We Have No Idea What Percent of our Thinking is On-going Negative

Most people have no idea how negative their thinking is and why, therefore, they are coping and existing in gray, dreary days instead of enjoying their lives. Sometimes I have to include myself in this number, and I’m a board-certified cognitive behavioral therapist who should know better.

I haven't felt too chipper in the last day or two and first thing this morning I decided to check in on my "self talk,” and spy on my own thinking to see, really, what was my brain conjuring up for me  when I wasn't "paying attention" to my thinking. Was something going on that I didn’t know about that was  getting me down?

What I found out was not earthshaking negativity.. Little stuff.  But it wasn't all that good either. I wasn't congratulating myself on little things that looked good around the house. Taking joy in anything. I was seeing only what  looked neglected. “The laundry room is a mess. I haven’t sent that thank-you note.”

I've spent years trying to grow raspberries and I just turned off the sprinkler system in that section this morning because they never produced berries. “Ugh,” I said to myself. “What a  failure. What a waste of water for years.” Thoughts like that.

As I continued my early morning surveillance over them, my thoughts continued their negative downward march. Thoughts about how I haven't been successful in getting one of my books on Kindle due to technical difficulties. When I opened the fridge to get something out, the light was burned out. Thoughts about “what a pain, I need to put a new light in the fridge. How do you even unscrew the darn thing. And then where do you buy one? Drat, I haven't done my swim yet.”

I'm not thinking how lucky I am to be able to do my exercises because I've got two good arms and legs. Oh, no, nothing like that. Just never-ending mild complaints. How come I'm choosing the negative of everything? Because I wasn't realizing that's what I've been doing lately, probably for days.  I wasn't really checking in on my habitual thinking habits. I didn’t realize that I was mind driving in drudge gear.

So I decided, as I got ready to start my swimming exercise,  I would  look for things to take some joy in. Nothing big. Not too ambitious. I just needed to leave a little less room for those mildly discontented thoughts building cobwebs in my mind where all these nasty little gloom spiders have been building their nests the last few days.

“Could there be?” I asked myself,  “something I could take a few minutes to think good things about? “ I see my dogs asleep. “I'm lucky to have them. No, get away you thought that I need to get their shots. I'm going to insist on thinking how lucky I am that they are healthy. And my computer was working this morning, can't I take some joy in that? Would it kill me to be happy that my computer was working?”

“And I just drank a glass of water. Do I have to think that I have two more glasses to go before I finish my water intake for the morning. Would it kill me to be just a wee bit grateful to have some clean water to drink when millions of women have to walk miles to get some water. Come on, woman, where is your imagination? Why so stuck in the negative!  Move the dial to good news will you. We need some good stuff going on. So what if it's little stuff. That's better than a lot of little bad stuff going on.

A. B. Curtiss

It is Seductive When the TV Tells Us Our Depression as Disease

There are powerful economic social and political reasons to call depression a disease. It is not a brain disease, it is over-extension of  the triggering of the fight or flight response. It can be
self- managed. Why don't our doctors teach us how to do it? First, follow the money. Depression is a multi-billion dollar economic enterprise for the psychiatric and pharmaceutical communities. Don't kid yourself, Doctors and scientists have mortgages and college tuitions to think about, too.

Socially,to insist that depression is a disease gives a measure of importance and approbation to what used to be ordinary malingering. This is hollow  victory for those who would achieve success and self-fulfillment if they would educate themselves about the way to manage depression themselves, and be more self-responsible. Unfortunately, it is very seductive to find a way to absolve ourselves of self-responsibility when we are losing the battle with depression. Again, any victory over self-responsibility is hollow.

Actress Patty Duke wrote in her book, A Brilliant Madness,how “relieved” she was to find she had an “illness,” how comforting to know that her depression and her behavior had not been “her fault.” These are the first four words in her book, all in caps: A DISEASE? THANK GOD!  Celebrities like Duke are part of the social forces urging us to accept this doctor-approved “relief” from thinking our behavior is our responsibility.

The idea that depression and manic depression are physical illnesses  still continues with few challanges in the mainstream medical and psychological community, except for a few stalwart souls such as psychiatrists Thomas S. Szasz and, to a lesser degree, retired Chief Psychiatrist of Johns Hopkins, Paul McHugh. In Szasz’s books, The Myth of Mental Illness and Psychiatry: The Science of Lies and others, he debunks the whole idea that people can be mentally rather than physically  ill, with mental symptoms in need of a doctor’s treatment rather than physical symptoms.

