sense your emotional experience is quite justified, but you’ve mis-attached it to learning the language. It is actually attached to not having learned the language.

Lisa:  My question is, David, you heard a sentence. I would like to go back and see what it actually was that clicked for you to say, "Wait a minute that doesn’t match what he said at the beginning." I just missed that. I just wondered how…

David:  Well, I was just taking in what he said and the process was to see whether that was an accurate statement. The implication or the sense of the sentences seems like he was saying that he was attaching the emotional reaction to the language.

Margaret: Lisa, Aren’t you asking how he could do that for himself?

Lisa:  Yeah, and I was just asking how David did it for himself. And how I could do it for myself. What happened there so quickly that you got to something that I wasn’t even onto myself or even hearing. What was the framework that you were listening with? And you just told me.

David:  I suppose for me it is about listening carefully to what is being said and seeing if I can understand it from that person’s point of view. At the same time, I’m taking in the situation he is describing and understanding it from my own point of view. Then any mismatches between the two will stick out.

In other words, I’m seeing it from his point of view and asking myself, "I can see why it would be a fearful situation, but why would that give me negative associations to the language itself? Why would it contribute to stopping me from learning the language?" Which sounds as if it is what he was saying.

Raphael:  We have got into a piece of it, but we haven’t resolved the issue yet for me.

David:  No, of course not, we are just beginning. And this is just one aspect of the block. The other side of it, at least that we’ve uncovered so far, is this territory of your assumptions about others and the expectations and assumptions you think others would have if you asked them to help you.

Don:  What I notice is that the problem presents itself to the subject, that is, me or whoever, as a glom, as a unit. Like there is this big, bad feeling for me around… whatever. And it is really hard to get objective and pick it apart, as to what is bad. And the skill is in picking that glom apart. When I listen to Raphael, I, like Lisa, am still caught up in the glom of his, "Oh, I don’t know the language, I’m supposed to know the language, I’m blocked from learning the language."

That’s the whole big, bad feeling and I just empathetically got caught up in that immediately. I can’t see my way through that at all and I can’t pick out, for instance, that one little piece of contradiction in terms and see the significance. To me it just seems normal, like that’s the way you use the language, learning a language, you know.

Lisa:  And I think it is just a really good point because I do too. I think the way you are trying to help us to see is how to even begin to hear the words that we are using ourselves and think, "Gee, is that really accurate" and actually listen to ourselves.

David:  Exactly. I’ll explain some more.

I have an advantage from having done so much of this work that I see certain patterns over and over. One of these patterns is the misperception or the misattribution of the reaction we have. That is, we attribute the cause of the reaction or symptom to something that is not the actual cause.

I work with a lot of musicians and actors so there’s a common example of ‘auditions make me nervous’. The person is attributing their nervousness to the audition as if the audition caused it. However, if you look closely at what is going on for that person, it is not the audition itself that is making him nervous. It is his ideas that he has to do well and win the audition, combined with his doubt that he won’t because he’s setting himself up to have to play much better than he can probably manage.

These ideas are causing the nervousness, not the audition itself. And this is easy to prove because when those ideas are not there, for instance when the person goes to an audition more as a lark and doesn’t care about the outcome, then he has no nervousness.

If somebody is misperceiving where their reaction is coming from then they have no actual way out of the problem. Take my audition example. When you think the audition is causing the nervousness, then there are only a few ways out. One way is to stop doing auditions, which sort-of works, but ends up severely limiting your professional possibilities, so that’s not really satisfactory. The other way is to do something to get rid of the nervousness reaction—take some pills, do some breathing, some relaxing or releasing exercises, etc. But this is just a coping mechanism because the reaction comes back again the next time and you have to do the coping mechanism each time. Only when you can perceive the situation accurately and therefore find the actual cause, can the problem be completely eliminated.

So, because of my experience in helping lots of people uncover these misattributed reactions, I am constantly attuned to hearing when someone says ‘this’ is causing ‘that’, and to asking myself if the stated reasons can actually be what is causing their experiences. Or to put it another way, I’m looking at the actual situation they are describing and asking myself if what was said is an accurate way of describing that situation.

So, Raphael, in your situation here, we have a number of elements, if I can put it that way. You did get sick. You were in hospital in Israel. You did have a problem with the language. And it was a very painful and difficult time. Those are all facts.

But the way you have organized them in your understanding appears to be—and process-wise, this was what I was checking out—that the difficult emotions had come because of the language, as if some characteristic of the language itself was stopping you from learning it.

So I’m thinking, first of all, how does a language cause something like that? The language is not causing it to all the rest of the people who speak Hebrew. So how could it be in the language? This is really just the application of a certain amount of reasoning or logic.

I can see that there certainly was a difficulty for you, but I’m asking myself if the language itself can possibly be the element that was causing the difficulty? If you already knew Hebrew when you became sick in Israel would there have been that difficulty? Probably not. So when I look closely at the situation in the hospital, I can see that it wasn’t the Hebrew that caused you the problems, it was more the fact that you didn’t know Hebrew.

Then I can see that it would be a very difficult situation to be as sick as you were, going through all that treatment and not have an understanding of the language of the country you are in, whichever language it might be. In other words, your fear and emotion was quite justified in that situation. It is a frightening and potentially dangerous situation to be in. And you sure wouldn’t want something like that to happen again.

So, like anyone would, you now have a powerful memory associated with the whole situation to help you steer clear of going through it all again. That’s a good thing. But it would be quite important to really be clear what precisely it was you didn’t want to go through again. That is, as we looked closely, it doesn’t make sense to attribute that fear and emotion to the Hebrew language or to learning Hebrew. Instead, what you might not want to go through again is being in a situation where you are not knowing the local language. So it would be quite important to be clear that if the negativity is caused by not knowing Hebrew, then that would be a powerful reason to learn it, not a reason not to learn it. So it turns around to be almost exactly the opposite of what you were first saying.

Lisa:  Thank you, David that’s really helpful. This is what I was asking for.

Carl (another student on the workshop):  So would it be fair to say that you are listening as much to what the person is saying as to how they are saying it, or their use of language in describing it.

David:  Absolutely. I am not so concerned about the language or words per se but more at what the language is pointing at. What is the understanding the person has that these are the words with which they are attempting to express that understanding? I want to get at their understanding or point of view, not the actual words.

If, for instance, Raphael’s actual understanding of that situation was that it was the Hebrew language that caused him difficulty, then you can appreciate why he might not want to learn it. But when we explore the situation we find that there appears to be a misunderstanding of the situation—a misunderstanding which, in fact, is still causing the problem because he doesn’t see it clearly. So it is essential to be able to comprehend the situation more accurately in order to know what needs to change to eliminate this problem.

Carl:  But you’re not paying a particular attention to the language in order to do that?

David:  Well, yes, but only as a map to the territory, which is the person’s understandings and interpretations. My experience, and I invite you to keep aware of this too to see for yourself, is that on the whole we express things pretty accurately to the way we perceive and understand things.

But it is important to check it out, because occasionally it isn’t accurate. Sometimes people say things and you ask them if that is really the way it is for them and they think back to the actual experience for a moment and realize that, no, it is not actually what their experience is. But when that happens, it is usually news to them. They didn’t really know that their experience was different from the way they said it was. They had been carrying an idea around that didn’t match the events, but without knowing it.

Most of the time though, we do express things pretty accurately to the way we perceive and understand things. But that doesn’t mean that our language and the understanding it is expressing is accurate to the real events it is referring to. So you constantly need to keep your ears open for the language people use in order to reveal how they are thinking and understanding, and then correlate how accurate that understanding is to the actual events described.

You can see from this that, at the very least, you want to keep asking yourself if what you are hearing seems to make sense to you and keep checking out whether the words match the actual experience. And if the words are accurate to the way you are understanding the experiences, is it actually the way things work? Is it true?

