Programming Your Life Macro

Macro is short for macroinstruction. A macroinstruction is a programmable pattern that takes a series of instructions and executes them in a sequence after a single keystroke. We use macros every time we hit Command-C to copy and Command-V to paste, when we Shift-Command-Control-Tab whatever. In fact, I just used a macro to move this whole paragraph here from a completely different file. I don’t remember when exactly I realized I could use a keyboard shortcut instead of the mouse hovering up in the menu bar and clicking in three or four steps, but I can’t imagine not doing it now.

Programming Our Own Life Macros

In the same way, we can program our own life macros as we become more aware of our own cycles of behavior, and use them to shorten the time spent fighting or crying or in conflict and increase the time we feel like we’re actually enjoying life. Eventually, we’ll look back on how long it took us to do things before we started using the macro.

Part of the work of talk therapy is guiding clients to examine their actions and develop an understanding of their own cycles of shame or anger or addiction or passive aggressiveness or whatever they’re experiencing. As we work together, they will begin to be able to identify these patterns and analyze how they happen, why they happen, and if they want to stop them from happening.

A good example is a client talking about a fight they had with their partner. This might include a description of the setting, the background, the incident, the reaction, the aftermath, and the reconciliation. The client sees it all happening with a new sense of awareness and understands how this pattern has directed their lives for as long as it has. And after the client sees the cycle, they ask how they can break it.

Let’s not think about it in terms of breaking the cycle. Let’s think about it like we’re programming an emotional macroinstruction sequence. We’ve identified all the steps we want to be in this sequence: setting, background, incident, reaction, aftermath, reconciliation. We know we’re going to go through these stages, and instead of figuring out how to stop these stages from happening, we will learn to shrink the time it takes to experience them.

"Doing the Work"

But how do we accomplish this? We talk about it. We come into session with stories from the previous week about how we struggled with something and analyze what happened and how we felt about it. We talk about the difference between what happened objectively and how we reacted to it subjectively. We observe whether we felt like we were powerless to stop acting the way we were, or if we were able to change how we felt or reacted, even if just a little bit. This is what people mean when they refer to “doing the work.” It’s about having the courage to talk about things that are scary and painful that we’ve spent a long time avoiding talking about.

Every session we spend doing the work, the reaction time between conflict and resolution shrinks. This is how we program our own emotional life macros. You know what triggers you, you know how you react, you know the reasons why, you know how you would rather react, and you know you have the power to act and feel differently. This work will help to shrink the time between conflict and resolution from a week to a day to a couple of hours and hopefully to the point where it all happens instantly in our minds. This cycle to emotional reactions will eventually be accomplished in the stroke of a key, enabling us to skip through the bad stuff and enjoy the good stuff. Shift-Command-PersonalGrowth-Happiness!

To find a therapist, visit the Psychology Today Therapy Directory.