And  Newseek Magazine ‘s cover story  on 1/29/2010 claimed that new research shows that anti-depressants are no better than placebos for depression.

Dr. Szasz,  psychiatry’s most dissident psychiatrist, was once dismissed from his university position for insisting that physicians were trained to treat bodily malfunctioning, not “economic, moral, racial, religious, or political ‘ills’...That doctors were trained to treat bodily diseases, not envy and rage, fear and folly, poverty and stupidity, and all the other miseries that beset man.”

 Szasz claims that the concept of mental illness came about because it is “possible for a person to act and to appear as if he were sick without actually having a bodily disease.”  He believes that mental illness is not a useful concept, that it is scientifically worthless and socially harmful because mental illness is not so much a disease as it is a metaphor for something the person is trying to communicate.

“People have been convinced that “what are really matters of their individuality are, instead, medical problems,” reiterates McHugh. “Restless, impatient people are convinced that they have attention-deficit disorder (ADD); anxious, vigilant people that they suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder; stubborn, orderly, perfectionist people that they are afflicted with obsessive-compulsive disorder; shy, sensitive people that they manifest avoidant personality disorder, or social phobia.”

And, insists McHugh, “wherever they look, such people find psychiatrists willing, even eager to accommodate them or, worse, leading the charge.” McHugh at least is questioning much of the present-day diagnosis of social phobia and multiple personality disorders. Even manic depression, admits McHugh is a presumed disease. The presumption, he declares, “carries the implication that some as-yet-undemonstrated pathological mechanisms and etiological agencies will emerge to explain the stereotyped set of symptoms.”To me this seems like pretty thin stuff to trust one’s life to and yet this “disease theory” of bipolar disorder is present-day medical orthodoxy.

Get Out of Despair First; Brainswitch, then Brainstorm

Dear A. B.

I like the sound of your theory, but what if you don't know the positive alternative to program into your brain? Personally, I am having a hard time finding positive thoughts to supplant the negative thoughts & subsequent sad feelings that I have about my falling home value. So many people across the country are being affected by the economic crisis, in a number of ways & to varying degrees.

The economic turndown presents an ideal "laboratory" in which to test your theories and our mettle, I can see that. I'm just not always smart enough to know what to tell my "thinking brain" when daily it seems, I am presented with more bad news about the economy.

I do tell myself, "It will get better, it will rebound, it will bottom out then improve." But will it, and when and how? I know you're not an economist, I'm not asking for your forecast for our nation's recovery, but this is heavy on a lot of minds right now. What is the most helpful way to view and deal with this crisis that is hitting us on economic, cultural and personal levels?

Dear Ginger,

Hardship comes to all of us in some way at some point in our lives.. Nobody gets off scott free from serious problems and terrible disappointments. Sometimes we get so discouraged we wonder why we should bother anymore.

And we can mourn our losses . However at some point we have to stop mourning our losses and make something out of what remains to us.  Bad enough we should have the reverses. Why should we also beat ourselves up day after day with suffering over them? If we spend all our mental energy suffering, we won’t have space for creative solutions, or at least moving toward solutions.

How do you shoulder disappointment and move ahead with your day? Again the simple process of brainswitching works to get you up out of the frozen state of depression and discouragment and start you in the right direction. At some point, when honest mourning starts becoming the chemical imbalance of depression caused by all the negative thinking, you can always do a few dumb mind exercises to block the onslought of all the fear and negative thinking. You can decide that any more negative thinking is not an option because it won't do any good. Once your brain is on a positive track, perhaps some new idea will occur to you.

If economic woes are the problem, perhaps you will think of some idea to bring in more income, a part time job, some item to sell. If it's the general economy that finds your net worth diminishing, you have a lot of company. Sometimes during huge crises, whole nation is thrown into war or economic disaster we must keep our mental strength so that we can not only be self-sufficient, but so that we can be a help and support to others who are also suffering. Today, for instance I hear many people saying they are "buying American made items even when they are twice the price of imports" just to support small businesses here. But you don't even think of positive moves to make when you are stuck in discouragement. You have to get out of the dark place before the light of creativity has a chance to function.

Here’s where magical thinking comes in handy. The brain doesn’t know the difference between being happy and pretending to be happy. Happy thoughts ultimately stimulate happy feelings. The feelings are genuine even if the thoughts that encouraged the production of those feelings were fake. This is the reason that groups of people all over the country meet regularly every morning for 30 minutes of laughing out loud.