Raphael:  So we are still in the thick of it, however, as far as I am concerned. That was a very useful insight. Then comes the contrast with my level of sophistication with the English language and the fact that no matter how much I learn I am still way behind the curve in terms of the Hebrew language.

David:  Can I interrupt here for a ‘process’ moment to point out another of the tools or processes of this work? We’ve got an example of what I call a ‘code word’ or ‘code phrase’ here—‘behind the curve.’ By code phrase, I mean a term that refers to some experience or situation or process in your life. You may know what you mean by that phrase, but what it is referring to is not explicitly spelled out.

Why I call these code phrases is because sometimes when we do take the time to explicitly bring out what they are referring to, we get information that is very valuable but that was unavailable to us while it stayed implicitly buried behind the code phrase.

So, let’s see what comes out when we explore this one. What do you mean by ‘behind the curve’?

Raphael:  Well, I could try to describe it or give you an experience I had. Which would you like?

David:  Whichever you think will describe it best or explain it best…

Raphael:  OK, I signed up for the very first continuing education for rabbis that my seminary has done and there was a face-to-face retreat and now throughout this year we have a commitment to study texts with a partner over the phone. So we started with psalms which were fairly easy. The latest text, the text I am working on right now is Bacchia Vechuda who was thirteenth century. I looked at the text…

Just a footnote here: Hebrew is a consonantal language. There are no vowels when you write it, unless you are either a little kid or an immigrant. So the text that I had has no vowels. If you don’t know what the word is you can’t read it correctly. If you know what the word says you can read it. It is sort of circular.

…So I pull the text off the internet, I download it and print it out and I say to my study partner, "Oh, it doesn’t have any vowels." And he graduated from the rabbinical school about three years ago and he went straight through from elementary school so he is probably twenty years my junior in age. He looked at it and he said, "Oh, that’s fairly easy Hebrew", and he just read the first couple of sentences out loud. I have been working on those texts and it had taken me about four hours to do six sentences and I feel stupid! And I feel, why am I even bothering…

David:  With that example in mind, can you say what you mean by ‘behind the curve’?

Raphael:  This is what I mean by behind the curve. That the expectation is that I should be able to access this text and to read it. Yes, there would be some vocabulary that I didn’t know and I could use a dictionary, but it wouldn’t be nine out of ten words in a sentence. I would be able to read it, get the gist of it at least and then back up and do the detail. And I can’t do that.

David:  There’s something you just said that is very important. It’s my job to help you recognize things like this, so I’d like to take a moment to point out what it was and fill you in on why this can be a very important tool to help you investigate this problem. As we go along, I will take every opportunity to point out these process moments and explain the tools you can have available when you are investigating an issue of your own.

The one I’m speaking of at the moment is a very common one and is what I call a ‘red-flag’ word. In this case, ‘should’, as in ‘I should be able to access the text and read Hebrew’.

There are a number of different categories or groups of these red-flag words and in each category there are a number of words similar to each other. In this particular category are ones like ‘should’, ‘ought’, ‘must’, ‘have to’ and so on. You can probably appreciate the sort of similarity between these words.

The other categories also have words with a shared similarity to each other but with different significance, for instance the group of ‘maybe’, ‘possibly’, ‘might be’, ‘could have’, etc. There are other categories too but it is not so important right now to list the groups that don’t apply to this piece of work at this moment.

The reason why I’ve come to call them red-flags words is not because of the word or phrase itself. All these words have plenty of perfectly appropriate uses. But when you are exploring through one of your issues and you are trying to understand it, it is important that you are tuned to every nuance of the way you are thinking and perceiving so you can catch any misperceptions or misconceptions.

So, in the context of exploring a problem, if you hear yourself use one of these red-flag words and wake up enough to register it, you can then ask yourself, what am I really saying here? What goes on underneath that? Surprisingly often, when you do take the time to dig underneath into what you are thinking and how you are seeing things, you will find clues that help to clarify or solve the problem. So let’s dig into this a bit and see what we find.

When you said that your study partner thought the Hebrew was very easy and you thought you should have known it, the question I want to ask you is: did you actually know it?

Raphael:  Did I actually know that there is a level at which I should be?

David:  When you are saying, "I should be able to read this text." Were you actually able to read it?

Raphael:  No, I was not.

David:  Then notice the situation here is that you have an idea that you should know it and at the same time there is an actual reality that you don’t.

Raphael:  Correct.

David:  Also notice that these two appear together. That is, your idea of ‘should know’ comes up at just those moments when you don’t know. You carry this idea around implicitly most of the time, but it actually surfaces as an experience when the idea doesn’t match the hard reality.

Raphael:  But the idea is not something I made up. There is a standard that exists. I don’t know how to concretely say what that standard is, however. And I’m not saying that I have to be a Barishnikov if I am going to call myself a dancer, but I do have to be able to spin without falling over when I am dancing on the stage.

David:  So if there is a standard of knowing Hebrew, then why don’t you?

Raphael:  Why don’t I know this Hebrew? Ummm…

David:  Let me ask it slightly differently…

By the way, process-wise, we’re still following through in this subroutine of code phrases and red-flag words and why it might be relevant to explore them…

So, leaving aside just for now whether there is an actual standard, nonetheless at that moment when you have the idea that you should know this but the actual reality is that you don’t—how do you feel?

Raphael:  Stupid.

David:  So is that the moment when that shame comes up?

Raphael:  Frustrated… shame… stupid… not a real rabbi… if I was a real rabbi…

David:  And if I heard you correctly earlier, it is this whole experience and these feelings that then block you from getting down to the learning?

Raphael:  There are some things about the learning itself that I don’t know how to do. I’m hypothesising, I’m guessing, that there is a way to learn a language that I haven’t learned and that I am doing it wrong. I continue, as you said earlier, to repeat the same thing that’s not working but it’s the only thing I know how to do.

David:  You may not know how to learn it on your own, but if you just went to somebody whose job was to teach you…

Raphael:  There’s the hook.

David:  Is there a reason why don’t you do that?

Raphael:  I have begun to do that this year actually, so I’ve started to break through it. Some information here: I’m taking a beginning modern Hebrew class at a college with a senior student who is an Israeli, a speaker of Hebrew. There are 5 college students plus me in the class. I am auditing it. I’m learning things about the language and about language that I don’t know, like nouns, verbs, all that stuff. It is slow, but it is helping. That’s one. The senior student who is teaching it is very considerate and he is not judging me that I am supposed to already know this, so it’s very helpful.

David:  But it appears that somebody is judging you?

Raphael:  Well, there is at least an internal jury that is doing the judging…

David:  That’s right. Now go back to those other moments you first spoke of. What you said then is that it is the negative feelings that come up that have blocked you from going ahead from where you are and incrementally gaining the knowledge. I am just pointing out the connection that at the very moment when you are faced with a situation that shows you the limits of your knowledge and offers the possibility of learning, these feelings get in the way and stop you.

Let me put it in a different way, as a question. If at those moments you didn’t have the idea, "I should know this, I’m stupid for not knowing it", would you feel differently?

Raphael:  Absolutely!

David:  What would the difference be, roughly speaking, as near as you can tell?

Raphael:  If I didn’t have the whole set of ‘shoulds’ because I am a rabbi—if I leave that part aside—I could choose whether or not I thought that Hebrew was an interesting language to learn at all. I could choose if I wanted to learn it, and I could either be excited about the learning or say I don’t want to do that, I would rather go learn how to kayak.

David:  You are now speaking about choices you might make, I was actually asking about the difference in how you might feel emotionally at that moment when you hit the ‘oh, I don’t know this’ if you didn’t have the ‘I should know it’ idea.

