Acting “as if”

A few days ago I was minding my own business, puttering around the house doing one thing or another, when I heard a loud noise that sounded like a cat hissing, growling, and crying at the same time.

It was the cat.  Hissing, growling, and crying at the same time.

Our son has a love/torture relationship with our cat.  He really does love her, and when I say “torture”, I really mean “have fun in ways that are not conducive to the animal’s short- or long-term physical and/or mental well-being.”  I don’t think that he is being mean on purpose.  But when I hear a noise like I heard, my instinctive and hard-wired reaction is to act as if he was.  This equates to a loud, sharp admonition to leave the cat alone, NOW.  And, often, a threat to find a new home for the cat if we can’t feel like she is safe with us.  In my defense, I’m looking out for the cat’s safety, and I explain this to my son when I try to repair once he’s calmed down a bit.  But the repair may not be necessary without my “acting as if”.  As if he were taking pleasure from torturing the cat, and treated her purposefully in ways that cause her pain, fear, and discomfort.

It’s what organizational learning researcher Chris Argyris refers to as “espoused theory” vs. “theory in use”.  My espoused theory, or belief that I will profess to anyone that asks, is that my son is a sensitive, loving boy, that truly cares about our cat and her well-being.  But my theory in use, or driver of my default reaction, is that he causes her pain for his personal enjoyment.

But I can learn to pause between reflex and reaction.  And due to the magic of neuroplasticity, I can begin to rewire my neural pathways.

This, to me, is the first step towards resolving the conflict between my espoused theory and my theory in use.  It’s the first step in learning not to “act as if”.

Here’s the practice:

1. Reflect after the fact on the way I reacted to a given situation.
2. Maintain compassion for myself, and accept the fact that my reaction was instinctive and so beyond my conscious control.
3. With awareness, the next time I find myself in a similar situation, try to recognize my instinctive reaction before I externalize it.  In other words, pay attention to what I am about to do before I do it.
4. Try to insert a pause between my instinctive reaction and my resulting action.
5. Fail.
6. Try again next time.
7. Repeat as necessary until I am able to insert a pause, even if only for 1 or 2 seconds.
8. Practice extending that pause.
9. Practice consciously changing my action to be rational and considered, rather than reactive.
10. Repeat – accepting that I will have occasional reversions to previous reactive behavior.
11. Keep practicing.

1. Decide that I want to change.
2. Practice changing.
3. Keep practicing.

It’s okay to let go of the expectation that you’ll ever be perfect, because you won’t.  No one can be.  Intentions matter.  If you form the intention to pay attention to when you are “acting as if”, you have taken the first and most important step towards “acting as is”.