We know the brain is powerful. Magical thinking may be a way we can set the powers of the brain to help us even though we may not know the full extent of those powers. Here's one the the magical thinking exercises from my book, Brainswitch out of Depression.

EXERCISE #1: EMIL COUE’S EVERY DAY IN EVERY WAY:

           

            This is the most famous, most widely used, and probably the very first mind exercise ever devised. Emil Coue was a French pharmacist who introduced to the world a psychotherapy in the1880s based upon hypnosis. In those days it was called “Suggestion.” Coue was the first modern psychologist (Mesmer and Paracelsus were much earlier) to suggest that our ignorance and weakness were causing our problems rather than some overwhelming outside force. The solution was to become strong and informed The implication was that anyone could do it.

            Emile Coue was the originator of positive self-talk, and would take on a new patient only if he would agree to repeat one phrase over and over to himself as a daily habit, “Every day in every way I’m getting better and better and better.”

            The mind, through learned association, puts these affirmations in touch with the knowledge and experience, already programmed into your memory banks that can help carry them out. The mind is a wonderful servant in this respect. It already has the ball, and can make the touchdown if you point it in the right direction.

            Here’s the exercise: Say to yourself either out loud or silently, “Every day in every way I'm getting better and better. Every day in every way I'm getting better and better.” Keep at it for two minutes, five minutes. As long as it takes. It is not a waste of time. What is a waste of time is thinking I am so stressed out and worried, I’m so depressed. In the case of a skin condition: “Every day in every way my face is becoming clearer and clearer.” In the case of a messy house: “Every day in every way the house is becoming neater and neater.” In the case of forgetfulness: “Every day in every way my memory is getting better and better,” etc.

            Once we have taken the edge off the pain of depression with Brainswitching, we can follow that up with this slightly different Directed Thinking technique. We can choose thought patterns which set the brain to working on the actual problem, if only symbolically. Working on the problem, “magically,” points the mind in the right direction to subsequently find more realistic solutions.  

Hope this helps. A. B. Curtiss           

I Responded to the Mocking with Courage and He Felt Ashamed

This is further correspondence ( See blog Tuesday, October 5, 2010) with the man who was having trouble with being  mocked and feeling ashamed when he confessed to his friend that he was struggling with depression. In addition,   the same man was also having some difficulties with his three year old son.  I haven’t edited for grammar. Although this man obviously has trouble communicating in English,  I think there is a great deal of charm  and honesty in the way he expresses himself that goes straight to the heart, although it is not perfect. I was afraid I would lose this if I just “put it all right” grammar-wise.

Dear A. B.

Thanks so much for your support. I could respond to him by my courage and he felt shame. He hugged me the next time he saw me.

I need to ask you about my 3 age of my child. I notice he has lots of fear of every thing like his toys. he fear of the small balls to sink in the bath tub. He always say I am fear of things. 

What should I do in this case.  R__________

Dear R_______,

Congratulations on your courage in stopping your friend from making fun of you and bullying you about your being depressed. There is a basic need for us to love each other, and if we have the courage to take our space, and reveal ourselves  to one another truly, without fear, sometimes that love happens.

As for your son. We all fear things we don't understand. Fear is our first impulse. Teach your son other things besides the ball that are not fearful for him. Don't tell him not to be afraid. Show him how the ball sinks, and then comes back up. Throw the ball up and down. Make it a game. Tickle him with the ball. He will soon start to understand that there are many ways to see things--you can see the fearful aspect of things,  and you also can see the interesting and fun aspect of  things.

Also many children are afraid of the drain in the tub when they see the water going down. They have to learn that they won't also go down the drain and that other things like their toys will not also disappear down the drain. They don't have that knowledge yet that some things will go down the drain and disappear and some things are safe from going down the drain because they won't fit through the hole. They are not born with that understanding, they have to learn it.

My four year old son said there were lions hiding in the hall on his way to bed. I asked him if he was afraid of the lions. No, he said, "bad lions never bite me, cause laughing lions like me. So help your child see that if he has imaginary fears, he can also  imagine things to take care of his fears. If he imagines the ball is lost in the water, help him make up another story how the ball "saves itself by jumping up." You get the idea. A. B. Curtiss

Dear A. B.

I did it today with my child and he seems accepted the way you told me to do and he played by balls in the water.  thanks so much for your advice   

This is the second week I take him to the child care in the university and I try to keep him three to four hours a day for three days a week. 