Raphael:  I don’t know. It could either be the excitement of the pursuit of learning, or I don’t care whether I know it or not. I could be excited instead of scared or ashamed, for instance.

David:  So near as you can tell, you probably would not have those ashamed or fear feelings that go with the ‘I should’. But when that ‘I should know’ idea comes in there you end up having those particular emotional experiences.

Raphael:  Yes, and then comes up the question of what kind of learner am I and what assumptions do I make about how quickly I have to catch up and I do actually…

David:  Excuse me, but let me point out you just said another red-flag word from the same group as the ‘should’.

Raphael:  OK, what was it?

David:  Have to… How quickly ‘I have to’…

Raphael:  Well, there you go. There’s my learning thing.

David:  If we take a moment to look under this new red-flag word too, does this mean that you have another idea? An assumption of how fast or how quickly you have to catch up and learn it?

Raphael:  You bet.

David:  And can you actually learn as quickly as you assume you have to?

Raphael:  No, that’s what is so frustrating.

David:  Here is the characteristic problem hidden under that particular set of red-flag words—that we have these ideas of what should be or has to be.

If you think for yourself about those situations, you’ll see that those words, that way of framing things, only come up in the moments in which the reality doesn’t match the idea. You don’t say to yourself, "Gee, I should eat salad tonight and you know, I actually want to." You only say it when you think you should eat salad but you actually want to eat the french-fries.

One big reason why you need to wake up to these kind of red-flag words is that when you do go and dig under them you’ll find your constructs or beliefs or ways of thinking. In this case they reveal that you are labouring under an idea—in fact a very fixed idea—that you think that reality really should be like this or has to be like this.

The other big reason to look under the words, is to take in that your own experience is showing you that it is not like your idea says it should be. And this is an interesting thing to take in. Your own actual experience of what happens is showing you over and over that reality is not like your idea. In other words, you’re simply not taking in what your own senses are showing you!

And this is exceedingly important to know. Without the wake up of the red-flag words you wouldn’t think to look deeper and so you wouldn’t uncover this knowledge. The words would instead make the same ‘sense’ they had always made to you and you’d just breeze right past, still failing to see that you are holding onto fixed ideas that just don’t match your experience of reality.

We found the same sort of thing in looking behind the ‘have to’ red-flag words. That you do not actually learn at the speed that you think learning has to take place at.

Now to make the point again… Notice, when you have that idea of how fast you have to learn and then your actual speed of learning turns out to be slower, how do you feel?

Raphael:  Not great!

David:  You can see how having such a fixed idea about the way things should work or have to work when the way they actually work is different, sets you up for those highly negative emotional reactions.

You have been tending to put the blame for the reactions on the fact that you are not learning fast enough. But does it belong there? Is it really the ‘not-learning as fast as I have to’ that makes you feel bad? Is that the cause of the bad feeling?

In fact, when we got under those red-flag words it appears that the cause of the bad feeling is that you have the idea that you should learn faster than you actually do. This is what causes the bad feeling, not the actual speed you’ve been learning at. Like the ‘I should already know it’, here we have another of those patterns where, when you look closely, you can see the misattribution of the feeling to something that is not what really causes the feeling.

Carl:  What’s being misattributed then, specifically?

David:  Well, if you go back to when he said, "I feel bad in that moment because I should know this and I don’t." Then, from your own experience ask yourself directly, if you were the one saying that would you be attributing the bad feeling to the not-knowing it? As in:

"I feel bad because I should know this and I don’t."

Or if I rearrange the words to get more at that meaning:

"I should know this, and I feel bad because I don’t."

As if the not-knowing is what is making me feel bad. But is that what’s actually causing it? If you were in a moment when you didn’t know but you didn’t have any idea about what you should know, would you feel bad?

In other words, is it more true that the ‘I should’ idea is what is causing the bad feelings. Would it be more accurate to put it:

"I don’t know it, but I feel bad because I think I should."

Of course, if I don’t attribute the bad feeling to the idea, I’ll never look at the idea and question its validity. In fact, the nature of these patterns is that the idea of what should be happening gets reinforced each time I experience it and so gets stronger and more fixed. And once the ‘shouldness’—the requirement of it having to happen—attaches to the idea, it tends to make reality somehow wrong because it isn’t what it should be.

With that kind of preconditioned and ever-more-fixed idea carried into each moment, of course, it makes perfect sense for me to keep trying to change the ‘wrong’ reality to match the ‘right’ idea or getting upset if it doesn’t. It would never occur to me to look closely enough to register which one is real and which one is merely an idea—and an inaccurate idea at that!

If you have ever experienced such a fixed idea, and who hasn’t, you’ll know how powerfully it sets you up to react in the same way to the next moment. Only when you can wake up enough to come into the present moment, away from all the reinforced preconditioning, can you tell the difference between real and not-real. Strange as it sounds.

And only when you can actually experience which one is real, would you consider the possibility of changing the misconceived idea to match the reality. After all, how can reality be wrong? It is just what it is.

Margaret: Where does vision come in, or making goals?

David: Something that is absolutely essential if we are to understand and solve our problems is to not forget that we are dealing with a specific situation here, not a generality. What you are asking now is about a different situation than this one. Someone with a vision of what they want or someone making a goal is not someone in the middle of emotional distress or being blocked from learning. To understand the nature of that one, we'd need to have an actual person with a vision or in the midst of making a goal and explore specifically what is happening for them.

This is why I have said there is nothing wrong with the word ‘should'. It has a perfectly appropriate use in the language. But, when you know you have a problem and you are exploring to find out what it is all about, and in that context those kind of red-flag words pop up, then you want to be alerted enough by them to look underneath and see if it is one of those kind of situations where a dearly-held idea has acquired the power to make the reality seem wrong and to stir up emotional reactions.

As Raphael can testify, these emotional reactions are not minor feelings, and they have the power to stop you from doing the very learning that, if you did it, would lead you in six months or a year into a totally different place where you wouldn't even have those feelings because Hebrew would then be as easy for you as it is for your study partner.

Raphael: You know, I think I may have internalised something that the Dean said to me once. I was required to have special tutoring by the faculty in order to continuing in good standing in the college. And the tutor, instead of helping me to learn the language just did the translation for me, so all I did was take notes. So I've had experiences where I thought I was learning but I wasn't.

And the Dean asked me one day how was it going? And I said, "I am doing a whole lot better than I was when I first got here." Which was true, because I had been learning and the more I learn, the more I learn and I do know a whole lot more and after having been a rabbi for almost 20 years I am actually a really good rabbi. I don't have the Hebrew skills that I should have, but anyway that's beside the point. I have been learning and I have been growing and it has been changing.

So I said to the Dean, "I know a whole lot more and I am doing better", and he replied, "Knowing more than what you did when you first came is not the issue. The people out there aren't going to know where you were when you started. They are not going to say, ‘oh, he is so much smarter than he was before'. They are going to have an expectation of your capabilities from the onset."

So, perhaps I have internalised that conversation.

David: Well, other people might or might not have an expectation, but what relevance does that have to you?

Raphael: Much relevance… OK, how do I explain this?

David: By the way, we are now beginning to get into the other side of what you brought up earlier about your assumptions about other people's expectations about what you should know. We didn't get into it much at the time, but the thread has led us back to it now.

Raphael: There are pragmatic realities that I am responding to. Two situations come to mind immediately. One is when I was a rabbi for a while in Manchester and I am doing a sermon dialogue which is my style. We are doing the question and answer part with the congregation and a 12 year old child who hadn't yet had her Bat Mitzvah is learning in the day school and she's asking me a question about the Talmud and Jewish law. I don't even know as much as she knows in order to ask me the question, let alone how to answer it and here I am in public.

David: You have just told us a fact. Is there a problem with that fact?

