This post is a longer musing on the topic of old and unhelpful thought patterns through the lens of a Harry Potter analogy, from Chloe's Substack.
Recently, I opened my strength training app (RP Strength, courtesy of Dr Mike Israetel – highly recommended) to start a workout and noticed that it had bumped up my target weight for deadlifts. The app automatically adapts target weight and reps according to previous session feedback, so this was normal. But what struck me about this time was my automatic response to the number: “I won’t be able to do that.”
One of the side benefits of working in the sport and exercise psychology space is that it maintains my awareness of my own psychological experiences around physical training. So instead of buying into this thought and acting accordingly (i.e. by reducing the weight), I noticed it and paused to reflect. I considered that I hadn’t lifted this weight in a while, having omitted traditional deadlifts from my programme and focused on higher reps and different techniques for 6 months, all to manage an injury. This weight would mark a new phase of progressing from where I left off pre-injury, and it seemed that my mind hadn’t quite caught up with this new reality. There was also perhaps a sense that it felt too good to be true, given how long I’ve been working on this: a “better safe than sorry” attitude of “don’t trust this.” To be finally out of the woods felt unfamiliar, and therefore difficult to believe.
But the problem with this kind of defensive pessimism is that it can guide behaviour in ways that keep us in the woods; staying in an undesirable but familiar situation can feel preferable to leaving and then returning once again. Knowing this, my response to such thought patterns is to “go over their heads” and do what needs to be done anyway, meaning I went ahead with the planned weight and achieved the target reps. And this shouldn’t come as a surprise – the app works purely on statistics; unlike our minds, it doesn’t contain psychological gremlins that emerge when it detects that we have progressed beyond a familiar threshold; it bases its decisions in objective reality.
Imagine though that I hadn’t noticed the nature of this thought, and instead accepted its propositions and lowered the weight. Then imagine that this became a pattern that was repeated over time. Alternatively, imagine this happens to someone at a critical moment, say in a major competition. Unfortunately it happens all the time, and the consequences can pile up in ways that are quite harrowing in the long-term.
When we act according to automatic thoughts without consideration, we can be doomed to confirm them and stay stuck in a particular place. This is because, by definition, thoughts are relics of the past; the ways in which we react to and interpret present-moment situations – even if they seem totally new – are rooted in past situations which we partially overlay onto the present one. We must do this to render new situations somewhat comprehensible and therefore navigable: “where have I been here before, what is familiar?” But problems occur when these ways of perceiving prevent openness to other possibilities and opportunities.
All too often we buy the thoughts that come up and this then feels like “the way things are”. This is the natural and efficient way of operating – to analyse every thought we have would be too costly. And there may or may not be truth to our thoughts, but the best outcomes surely occur when we allow ourselves to find out what the reality is, rather than deciding in advance. We don’t really know what’s possible and what we can achieve, but we can work to ensure the things that limit us are our actual abilities and the environment, rather than arbitrary psychological constraints.
A Harry Potter analogy
This recent experience evoked memories of playing Harry Potter games on the GameBoy Advance back in the 90s. Just like the films, it involved a lot of attempts to sneak around the corridors of Hogwarts at night undetected. The key was to wait for whoever was patrolling – prefects or adversarial characters such as Argus Filch or Severus Snape – to turn the corner so you could slip by and gain access to some forbidden area. If you were caught, you were sent back to the Gryffindor dormitory, which became extremely annoying if it kept happening.
Prefects are chosen based on their propensity for adherence to rules, conscientiousness, and responsibility. In other words, they are perceived to be reliable and well-considered in their actions. They are tasked with policing students’ behaviour to ensure that it remains within certain bounds. Prefects are also part of a broader system – a framework of rules, regulations and values that serve to guide its inhabitants in a particular direction in a predictable and “acceptable” manner.
This serves as an interesting analogy for the way our sense-making frameworks and its components – thoughts, narratives and beliefs – operate. We naturally rely on patterns of thinking that feel like they have some credibility and predictability to them, often granted by the effects they have had in helping us deal with past situations. The lenses afforded to us through these patterns maintain the pre-existing narratives and frameworks, thus contributing to a sense of coherence and predictability.
As a side note, I also find it amusing and relevant here that a simple letter swap in the word “prefect” gives you “perfect”, something of an aim for perfectionists who are often particularly plagued by tyrannical and rigid thoughts.
All of this renders the environment navigable (at least on the surface), and there are both elements of necessity and benefit to it. However, with order comes the potential for rigidity, constraint and stifling, evoking images of the light and dark sides of the archetype of the king. The benevolent king provides order and protection, but as circumstances inevitably change that system becomes obsolete and proves restrictive and burdensome, ultimately leading to stagnation and decay. The king becomes tyrannical rather than benevolently protective. Thought patterns that have somehow served us in the past are no longer serving that same function but instead keeping us stuck.