He seems stressed when I take him and cry when I leave him there. I do not know should I continue with him because I paid 900$. 

Thanks so much for the help. You helped me a lot.  R___________

Dear R___________

Does he just cry when you leave him or is he unhappy while he is there?  Ask the child care center how long he cries after you leave. If he's unhappy a long time that is one thing, but if he's just trying to get more of your attention by complaining when you leave him and two minutes later he's busy playing, that is not serious. Just simply ignore his complaints and cheerfully bid him goodbye, After a while, if he gets no attention for his crying, he'll stop.THis is only the second week and it's strange for him. He hasn't settled into the routine yet. A. B. Curtiss

Dear A. B.

sorry, we almost done with the 3rd week in the childcare. R__________

Dear R_________

I would try it for the rest of the month and see if he improves. You could give him a teddy bear or toy to keep with him while he is at school. Bring it home from school and let him have it before you take him in the morning, and let him keep it during school time and bring it home again. . A. B. Curtiss

You Have to Put Good Thinking Into Your Brain Before you Can Access It

It seems so ridiculous to say this, but think about it. When people do stupid things and say "I don't know what I was thinking in those days," it should remind us that if we don't put ideas in our brain, they won't be there for us to use.

To ensure that your brain comes up with better and better solutions for the problems in your life, you must constantly be programming helpful information into your memory banks that you can draw upon later. This is why education is so important. This is why it’s important to have solid ethical and courageous principles that you can draw self-support from.

Suppose, for instance you have a weight problem. You’re at a meeting and overhear someone say that you’re fat. Sure, you can get upset and hate the skinny person who called you fat. You can withdraw from the group in anger and fear. You can blame everybody for being cold and uncaring. Or you can ask yourself, “What can I do to help myself in this embarrassing and adverse situation?”

You can always turn from your emotional brain and put your thinking brain to work. It will help if, ahead of time, you have previously programmed into your memory banks the principle that it is a good thing to strive constantly to be a better person. It will help if you have already programmed into your memory banks what kind of food is more nutritious and less fattening so you could decide, then and there, to start eating carrots instead of potato chips.

It will help if you have programmed into your memory banks the principle that negative emotion should never be an option, that self-denial of things that aren’t good for you is a good thing, that embarrassing situations are good for one’s character. and one is a stronger person to have suffered and survived than never to have suffered at all. It will help you for the rest of your life if you will program into your thinking brain — right this minute — that you can call upon it and it will always come up with some positive alternative to anxiety, anger and fear.

How to You Escape Negative Emotion and Access Good Thinking?

According to neuro-anatomists, while the thinking brain matures with age and experience, the emotional brain never matures. Thus, we have two-year-old tantrums of infant rage, repeated straight through life by those who don’t know any better. Not just ten-year old tantrums either. We’ve all read about 40-year-olds in road rage, and parents at kid league football games committing mayhem.

The other important thing to know about our two brains — for those who don’t want to allow themselves to stay stuck in rage, depression or social anxiety,— is that the emotional brain, the modern equivalent of our primordial survival instinct, the subcortex, triggers all by itself. But unfortunately this is not true of the thinking brain which is supposed to come to our aid in these horrific situations.

The thinking brain, the neocortex,  MAY very well activate automatically as a result of learned association. The brain works by learned association (think “salt” and the thought “pepper” pops up; think “up” and the thought “down” activates). But, on the other hand, it may NOT, too. In order to be absolutely sure your brain goes in the direction that would be most helpful in any difficult situation, one must call upon the thinking brain as an act of will.

Here’s where that old saying, “freedom of the will” is not just an ancient platitude. Your brain is your most obedient servant. But you have to know how to direct it. If you don’t know how it works, you can unwittingly give your brain instructions that send it whirling into a brain place you don’t want to go. Like rage, fear, social anxiety and depression, all courtesy of your instinctual emotional subcortex.

Getting troubled by these emotions is the very thing that should remind you of your freedom of the will. “Hey,” you can say to yourself. “I’m really upset. I better get out of my subcortex and into my neocortex RIGHT NOW.” There is never any fear. anxiety or depression in the neocortex.

When you are assailed by anxious fear — and remember, blame is the way we avoid feeling the painful feeling of fear. So even if you are not in a state of fear; if you are into blame and jealousy and mad at the world (to avoid feeling the pain of your fear), say this to yourself. “What can I do to help myself in this adverse situation?” This is the way to get yourself out of the subcortex and into the thinking faculties of the neocortex.