Raphael: [Laughs] The problem with that fact is that anybody who is a rabbi should not bested by a 12 year old in terms of text studying knowledge of Jewish law. But the game is to attack the rabbi and try to score points. Because the rabbi in the Jewish world is the supreme scholar. The rabbi is the top of the hierarchy.

David: "Anybody who is a rabbi should not bested by a 12 year old." So is this another idea or construct you have?

Raphael: Yes, we are back to an idea again.

David: And is it the actual reality in the entire rabbinical field that all rabbis are supreme scholars, except for you?

Raphael: No.

David: So what are we talking about here?

Raphael: We are talking about how I don't want to get clumped in with the ignoramuses who are rabbis. I don't want to be considered an ignoramus. [Laughs] OK, yeah, there are rabbis who are stupider than me. But I want to play with the big boys, I don't want play with the dumb ones.

David: So what would it take for you to fulfil that desire?

Raphael: Well, there we come to the other half of the problem. I was on my way towards the solution, but it seems that the world at large is in my way. I applied for and was accepted to study in Israel for a month this summer all expenses paid. And I was thinking, Aha, now I can learn Hebrew. I have never been to Israel longer than the time I was in the hospital. So I haven't had the experience of Israel that is so normative with my colleagues, which is to spend a year or more there.

David: Sorry, but the question I asked is what would it take for you to reach the level that you want to reach?

Raphael: Yeah, I am getting there. It takes studying and it takes studying in a environment where I won't be shamed by what I don't know and Israel is the best place to study…

David: For the moment let's just take it bit by bit. In other words, it would take you studying. It takes you learning what you don't know at this moment.

Raphael: Right.

David: Is there any way to get there without taking that step? The learning step?

Raphael: No… have to learn.

David: If you took the steps, the first step you'd learn a little bit and the next step you'd learn a little bit more and the next more and at some point you'd be on your way to where you want to go. But it appears that you run into something here that stops you from starting those learning steps.

If I heard you correctly, it appears to be those bad feelings. And what we are exploring at the moment is where the bad feelings come from. Whether they are because of these ideas of what you should have known but don't, or the ideas of how quickly you have to learn but didn't, or about other people's expectations that are stopping you from taking those steps from where you are—the simple first step that you can take?

Raphael: Yup. Yup. The shame is very powerful.

David: OK. Let's take a moment with that one. You have just said what I call an unfinished sentence. You have named a powerful experience you have—shame. But you haven't finished the sentence to say what the shame is an experience of.

What is shame? What is actually going on when you have that experience? Ashamed of what?

Raphael: This is coming back to the same place. Shame of not knowing and being shamed—actively being put down by somebody else.

David: Has there actually been somebody putting you down?

Raphael: Oh yes, all through rabbinical school. My first year instructor had a primo reputation for embarrassing people and putting them down, not unlike what happens to many doctoral students and doctoral candidates along the way. It is partly an academic game, but, yes… daily.

David: I suppose one could call it a game until you look at the consequences. It might be a game for him, but how much of a game was it for you?

Raphael: No, not a game for me, no.

David: So, at the very least we are looking at extremely bad teaching. In fact, I wouldn't even call that teaching. That's not an instructor, that's more of a destructor.

Raphael: I was well schooled in knowing that I didn't know.

David: This kind of mistreatment is a very important thing to see through, because there is certainly no end of that sort of ‘teaching' around. Probably all of us here have experienced it in some way or another. It can be very powerful stuff that can have a long-lasting effect as you can see.

But it has relatively little to do with you if someone else fails to see where you are in your learning and consequently fails to help you move from where you are to somewhere else. In that sense it doesn't reflect anything on you or your ability, but it sure says a lot about him.

Raphael: So why have I taken this in and taken this on, again and again, oppressed, repressed depressed, suppressed… pained… been deeply pained by it?

[Pause for an emotional moment…]

David: Well you have at least a little bit of an answer from what we've found here already. Because, notice, if you have those ideas that come up in the moment—those ‘I should have known', ‘I have to learn quickly' ideas—then at the very moment when you have those, they are not just ideas. There is an entire set of experiences that go with it—shame, feeling stupid, frustration. Those experiences are very real and quite powerful, and if you misattribute them and you think they say something about you, you end up actually identifying with them.

This reinforces the ‘I should know' idea so the next time the not-knowing situation happens, you think the same way and have the same experience. In that sense, the idea quickly becomes a ‘reality'—for you. After all, there is no ‘reality' like an experience, or to put it differently, there is nothing like a powerful experience to make something seem like a reality—even if it isn't.

Of course, the experience you are having is definitely very real, but it is not about what you think it is about. It is not at all an accurate description about your intelligence or your ability to learn, but it is certainly a very real experience.

A moment ago you said a very interesting thing when you said, "I am a very good rabbi, I just don't know the Hebrew." But then contrast that with your statements about what a rabbi ‘should know'. And yet here you are a rabbi, and a very good one by your own admission. You just have this particular territory of your Hebrew knowledge that could be improved.

Now take in that you have had a number of actual experiences in the past with that instructor (and perhaps other ones) who did say very direct and belittling things to you. You thought they shamed you and put you down.

But it is an interesting thing to consider that they didn't see the situation accurately either. They thought you should be somewhere more knowledgeable, when in fact reality at the moment was showing them (and you) that you were here not there. Unfortunately though, rather than do their job of helping you move from where you were, they ‘put you down'.

However, can you really put somebody down if where you are putting them down to is where they already are? It's only a ‘down' from their inaccurate expectations of some sort of ‘up' where you weren't.

But because of your ‘should' ideas and these painful past experiences, every time you hit another moment when you don't know the Hebrew, you feel as if someone is putting you down or judging you even when you may not know exactly what they are thinking. This, of course, stirs your emotions up again and reinforces the feelings and the ideas.

Raphael: Well, then I have the internal jury…

David: But if you feel the same sort of shame and put-down-ness from your internal jury, then you're really saying that now your own thinking has the ability to reinforce this circle and stir up the emotions you go through because of it, even when there's no actual external person putting you down. Nothing except your own framework of thinking.

You may not have an answer for this and there may be no way to know without trying it, but here's a question for you to think about. What might happen if that internal jury was not there judging according to the ‘should'? If instead you simply recognized, "Oh, here is the level of my knowledge", and for instance when your study partner says it is easy, you might say back to him, "Well, it's not easy for me. It might be easy for you because you had a different background that I didn't have."

Notice, in that situation there is no one putting anyone down and no one being put down. There might, in fact, be sympathy from him, or understanding, or who knows what. That would be a very different situation.

In other words, you are right, you have the internal ‘jury' which reconstructs it as if the same thing was happening again, when in fact no other person has done anything, outside of your own thinking.

Raphael: No other person is currently doing anything. They have in the past, and they may quite easily in the future.

David: But they may not. Notice your framework doesn't acknowledge a ‘may or may not'. So you don't get a chance to actually find out. With that framework you automatically assume it is déjà vu all over again and automatically jump to the conclusion of being shamed and put down and so out come all those emotions and feelings again, even before it happens.

Raphael: Yes, but there really is an external reality. When I go to rabbinical conferences or a study session and they don't hand out a translation, I am lost.

David: That's a fact. One implication of that fact, as you said before, would be to do the study so that in six months or a year from now you wouldn't be so lost. End of the problem.

Raphael: I acknowledged that studying and learning the language is a remedy to the situation. But I don't live in such a world where I can simply immerse myself in the study of Hebrew for a year, and even if I could, I don't think a year's immersion would bring me to the level where I should be at.

‘Should'… I know, I heard the should.

David: Good. That's why I'm pointing it out each time, so that you will begin to hear it yourself on your own.

Well, I just picked those figures of six months to a year out of the air. But the point is, whatever you could do would be an improvement from where you are now and whatever you can do after that would be an improvement again. You would be doing that which is actually possible. Is there anything else that is actually possible?

