Tag Archives: psychology

The Paintbrush of our Minds – Thought

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In learning how to teach young people with learning disorders how to read, I learned the importance of explaining how words work in the closest manner possible to the truth of how the human brain developed a writing system over thousands of years. It all came down to the brain’s attunement to speech sounds. Deviate from that and our writing system becomes confusing and incoherent. The same applies to our understanding of human psychological functioning.

Every theory and therapeutic modality is an attempt to put structure around what is observed. Unfortunately, some of the terms that are used take us away from the simplicity of how our psychological system operates.

All human experience and behaviour arises out of the firing of circuitry formed in the brain. There is no one location for the ‘ego’, or the ‘inner child’, or ‘parts’, or the ‘self’. Each of these constructs is simply what we observe about the types of thinking patterns that have been neurologically ‘wired in’.

Interestingly, we all have the potential to observe these neural pathways in action. However, our ability to do so varies. If that ability is blunted, neural wiring makes it so. Somewhere in our past, we have wired in a belief that paying attention to our internal reality is to be avoided – and the firing of that wiring makes it so.

When people say, ‘I don’t like conflict …’, or ‘I’m not the sort of person who ….’, what they are really saying is that this thinking that has been wired in. A more accurate use of language would be to say, ‘I am the sort of person who has some avoidant neural wiring around conflict’, or, ‘somewhere in life I learned to think ….’. The ‘I’ is doing the observing.

We all behave as if the thinking we do is truth. Most of the time it’s not. It’s just wiring. How different life can be if we hold our thinking lightly.

In recent months I have innocently taken my thinking about the meaning of being usefully employed seriously. Through writing, action, experience, and more reflective writing, a deeper thought has emerged, sculpting an inner peace not dependant on external validation. I am grounded the value of what I offer. I know the stability and energy it brings. I intuit it’s life giving value.

I don’t find the notion of an ‘inner child’ particularly useful. I know I have a raft of infantile and childhood thinking stored in the lump of jelly inside my skull. And I also know that some of it is so automatic and intrusive on my daily functioning that it needs reshaping. Not to erase it, that is impossible, but I can write to explore the internal and external context around it’s birth; read and write in the hope that an insight explodes like the birth of a star; and an even more powerful thought is established in the inner galaxy of my mind.

My brain can produce catastrophising thoughts, thoughts that separate me from reality, doubtful thoughts that destabilise me, thoughts about the danger of people, thoughts about anything. We are all an expression of thoughts and patterns of thoughts that are wired into our brains. And we are also the potential for more. The potential for something new and fresh. Liberating. Writing does that for me. Writing allows me to see my thoughts, to ask questions about their origins, their births, their instructors, and the context in which I picked them up. It also allows me to see their amazing inbuilt survival purpose and to feel compassion and admiration for the resilient heroes we all are.

Writing allows me to be awed by the emergence and source of insights and thoughts that liberate. Our unconscious is the repository of some of our most life limiting thoughts and is the source of thoughts that can craft heaven on earth. Both exist. Both sit side by side. Both are available. Write to know them. Write to capture their presence in your day. Befriend both.

I don’t know …. Part 2

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Accepting ‘I don’t know’ in response to a mind filled with questions and problems was just the first step in hearing solutions to the issues I faced with my final client in my previous post. Many traditional psychotherapies now include acceptance as one of the steps in living a more psychologically flexible life. Acceptance entails two components. The first is acceptance of life as it is. The second is acceptance of what our mind understands (or not) about it. If my life requires that I work full time in order meet my financial commitments, feed all members of the family, keep us safe and secure in our home, etc. then accepting enables me to do what is needed. Don’t accept them and I occupy a fantasy world from which I am easily frustrated when the realities of life intrude. When we accept physical reality, our natural intelligence provides the ideas and thoughts needed. Get caught up in our heads, however, and the solutions to physical reality are blocked. They are still there, but our attention is elsewhere.

Now, I know that I can work, and that I can work at whatever if need be. So when I am faced with finding full time work, my mind doesn’t flip into a conniption about the possibility or impossibility of that. Instead, it automatically opens up to ideas. But what about when I come across problems in which I am not so well versed? Ones like how to respond to client problems I am unfamiliar with, or how to respond to a family member in domestic violence, or how to respond to a life threatening health condition? Problems in which I have no prior knowledge or are seemingly impossible to solve?

