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“Mental health lies within the consciousness of all human beings, but it is shrouded and held prisoner by our own erroneous thoughts.”
~ Sydney Banks
In my years of medical training and latterly as an innate health coach, I’ve come across several ways of helping people with mental health conditions, each of which works on troublesome thoughts & feelings in a different way.
In describing them to you, it can help to imagine these targeting the various parts of a river, where anything done upstream, washes away the need for interventions performed further downstream.
Each of these has the exact same end goal: peace of mind. None is right or wrong, they’re not necessarily exclusive, and each has its own appeal.
1. Symptom relief
Our first port of call, furthest downstream, is symptom relief. This might include avoiding triggers, which makes a lot of sense, until we notice our lives getting smaller as we dodge more and more scary-looking situations.
Medication and drugs fall into this category too, be that prescribed or recreational. By altering our biochemistry, they make us temporarily feel different, which is an attractive proposition. But they have side effects, can become addictive and do nothing to address the root cause of our malady.
Some habits, like gambling, shopping, disordered eating & self-harming can also relieve symptoms of mental stress, by taking our mind off our selves and making us more present, albeit briefly.
2. Content of thought
If we’ve identified that the pain we feel is as a result of hurtful, repetitive thinking, then we might move further upstream and address those thoughts, head on. We’ve all made the difficult transition from infancy to adulthood, and the traumas we experienced (of varying magnitudes) and the ways we learned to cope when young, form the basis of our conditioned thinking and behaviour, now.
Talking therapies can help by exploring the past, making these connections more visible, and allowing us to leave behind redundant patterns, in turn reducing, or eliminating the need for symptom relief.
But it can be a painful process, and one that inadvertently makes matters worse, by repeatedly focusing on topics that keep harmful memories alive.
3. Structure of thought
What if we could deal with troublesome thoughts and feelings by just zapping them, or changing them when they happen, somehow? Enter cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), neurolinguistic programming (NLP) and positive psychology, which, being still further upstream, potentially bypass the need for therapy, and symptom relief.
The general approach here, is to nullify, reframe or replace hurtful beliefs with more realistic, or in some cases, positive ones. This can be incredibly effective for phobias and repetitive patterns of thinking. But these tools are dependent on keeping up with practices, they’re usually directed toward one specific problem, and they can be overwhelmed by, or resistant to very strong emotions.
4. Nature of thought
All of the above have one thing in common: they see thoughts and feelings as troublesome; problems to be dealt with. There’s an underlying assumption that some aspect of us is malfunctioning, requiring fixing. But what if that just isn’t true?
When we start to explore the nature of thought, we discover it to be neither positive nor negative; it’s just a picture of the world being painted by the mind, moment to moment, and it changes all the time. As author Richard Carlson put it,
“Thought, in and of itself, is harmless”
…and it’s only when we ascribe to it a power it simply doesn’t have that it looks like we need tools, techniques, therapy, avoidance or medication in order to ‘handle’ our experience.
When we stop our incessant tinkering, the mind is a self-correcting system and shrouded beneath our “erroneous thoughts” we find that who we really are is whole, unbroken. It is here, at the very wellspring of our experience, that we find our ever-present innate mental health, washing away our troubles.
Maybe this is what it means to ‘go with the flow’.
💟
Giles
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