Raphael: Yes, I could continue to avoid situations that require text study.

[Laughter]

David: Yeah, you could do that. But would that solve anything? Other than to keep the same lack of knowledge there that would keep you from your desire, as you called it, to ‘play with the big boys'? It would preclude the movement of learning, and it sounds like as long as you keep those other ideas intact then any time a similar situation came up, you would feeling the same shame—of being an impostor rabbi.

Raphael: And we still then come back to the emotional reality which in most cases prevents me from asking for help. So let me follow though with another concrete one. I have been given this opportunity to study in Israel this summer. Given the situation, I don't know what to do. The anxiety is building…

David: Let's just go back to when you said the emotional reality stops you. What exactly is the ‘reality' part of the emotional reality that prevents you from asking for help?

Raphael: OK. So the possibility is that I will go to Israel for this program and that I will stay a second month and study. A friend of mine is the assistant director at a school in Jerusalem. She has suggested that I would love that program; the teachers are great, and you take a language exam and they assign you to a level. So I wrote back and I say, so tell me…

[pause] Sorry… emotions…

Am I really going to be able to study there, or will the teachers shame me for what I don't know?

David: You are speaking as if the teachers might shame you. How can a teacher shame you?

Raphael: Been there, had that.

David: The teacher can say certain things, but the shame is your response. I can think of a situation where the teacher could say the same thing to someone else who just happened to have the same level of knowledge—or lack of knowledge—that you have, but that somebody will not have any experience of shame.

James: So you are saying, David, that a teacher could have the intention to shame somebody else but it is the actual taking in of that shame and accepting that attempt to shame you that causes the experience of shame?

David: Yes, well sort of, depending on what you mean. Notice the implication here is that the shame is caused by the teacher. "The teacher is shaming me." But does the shame come from the teacher, or does the shame come from the idea that I should already know this?

It doesn't even matter if what the teacher said was, "You should know this, are you an idiot or what?" Take my example of someone with the same lack of knowledge as you who goes into the same situation. The difference is that this person doesn't have the same set of ‘I should' ideas as you do. This person is in the same classroom and he knows what he knows and he also knows what he doesn't know and he knows he needs to learn.

Then if such a teacher said, "You should know this, are you an idiot?", he wouldn't feel shamed, he would just say, "Well, I'm sorry, but I don't. That's why I am here for help. Will you help me?" With a subtext of, "Either you are going to help me or you're not. And if you are not going to help me, what kind of teacher are you?"

So the teacher may be saying whatever they are saying with whatever intent they may have, but our person wouldn't be feeling ashamed unless he also had some idea that he should know something which he doesn't know.

What's the shame in knowing what you know and not knowing what you don't know? That's just where you're at. That's why you are there—to learn.

It's essential to see this clearly, because otherwise you will be taking it into yourself as if you have done something wrong. But if you look closely, any teacher who would say something like that has a big problem. They've done something virtually unforgivable as a teacher—to make a student feel bad for being where they are. Their job is to help you, not to make you feel bad.

But when they've come out with rubbish like that, you tend to see it as something wrong with you. You don't see it as something that they did and talk to them about it, or get out of there, or complain because that's extremely bad teaching and it's abusive to boot.

And by the way, it doesn't say a single thing about you, but says a huge amount about them.

Raphael: So shame is a response to a perceived situation, or to an actual situation. Nobody can shame me unless I allow them to shame me.

David: I would say nobody can shame you regardless of what you do. Shame doesn't came from them. It comes from your ideas that you shouldn't be where you are.

Put another way, use my example again… If somebody went into that same class who knew exactly what he knew and didn't think he should be anywhere else, and knew what he didn't know and who was there to learn, why would there be any shame? Where would the shame be, no matter what anyone else said? How can you be shamed unless you feel that you are somehow somewhere you shouldn't be?

The bad teacher didn't cause the shame, though they are making the same mistake as you are of thinking you should know what you don't. Unfortunately, it is exactly that kind of attitude and statements from others that bring up the shame feelings in anybody who has this idea that they should be somewhere they are not.

To prove this, all you would need to do is change the way you see the whole thing and you wouldn't feel any shame at all, no matter what someone else said. You'd simple recognize what they said as very unconstructive teaching that isn't helping you learn.

Do you see the point I am making?

Raphael: I see the point, and as a teacher I understand that it is the job of the teacher to teach. And my experience in seminary and upper level educational experiences is that there is a culture of who knows the most, who has the most, who is the cleverest, who is the best writer, who is the whatever—a kind of academic machismo, if you will.

David: Well, I would say it is more an academic insecurity. The way you have just described it is how it may look from the outside, but think where that attitude comes from on the inside… It must be coming from some insecurity or tiredness or frustration which is sitting squarely in those academics.

Alastair: Where are we now in term of process?

David: In the larger sense we are exploring to help Raphael see what it is that is stopping him from doing the learning of Hebrew. The learning which, it seems inescapable, is the only pathway that would lead towards what he wants. Knowledge of the language would be very helpful in what he does but he doesn't have it at this moment, and in the real world you can only get it by getting it step by step. But something appears to be blocking him from taking those steps, and we are exploring what that is.

So far it appears to be his own conceptual framework that's stopping him. Under that framework we are seeing a number of places where there are misattributions or misperceptions of the feelings—experiences that are not quite about what he thought there were.

Margaret: You don't include history at all? The history of an adult saying to a child, "You're naughty when you do that." People have had that experience of directly being shamed: "You are a bad person for doing that, you are bad, that's a bad thing to do, don't do that again." The feeling has some history and that's not important for the process?

David: Oh yes, and I acknowledge that. I'm the first to acknowledge that this is huge stuff. But notice, is what the adult says actually accurate? Are you actually bad? Is the kid bad because he took the cookies? Or do we have an adult here who is mistaking the whole situation?

Where is the badness here? In the child or in the act? Seems to me that the act of taking the cookies may have been bad, especially if he was told not to. But the child himself is not bad. So the second way you phrased that may be more accurate: "That's a bad thing to do, don't do that again." That's something a kid could learn from and maybe change his future actions.

But the first one: "You are a bad person for doing that." What can a child do with that if they take it in? Probably end up thinking his very nature is bad? Get into a struggle trying to change himself? And how does he do that? Try to be good? But if he's come to believe he is bad, that doesn't change him into being good. He's just a bad kid trying to act good…

Margaret: But that feeling is sometimes overwhelming for a person who is not able to see that?

David: Yes, it certainly can be and often is. But in what context is it overwhelming? That is, why does it become overwhelming for that person? If you look closely, is it only overwhelming if you do actually take it on that maybe you yourself are bad? This is what we've been looking at here. That could certainly be overwhelming, especially for a youngster who is dependent on being loved, not being rejected for being bad.

However, if it was stated accurately by the parent that your actions of taking the cookie may have been bad, then that's just a small matter of what you did for a few moments and can be opened up as a learning moment so that you can simply change your next actions. If it's just your actions and not you who is bad, why would it be overwhelming? Especially if love for the child is shown all the way through and it is just disapproval of the actions.

In Raphael's case, what's to be ashamed of in not knowing something? It even makes sense that he wouldn't know it, given his background. It's just a fact. Mind you, it is an awkward fact for him because he's put off learning it for quite a while now, and it will get more awkward the longer he puts it off.

Raphael: Bingo.

David: But nevertheless, it is still a fact. And an important one we cannot avoid.

And if we're looking closely here it also becomes unavoidable that your overwhelming feeling of shame—not as it was years ago but as it is reinforced and recreated at each moment—comes from your framework that this is actually about you, about your intelligence or your learning ability. Isn't this clear from the number of examples when this feeling comes up and there isn't anybody else there at all except for your framework of thinking?