So, when we get sent back to the Gryffindor common room because we have been apprehended whilst exploring, we’re back to a place of safety and familiarity, somewhere we understand how to act and what effects our actions will have. If I had ignored the app's suggestions and dropped the weight on my deadlifts, the apprehension I temporarily experienced would have gone away and I would feel comfortable in lifting a lower weight that felt “within my grasp”. We can stay there and avoid being “told off” – avoid acting in ways that contradict our thoughts and hence trigger a cacophony of internal protests from critical and anxious voices. But our true quest still awaits and summons us elsewhere - the call to adventure and exploring new territories. Staying in the safety of known psychological environments is antithetical to progress and transformation. We are not acting under the premise of “how far can I get?”, but “I’ll just stay here and do what I can.”
Harry and his companions are certainly not satisfied with accepting the status quo; the attitude is “I’m going to go there anyway”, so they take the risk and try to access these forbidden areas. It is this pending quest that we turn away from when we buy into limiting thoughts, beliefs and narratives about ourselves and what we are doing. We don’t know what pursuing that quest would get us, but it would be something different to what we have now, and something more aligned with reality, our true potential.
Of particular interest to me is the third-floor corridor, which in the first story (The Philosopher’s Stone) Hogwarts’ headmaster Albus Dumbledore rules as strictly out of bounds, warning of a painful death for those who disobey. This concept seems rich in symbolism and my mind went several places with it. In some Jungian circles the number 3 is considered symbolic of incompletion or moving towards completion, the precursor to the number 4 which is often used to symbolise wholeness. Entering a forbidden third-floor corridor then could reflect exploring territory that holds promise for growth, and opportunities to engage with Jung’s “transcendent function” – the integration of conscious and unconscious minds, facilitating wholeness. The ego – our conscious sense of “I”, tasked with rendering the world coherent and logical through creation of the frameworks described above – has good reason to want us to steer clear of this realm then, for a meeting with the apparent absurdities and contradictions of the unconscious mind can be destabilising and humbling for the ego. If we’ve gone for years under the premise that we can’t achieve more than XYZ, the positive realisation of “I can do more than that” also comes with “but how do I operate under that foreign premise?”
It also turns out that the third-floor corridor holds the secret trapdoor to the chamber containing the philosopher’s stone, guarded by a three-headed dog named “Fluffy” who is reflective of Cerberus from Greek mythology. So Dumbledore wasn’t kidding – coming across the “hellhound” that guards the underworld is one of the more explicit ways of brushing up again death. But death of what? Death is often considered a symbol of transformation or change – perhaps indicative of the need for an outdated attitude to die and new ones to be born. But again, there are forces at work in the psyche desperate for that not to happen, whether those be the ego or more unconscious defences, because it would disrupt order.
Equally, the philosopher’s stone is an interesting symbol, suggested by alchemists to hold the power to transform ordinary metals into valuable ones such as gold. The Book of Symbols has some interesting things to say about stones; namely, we see stones as ordinary, plain objects of little value, yet the philosopher’s stone is symbolic of the potential in looking at aspects of ourselves we consider ordinary or worthless and transforming them into something that is of value.
How to evade the prefects?
Those familiar with my Substack will know I have a particular interest in the Trickster archetype, and we can see the potential in some of those attitudes here in cultivating the boldness to “go there anyway” despite psychic resistance. With enough attempts to act counter to limiting thoughts, we may reach our version of the third-floor corridor and thus realise that acting in ways that at least give us a chance at success, rather than giving up before we start, is the best way forward, enabling a transformation of our philosophy of performance or physical activity.
Or maybe we use invisibility cloak-style manoeuvres to take ourselves by surprise. My best example of this is box jumps – once I reach certain heights, I often find I can’t commit to it and back out of doing it at the last minute for fear of failing (and falling). But I know I can jump that height, because if I tuck jump in the air without the box I can comfortably achieve it. So I sneak past myself by deciding randomly at the last second when I am to attempt it and jump before I can stop myself. *NB: this can clearly go wrong if you don’t know your limitations, so don’t try this at home!
But sometimes we need something with a different kind of energy to overcome these pervasive thoughts that may bring a real power of feeling with them. Bumping up against pesky prefect-type thoughts that dampen your vibe a bit is one thing, but encounters with sentiments with a more hostile tone evocative of Filch or Snape is somewhat more off-putting. Here the Trickster can help clear the way for a more assertive and rebellious energy to come through, maybe that of the warrior or the rebel archetypes.
A particularly powerful quote from James Hollis in Hauntings comes to mind here: “We need to grow larger than the constrictive arenas in which complexes have us play… to realise that being bound to the past is not acceptable and, perforce, thrust into a serious fight to recover a larger measure of personal sovereignty.” This is about committing to moving in our chosen and valued directions and charting a more conscious course in life, which we can’t do while we follow the dictates of our thoughts.
Chloe
Psychology of Movement
Comments