It is not easy to do, or everybody would be rational, laid-back vessels of sweetness and light. But we’re not all sweetness and light. We’re frequently upset. And because the emotional brain is instinctual and houses our psychological defense system, we are scripted to pay attention to it first. That’s why it’s good to have second thoughts about things.

It’s not easy to turn away from painful and overwhelming emotion when we just don’t know what to do next. Unchecked emotion freezes us in old holding patterns like denying, blaming, withdrawing, and throwing tantrums. That’s the very meaning of emotion.  e-motion, no motion, we’re frozen in fear, without a means of going forward.

Emotion is the easiest thing in the world to do because it’s an instinct, not volitional behavior. Rational thinking takes more effort. That’s the bad news. But the good news is that you don’t have to know exactly what to do next in order to help yourself.

Your thinking brain has everything necessary in its memory banks to help you. You just need to jumpstart the process by asking your thinking brain to help you, by having those second thoughts (instead of just banging into that car that just took your parking space), by saying to yourself, “Now, hold on, what can I do to help myself here? What is a positive option?” When you have asked your brain a question, it will do its very best to come up with an answer for you. And it's usually a better answer than road rage.

When you turn away from your emotional brain and ask yourself what positive, small thing can you do to help yourself in this bad situation, your brain will come up with something. You can trust your own rational brain to come up with something that will be better than being upset and afraid or angry. There is always something more appropriate than fear and upsetness to do.

Divorce is Not the Surest Route to Personal Autonomy and Emotional Freedom

I’m troubled by therapists so quickly supporting a patient’s intention to divorce on the basis that they immediately assume it is the patient’s best possible route to personal autonomy and emotional freedom.

I was taking a course in hypnosis to fulfill the requirement of my psychotherapist license renewal in the State of California. A marriage and family therapist needs 36 units of continuing education every two years. I was troubled by a taped therapy session shown to us by the course instructor in the light of all the controversy about the shaky state of marriage lately.

He prefaced the video session by saying he was biased in favor of saving marriages, and that the taped session he was about to show concerned a women who was considering leaving a 30-some year marriage. I prepared myself to hear some pithy arguments on the side of marriage. Was I rudely surprised!

I expected that the session would be brief with an ongoing shift from the old lengthy analysis of a patient’s patholgies to a focus on strengenthing life skills; a shift from WHY did you do it yesterday to HOW can you do something better today. But this session was a big disappointment..

The patient explained before undergoing hypnosis that she was briefly separated 25 years ago, and in the last couple of years had been giving herself more space in the marriage, focusing on work, friends; putting personal boundaries up like having her own bedroom separate from her husband, etc. She had no comment on what her husband said or felt about her taking her space.

She said whenever she moved in the direction away from her husband she felt excited, a “sense of freedom;” although she was also afraid to risk being on her own at the age of 60. It seemed the woman was doing all this surreptiously without giving any hint to her husband that she was unhappy and considering leaving him.

The instructor’s theme in his hypnosis demonstration was to encourage the patient toward the confidence that she had the wherewithall to move forward with her life regardless of any risk involved and for her to remember that any life entailed hard work and down times. The post hypnotic device he used was the incomplete sentence “you will move forward because you have outgrown..”. Here the patient  was left to supply the word husband.

The instructor then read a letter he had received from the woman about 8 months after the taped session. “I knew she had already made up her mind,” he said happily. I was shocked. Since he was convinced the woman had made up her mind to divorce and was just scared to do it, he was going to hypnotically give her the courage she needed without knowing any other details? 

He was glad to relate to us that she had rented an apartment, hired a lawyer to negotiate financial details, put aside money for a face-lift, was having a great time planning her interior decoration and choosing a theme for her  house-warming party. He beamed with delight at his successful intervention!

I would have done the session differently and focused on the idea of freedom having nothing whatsoever to do with another person.  But of course I didn’t say anything. The other people in the class did not pay hundreds of dollars to have the benefit of my thinking. 

I would have asked the woman to tell me just a little bit about her husband to get some general idea of the relationship. Then I would have specifically asked her whether she had told her husband she was considering leaving for good and what her husband thought about her.

I had the idea that she wasn’t keeping him informed but, not having asked, I could be wrong. But I couldn’t be wrong about the little-kid excitement in her voice when she talked about her new “freedom.”  A well-planned set-up to prepare for a divorce perpetrated on an unsuspecting partner seems like a hollow victory to me.