It's essential to realize that the power of these long-standing problems is not because of the past. It's because it has been recreated each time since that it is still powerful now. Or to put it slightly differently, every time that you re-experience it powerfully, it is not the past that is causing it anymore, it is your current misperception or misattribution that is responsible.

This is not a theoretical idea of mine, by the way. We've seen it right here each time by just exploring closely what you are actually thinking in that present moment.

If your ‘I should know it' idea and that resulting feeling hadn't been recreated and reinforced over and over again in each present moment, the whole thing would have be long forgotten. This is another of our wonderful human characteristics—the ability to forget things that are no longer relevant to us.

Raphael: You know, right now the feeling gets in the way of being able to hear you. Literally it is like the fog. The shame that comes up from that old habit—the feeling is so intense—that I can't even hear what you're saying.

David: Yes, I can appreciate that from my own experience and from working with others, so there is no rush to get to anywhere here. We can take all the time in the world and say it as many times as necessary and go over it as much as we need.

Margaret: So you are modelling this non-shaming learning…

David: Yes, I suppose I am. You're very perceptive.

Don: I see a real confrontation of ideas between David and Raphael as to what is an accurate picture of reality here.

Raphael: It is not a confrontation of ideas I am resisting. What I am hearing, and of course I may not hear it correctly, but what I am hearing is that the shame is not coming from the outside, it is coming from the inside. And if it is coming from the inside, then I ought to be able to change it.

David: You can.

Lisa: What is the it?

Raphael: The shame. The shame is coming from the inside not from the outside, But then I get a little angry. I think that you're not really hearing me.

David: Understandable, but here's a chance to go over it again. If you went into the situation where some teacher was saying to you, "You should know that, you are a rabbi!" And if, in that situation, you were to say, "Well, I am a rabbi, and I don't know that, and I am here to learn—that's where I'm actually at." Where would the shame be in that?

Raphael: If I could see it that clearly there would be no shaming in it.

David: That's where we are headed—for you to see it that clearly. In fact we are already almost there. Notice that what I just said was simply describing the facts. You are a rabbi. And you don't know as much Hebrew as you need. And you do want to learn. Those are simply facts. I am not saying anything other than facts.

And another fact is that you are there to get some help, hopefully. As opposed to have somebody telling you that you should be somewhere where you are not.

This is important because if you are actually going into a potential learning situation like that and you happen to be carrying around these kind of ideas and feelings where you could feel shamed by someone, then you are in a very helpless position. In a very real sense, you're justified in being afraid of that situation because if those heavy-duty emotional reactions really could happen and you had no control over whether it does happen, and if it was that overwhelming for you, then who on earth would want to put themselves in that kind of situation?

Raphael: Yes!

David: The anxiety is quite literally justified… but only if the way you see it is the true and actual reality that was there.

Raphael: I think it is the reality that is there, and I think that what you are suggesting is that my individual response could ameliorate that reality.

David: No, not at all. What I mean is that if that really was a reality that some outside person could make you ashamed, you'd be justified in being anxious. And you do happen to think that this is the reality. But everything we are uncovering here shows that this is misconceived. It is not the reality. So, I'm not after you changing your response. I'm after you seeing clearly what is the reality. Then you won't even have that response.

It is true that when a teacher has acted toward you that way, you have had a shamed feeling. It might well be true that those kinds of bullying teachers are quite common, but how does that force you to feel ashamed?

Like my example before, I can easily imagine another person with a very different attitude who could go into the same situation with a teacher like that and end up with a very different set of feelings—no shame at all. The same teacher ‘does' the same thing to both of you, yet the two of you have different responses.

When this happens, how could it be the teacher who causes the shame? That is impossible. It can't be. If the teacher caused the shame, then it would happen to everyone they act that way towards. But the feeling of shame doesn't happen to this other person because he has a different point of view.

So it's the point of view that causes the shame, not the teacher. I can't see any way around that one, can you?

Raphael: No, well, I don't know. I don't know. I want to learn, teach me.

I've grappled with this one. Victor Frankel basically says similar things to this, that no one can take away your humanity from you unless you allow them to. He was responding to his experience in the camps in World War II. The Nazis could take away everything from him except his control over his response to the situation. I think that he is brilliant, and I think I would have crumbled long since. I think there are people in the world who rely on being able to create a certain reaction and I am hearing you say that the response of shame is my response and that I can unlearn that response to a given situation.

David: See, this is where you have it turned around for yourself. You believe it is a response to the situation, and as long as you do, you'll have that response. They go together.

But what I'm showing you is that the shame is not a response to the situation. It is a reaction to the framework you have that you should be somewhere else in your knowledge than where you are. It is the inevitable feeling you will have if that is the framework you bring into those moments when the reality is that you don't know the language but the idea is that you should. Anybody carrying that idea into that situation would have the same sort of reaction.

[To the group:] I am sure you can all relate to this sort of thing yourselves.

Lisa: It's not like you're trying to change the response in a indirect way. It's understanding what it is a response of…?

David: Yes, yes. Showing you that with that framework of ‘I should…', you will have that reaction every time and…

Raphael: Can you say that again? Anybody with the same framework… And the framework is: ‘I should…'?

David: Anybody hitting the situation where the reality is what it is and yet they think it should be something else—in this particular case where you don't know something but you think you should—would have a similar reaction because of that ‘should' framework.

By the way, we are still exploring the process tool of red-flag words and why they are important to catch. Because if you don't wake up to them you can't explore under them enough to start to see how accurate or inaccurate your ideas and points of view are to the situation.

Notice when we caught the red-flag words and did a little systematic digging, we quickly found that the problem is that you are attributing the shame feeling to the ‘not-knowing Hebrew (…when you should)'. As we explore around it more the question gets raised: can that feeling of shame be coming from not-knowing Hebrew or is it coming from the fact that you think you should and yet you don't?

Because, as you said yourself when I asked you before, "If you hit that moment and didn't have that ‘I should' idea, would you have any feeling of shame?" And you said something like, "I don't know, I might have feelings of excitement about learning or I may not want to learn, but shame it is not one of the feelings that might come up. Excitement or interest or boredom maybe, but not shame."

Lisa: Also the power of the should is that it seems the reality then becomes unacceptable. That this should is the only acceptable thing. It is not that you say that you don't want to learn or, yes it would be great to know Hebrew. It's ‘I should', which makes the reality of where you are actually at unacceptable. I'm clarifying this for myself, but I can ask it as a question: when you are at the level you are at with your Hebrew and you have this idea that you should be at a different level with it, how does that ‘should' idea then make the reality seem?

Raphael: My experience of this dilemma is not a cognitive one. My experience of the dilemma is not that I hold an idea of a certain level of achievement. My experience is that I open a prayer book and the habit of my childhood of just having to try to make the right sounds is dominant as opposed to connecting to the page and the words as an actual language. So that I don't experience the language as a language. I experience it as a set of sounds that carries me somewhere.

My experience when I prepare my weekly Torah study for the students is that I don't access the Hebrew language, I don't access the text of the Torah, of the Bible, in its original without using English. My experience when I try to do Talmud which is mostly in Aramaic, or these texts that I am studying with my partner over the phone, is that I am illiterate. I can't access the language.

My experience in the Hebrew classes that I am taking now at the college is a different kind of experience altogether, which is an interesting one that somehow, since I am able to say quite easily, well, I am a rabbi but I don't know modern Hebrew. The study of modern Hebrew is not quite so loaded for me, so I am actually being able to learn the language and use all kinds of vocabulary that I had accumulated over the years and bring into this experience of the modern Hebrew.

And I am having Aha moments with grammatical things like how you do the definite noun phrase. I didn't even know what a definite noun phrase was few weeks ago, but now I have learned what a definite noun phrase is and when I see it I can get it. But primarily my experience is that I am illiterate. And I am a very literate person in English and I hate being illiterate in Hebrew!

