In the world of psychology, negative feedback loops offer a key to better understanding yourself. If negative feedback loops sound technical and complicated, they aren’t. This post breaks down what they are and how they work in ways you wouldn’t expect.
What are negative feedback loops?
In psychology, negative feedback loops are a process in which our unhealthy childhood narratives cause us to act in ways that reinforce these unhealthy beliefs, making the narrative stronger and more entrenched within our belief system.
Let’s break that down a bit more. In another words:
1 Something happens which causes us to have big feelings.
2 These feelings trigger a core childhood narrative about how we and others work.
3 We respond by acting according to how our narrative tells us we should act.
4 When our actions (and those of others) reinforce the emotions and the narrative that caused us to react in the first place, this becomes a feedback loop.
I know, this probably still sounds a bit too abstract, so here’s a story that illustrates how a negative feedback loop—along with an unhealthy narrative—really messes up someone’s life.
Jerry’s story
Seventh and eighth grade confirmed for Jerry everything he’d feared his whole, short life: no one liked him.
Sure, he had friends growing up, but they were more like playmates, his mom pawning off Jerry to this or that kid’s apartment so she could get some time away from him—at least, that’s how it felt.
Sure, his mom loved him—he was her one child—but that didn’t necessarily mean she liked him.
The truth was, Jerry was horribly awkward with anyone his age, and he knew it.
In middle school, the bullies ran the show, making elementary school feel like a friendly scrimmage, a time for kids like Ivis Dewer and the Tucker twins to hone their ridiculing and fine-tune the walk-by elbow jab. In middle school, it was all about fists and sex jokes. It was safer to avoid everyone, even the nice kids who, in his gut, Jerry knew would make fun of him the moment his back was turned.
Then, in high school, he somehow found a few kids who loved Magic: The Gathering and RPGs as much as he did. They felt like friends, but he knew these kids were flukes, a lucky and inexplicable tear in the fabric of how things worked.
Because the real truth? The truth Jerry knew deep in his core? Anyone who actually knew him wouldn’t like him.
And so he decided it was better to stay on the periphery, a pleasant smile to show he was nice but not enough to attract anyone’s interest.
Years passed, and one day, when a somewhat older co-worker named Brad asked him how his weekend was, Jerry felt the familiar rise of panic like bile in his throat. He grinned as he knew he should, and said, “Fine, good. Yeah, it was fine.” He nodded to show how fine it was. He asked about the guy’s weekend because that’s what you’re supposed to do.
He let the guy named Brad talk as his mind tornadoed.
Just get through this, Jerry thought. Friendship was the hope but never the goal.
He smiled and tried to nod at the right spots, the co-worker’s words swirling as Jerry tried to latch onto something that would tell him what question to ask next, knowing that he was already lost in the guy’s story about taking his son bungee jumping.
Brad had paused and was watching Jerry, waiting for him to say something, and Jerry knew this was the moment. Then the man’s eyebrows lifted, and Jerry could read it everywhere in Brad’s face, the guy making the mental note, Jerry: nice enough but boring. Nothing there.
Brad gave a smile that wasn’t a smile, then said he needed to get back to work.
The familiar voice in Jerry’s head: I am dull and boring, a waste of people’s time and effort. “I just stand there awkwardly saying nothing,” he told himself, and suddenly, a new thought materialized. He had it completely turned around: the guy thought Jerry was bored.
Brad had walked away because Jerry didn’t seem the least bit interested in Brad. Neither in hearing about bungee jumping or in volunteering anything about his own “fine” weekend which, truth be told, had been anything but fine—a weekend in which a story he’d written was accepted at Mash Up Online: A Magazine of the Strange and Weird and his cat had become too weak to eat.
How do you begin telling someone about all that?
How hungry he was to talk to someone, and yet when he found himself face to face with Brad, he wanted to flee. All this time afraid of everyone’s disinterest and rejection, working the worry of what to say so that in the end he said nothing.
It all folded back on itself, he thought. Worry about rejection so that he inevitably brought it about. Which only made him fear it all the more.
And then he saw himself with Brad on the bungee jumping platform, a mile high, tied in, and secure. He was frozen in fear, the wind whipping tears to his eyes as Brad yelled into his ear, “Trust me, son, you’re safe. Go for it.”
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