So that's my experience. But what David is suggesting to me is that the emotions of shame come from a cognitive framework of ‘I don't know but I should know' and therefore I feel ‘arrrgggh'!

But I am not having that cognitive experience of the idea of shouldness. I am having an actual experience of not being able to penetrate a text when I am used to being able to access the written word. And the written word—not only in Hebrew but in the Jewish tradition—is vastly significant.

David: But if you are having an experience of not being able to penetrate it, how does shame come into that?

Raphael: I'm stupid… because I should be able to… Ahhh! [laughing]

David: You see, you're starting to catch the red-flag words.

You say, "I'm stupid because I should be able to…", but look really closely here. I propose to you that the feeling of stupid comes because of that idea.

"I'm stupid because I should be able to…", as opposed to, "It is simply a fact that this is the level of my knowledge at this point."

Notice you just described a situation where your framework is more accurate and accepting of the facts—that you don't know modern Hebrew—so you can go ahead easily. It is interesting to learn and you progress. And there is no shame. On the other hand, the framework that you ‘should' know the rabbinical Hebrew when in fact you don't know it, gives you the shame and stops you from progressing.

If you had the same attitude as you do with the modern Hebrew, is there any reason when you think about it, why your other Hebrew learning wouldn't be just as interesting and you would also be progressing?

I think what Lisa was saying, or at least the opposite side of what I understood, is that if you didn't have those ideas of what you should do, where would you be but accepting where you are? Here is what you do know and here is what you don't know. You would accept that this is where you are, since it is, in fact, where you are. You could then move from where you are to the next step.

Raphael: OK! I give up. I agree. The problem is my cognitive framework. Now what? How do I unwire it? It seems to be infused in me like a tea bag in water.

David: Yes, I'm sure it is and it's something that has been probably reinforced many times and it has been reinforced all the more powerfully because there are huge emotions that go with it.

There is nothing like an actual experience to make something seem real, especially if you misattribute the experience as if it has to do with your level of knowledge, your intelligence, or your stupidity—until you actually start to believe that you are that. But the point here is not specifically how to disengage it, the point is to actually see that it is only an idea you hold—an inaccurate idea. It is not the reality!

You know what you know and you don't know what you don't know. That's the reality. And your idea is not just an idea. It is a particular sort of idea. It is not: "Oh I don't know this, but some other people do" or: "I don't know it, but it might be kind of nice to." It is: "I don't know and I should know it."

If you really pause a moment to think of the implications of this kind of should. What you are saying is that there is something wrong with the situation as it is because it should be a different situation. It shouldn't be this one. It is exactly saying, ‘This reality is wrong to be this way, it should be or has to be another way."

Literately, it is a fixed idea. You are holding on to that idea very, very strongly as to what should be, and judging reality as being wrong because it isn't what should be, and then going through big emotional reactions because of this. That's the very essence of this problem.

But reality is what it is—you learn at the speed you learn; you don't learn any faster. To the degree that the idea is fixed, the idea will be held onto in the face of repeated experiences that show you that reality is not what the idea says. And in spite of having these experiences over and over, you never get to take in what reality is because the idea is always making reality seem wrong. Consequently the idea gets more fixed and every time you hit that situation, reality seems wrong again and isn't what it should be and this generates the shame and frustration experiences, which as long as you interpret them as being caused by not knowing the language, will reinforce you to experience it the same way the next time…

Do you see how it works? Soon you end up where the idea acquires more ‘reality' than the actual reality. And you are stuck in an endless series of trying to change the reality to match the idea, which would be very wonderful if you could manage it. But notice, reality seems to be most uncooperative in matching itself to your idea. And through all of this, it has never occurred to you to really look at these two and see which one is real and which one is an idea. So you've been truly stuck in it.

If you had the tools to explore it carefully and get outside the preconceptions as we are learning to do now, then you'd easily see what is real and what is the idea. This is what unfixes the idea from seeming like the reality you think it is. Then, rather than trying to get reality to change to suit your ideas, you could perhaps operate the other way around and let the idea shift to match the reality. Then there'd be no conflict and no reactions and no problem.

Raphael: And so I'm now wanting to resist you completely. I am seeing in my peripheral vision Rebecca stretching and I'm thinking of all the dancers I've known where there was a certain level of physical flexibility in the body and strength and endurance and grace required in order to be a dancer. If you put ten people in front of an audience you would probably have the audience saying that x-percentage of them really were dancers and x-percentage hadn't quite got there yet. I think that with the Hebrew there is a reality there. The parallel of putting myself on stage as an accomplished performer and I am not!

David: Why are you putting yourself on stage as an accomplished performer when you are not?

Rebecca: Because I'm a rabbi!

David: But you're not being the rabbi that you are, you are trying to be some rabbi that you are not.

Raphael: I know, but rabbi-ness like dancer-ness has a certain set of implications to it.

David: Notice you have another idea here—of what rabbi-ness is. Are you saying that if whoever is in control of assigning and/or taking away rabbi-ness knew where you were they would take it away?

Raphael: No, they can't!! haha!

David: So where did you get this idea about the definition of rabbi-ness, especially when you see that there are other rabbis that don't even know as much as you do?

Raphael: But those are reform rabbis and I am not a reform rabbi.

David: Ahh, does that mean you're an unreformed rabbi then?

[Laughter]

Raphael: My apologies to any reform rabbis who might be listening. Many of them are much smarter than me and have more skills.

David: Let me just say something here on the process level. Something I can speak about from my teaching experience and which I think is important to mention now.

We were working this morning with someone else whose issue was being caught up in a circular problem—where his way of seeing things takes him around and around in a circle. When somebody is caught in such a circular issue, the problem more often than not isn't one of avoidance or resistance, though that may also be there in some cases. It is more that somebody is truly caught in something that they can't see their way out of. They are in a maze. They are in a labyrinth. Every time they think they are heading for the exit, they end up over here back in the circle with the symptoms again. It is the nature of that one until you work out how to escape from it.

Don: Yes, and the intention is to get out of the maze, it is just you miss the door every time.

David: Eventually through exploring and exposing these vicious circles, you'll know the nature of them and understand how you keep caught in them and how to liberate yourself from them.

Here we've uncovered another bit of it. The very essence of this circle is that the ‘should' thing seems more real than the reality—literally. Reality does seem wrong and you are not the only person in such a circle who is going to keep on insisting that the way you see it is a reality and that you really should know it. That's why you are caught in it, because you have such a degree of forceful fixedness on the ‘should'. If you didn't have so much certainty in the ‘it has to be like this', you wouldn't be caught in a circle and it wouldn't be vicious.

I already know this from helping others, so I know that this is what is going to happen. That in our process here we do need to go around it all more than a few times because you do really need to take in the degree to which you hold the ‘it should be like this'. We don't say these words for nothing. "It has to be like this", and you really do think that is the way it should be.

Lisa: And it should already be that now, it's not like something for the future…

David: Yes, these are real words, with a real meaning for him.

Don: Do you ever bring in, say, his material that he brought in? It cleared my head when you said these ‘shoulds' and ‘have to's' are attached to lots of ideals and for Raphael, clearly, it was attached to the whole idea of the whole Jewish religion and the Torah and all this vast array of tradition. Is it helpful to bring that in and point it out?

David: Yes, that's what I'm doing. What the ‘shoulds' seem to be attached to is the idea of rabbi-ness. That's what a rabbi is, or should be, even though we actually have one here that is not like that. And perhaps quite a few other ones are not like that either. Even if some are, that doesn't mean that all rabbis have to be like that.

Don: I don't know if it is only from the outside that it makes it clearer. It is clearer to me that being a rabbi is attached for Raphael with this tradition of being a rabbi. But evidently he has escaped the tradition in some ways. I mean, for instance, by not having the usual upbringing.

David: How real and true for everyone can the tradition be if there are exceptions?

Don: What I'm saying, is there any helpful way to bring this into the picture for him to bring him to an easier realisation that the should is…

Raphael: Oh, I can go on and on about my accomplishments as a rabbi—the whole shooting match. I could tell you about when I was last in Jerusalem in 1998 that I helped to create a revolution that is still going on. I can do all that. That stuff is not hanging me up. The accomplishments are not a problem. And my genuine accomplishments as a rabbi and my skill as a rabbi and my work with people, that's not a problem. This is the problem for me. This is the place that is loaded for me.

And on the other hand, I would say just in my own defence. I don't know if I have to defend myself, but I seem to want to… [Laughter] …a lot of the rabbis that are real text-jockeys don't know what to do if they are in a hospital with somebody who is dying or in a ceremony with a 12 year old who is about to become an adult or at a wedding or…

David: What does that actually tell you about what a rabbi should or shouldn't be?

Raphael: Yeah, well I have ideas about what rabbis should be and I am a lot better at the things I think rabbis should be doing except the text stuff. But maybe that's just because I can't do the text stuff.

David: Yet…

Raphael: Yet… yet… yet…

Alastair: Would it be good LearningMethods to take a look at ‘should' and try to codify exactly what would be an acceptable level of knowledge of text, instead of keeping it vague? Will it help defuse it a little bit or is that appropriate?

David: That's an interesting idea. We could do that, but then notice what we'd need to be clear about. We'd need to finish that sentence—acceptable to whom? It appears that an acceptable level to Raphael is way above where he is.

Alastair: But it hasn't really been codified…

Raphael: Oh, sure it has… An acceptable level of text would be to be able to read it and understand it.

David: Acceptable to whom?

Raphael: To me. I would like to be able to read this and understand it, without going, "What does that word mean?"

David: This is a fact: you would like to be able to read it. There is another fact here—that at this particular moment you can't. There is another potential fact—a probable and likely fact—that you could learn it given some time.

Raphael: And somebody who is gentle enough.

David: Gentle enough to…?

Raphael: To me. To not be hard on me when I am trying to learn it and say, "Oh, what an idiot you are."

David: And would you be an actual idiot, if somebody said that?

Raphael: [pause…] No, I am not actually an idiot.

But that was one of the fond disparaging remarks of my childhood. One of the favourite parental put-downs.

David: Let's come back for a moment to the territory of acceptable to whom? You are speaking as if you can have a level of knowledge that has a property called ‘acceptable'. But is this possible? Is the property called ‘acceptable' attached to the knowledge level? Or is acceptance something individuals do?

Here's where we are getting very much into the territory of understanding the nature of value systems as I call them. I'll not go into it much here, except to point out clearly that it is human beings who accept or do not accept. There is no such thing as an abstracted ‘acceptable level of language'.

There is a particular level which is acceptable to somebody and a very different level which might be acceptable to somebody else. The acceptableness is a property of the person doing the assessing of the language knowledge, not a property of the language knowledge. But, boy, do we often mistake that one!

So if you are the one doing the accepting or not-accepting, and this accepting is being applied to the level of your language knowledge, does that mean that you are not accepting the level of knowledge you have?

Raphael: OK. So we're back again to the actual reality I'm up against. It is true, even though I am a rabbi, and I am a good rabbi, that were I to apply to the college now to go to school there I would not have a sufficient level of Hebrew to start! And that does a number on my head, that I don't even know as much Hebrew as the students who are starting now.

David: And if you were applying now and you wanted to be a rabbi, wouldn't you presumably do the work to learn it first before you'd get in? So is this a problem?

Raphael: Aha! Framework again… cognitive framework. The dissonance comes from my own assumptions about what I know and what I don't know based on…. Aha… aaah…

Margaret: I don't hear you saying that he didn't choose a teacher well. You're not saying that either.

David: Well, you're right, that is sitting there too and having a good teacher would be a relevant factor in how easily and well he would learn as he's experienced with his modern Hebrew teacher. But it is not the main issue here. You can't begin to choose a teacher well until you have a framework that would allow you the presence to assess how the teacher is actually teaching. Is he or she a constructive, helpful teacher or an unconstructive, bullying teacher?

Because right now if the teacher said something disparaging, Raphael would see it as shaming him rather than seeing it as something to do with that teacher's way of teaching. He would not be able to say, "This teacher isn't accepting that I am where I am in my learning and isn't giving me the help I need." Instead, you can bet that probably he'd be so in reaction in that moment he wouldn't be able to assess anything about the teacher. He'd be feeling it said something about him. It would simply produce another painful experience and reinforce all his ideas about his lack of intelligence or ability or rabbi-ness.

Lisa: So, David, just a moment before it sounded as if what Raphael put out as a problem about getting into college, you restated as facts about his level and then you asked if there is any problem with that?

Raphael: Well, David said if I wasn't already a rabbi now and I wanted to be a rabbi then I would go and study what I needed to know in order to get into the college and so what is the problem? And I'm still wrestling with him and saying, but there is a standard, and here is some proof that there is a standard. The level of Hebrew I know wouldn't even qualify me for admission now and I am even already a rabbi.

Lisa: So there is a standard coming from this school to get in?

Raphael: Right.

Don: And he pointed the way around that fence.

Raphael: Which is back again to the learning thing and the should thing and the framework thing and that the shame is my response to an external situation but it is not inherent in the situation. It is there because I put it there… And then I get angry.

David: It is angry at…, or angry because of…?

Raphael: Because then I can distil it down to it: it's all my fault, blame the victim, I am feeling the shame…

David: Why is there any fault here at all? Where could there be any blame? You have recognized that there is a level of knowledge about the language you do not have. That's a fact.

You know that this is something that would be helpful for you and something you want to do. That's a fact.

You have enough history, from the sounds of it, to have a certain sense about your ability to learn it. And that you would learn more and more over time if you got at it. That's been true for you before and probably would be again.

I can't see any fault or blame in any of those facts.

The blame comes in when you start to compare where you are to somewhere you are not and this somewhere appears to be your idea of rabbi-ness.

If you just saw all those facts as the simple facts they are, you could go, "Oh, here's something I need to learn and I could start to learn it—and tomorrow, or the next day, or 5 weeks later I will be a little further along."

If you look at it, these exact same facts just described the situation you have in learning modern Hebrew which is not a problem for you. And it's not a problem because there you have taken in and accepted all the facts around not knowing modern Hebrew and so learning it is easy and seems interesting. Why wouldn't this be the same?

It sounds like the only reason why it isn't the same is because of this deeply-held idea you have of what should be—an idea that does not, in actual fact, match reality. And the exact and precise extent that the idea is so deeply held is directly proportional to the amount of shame feelings you have.

Raphael: Say that again? The power with which the idea is held onto is directly proportional…?

David: The depth to which you are holding this, or the intensity, or the fixedness with which you are holding this idea is exactly proportional to the amount of reactive feeling you are having about it.

Lisa: And all those feelings are what keeps you from actually taking the steps that would give you the learning that you want.

Don: What has been a very key thing throughout my LearningMethods experience and exploration, and which I keep running into, is that every time I have a symptom feeling and I relate it to my framework the way I have learned to do in this work, it always turns out that there is nothing wrong with that feeling. That feeling is totally appropriate to the framework once I have figured out what the framework is—my belief or way of seeing things…

Lisa: There is nothing wrong with the shame?

David: The shame is exactly what anybody would be feeling who holds that same sort of belief.

Don: And the tricky thing is to figure out the framework structure that keeps me locked in that feeling. And indeed when I figure that out about some feelings, I am