A busy mind is just as unhelpful in these circumstances as it is to more easily solved individual issues. It clouds access to whatever we need in the moment to move forward, whether that be into action or a shift into deeper understanding. Just as consciously acknowledging the physical requirements of life can open up the mind, so too can acceptance of ‘I don’t know’. Acceptance of ‘I don’t know’ brings the busyness of our minds to a halt and opens it up to fresh ideas.

But consider our learning around ‘I don’t know’? How many of us have been yelled at, hit, shamed, made to stand in the corner, sent to our rooms, made to stand outside a classroom, etc. because we didn’t know? In my mind, our experiences with ‘I don’t know’ is partially behind most people’s psychological habit of venturing into excessive thinking when confronted with a problem. We have learned that a statement of the truth ‘I don’t know’ is unsafe and so we psychologically go looking, usually for a solution that we think will appease the person who has asked the question.

When I stray into a busy mind, I am looking for understanding that solves everything. I do it because I have learned that when I either spoke my truth or I responded with ‘I don’t know’ someone else was very unhappy. As a child, if being truthful didn’t appease others, then I only had one other psychological place to go – out there. The experience of ‘I don’t know’ morphed into a mental habit of turn away from my own wisdom/truth and seek outside. But looking ‘out there’ for understanding and solutions accelerates thinking and takes us away from the clarity we seek. Clarity is found in a slow mind. Mental habits learned from our childhood experiences with ‘I don’t know’ hinder the clarity we seek.

Notice when your mind is busily searching for understanding everywhere but within your own wisdom/truth. Turn around, speak your truth and accept ‘I don’t know’. Go about your life and be grateful for the insights that will come if needed. Practise acceptance of ‘I don’t know’. See what happens when you reclaim the truth that ‘I don’t know’ is healthier and wiser than trying to pretend we know it all, or that we know nothing and other people know it all. Experiment with voicing ‘I don’t know’ without giving reasons. If we don’t know, we don’t know. Experiment with living life from not knowing. Reclaim the power of speaking our truth of ‘I don’t know’ when that is the case. Experience the peace, calm and insights that often follow.

Photo: Matt Walsh, Unsplash.

I don’t know ….

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At the end of another day seeing clients in private practice, my mind was in overdrive. Six people, six different contexts, six different presenting issues, and this was only one day in five. My mind was reeling with the range of human issues, the variation in people’s understanding of what therapy entailed, the ever increasing possible avenues for effective intervention, and a service delivery system that was difficult to navigate confidently. Medical practitioners, not for profit service providers, community agencies and private practitioners all doing their best to comply with the policy makers’ model, and the public service officers who translated it into business practice. With so many individual mindsets involved, chaos often reigns.

Most days, I was able to retain my mind on the ‘present moment’ quietening and listening, responding from what came to mind and working through practical issues as they arose. On this day, however, I had finished it with a client I wasn’t making much progress with.

My mind began to look for answers. What had I been reading recently that could inform my thinking? Maybe I should sign up for at least two of the trainings that had crossed my information feeds in the past week? And what about the latest research findings on my professional organisation’s newsletter or the books my colleagues were buying? Clearly everyone else knew better than me. Clearly I was incompetent. The more I thought, the more hijacked my mind became, the worse I felt, the grumpier I got, the less I was aware of the people and peace in my home. My mind had taken a detour and I was hurtling down the dirt track of no return.

Stop. Time to turn around. Time to slow down the whirling dervish in my head. I grabbed the dogs and took them for a walk in local bushland. I needed to come home. What was my truth? My truth was that the system is broken. My truth was that the increasing number of therapies and interventions is confusing. My truth was that I didn’t have a clue how to move forward with this client. There it was. I felt it. All prior thinking had whirled. This one resonated. My truth was that I didn’t know. Simple. I accepted my truth.

As I walked, an image of me throwing a head full of thoughts behind me emerged. They were gone. The busyness ended. My thinking had kept it all going. Accepting that I didn’t know cut to the chase. There was no need to scramble. In the scrambling I was never going to know. Knowing only ever comes when the mind is effortlessly engaging with whatever is next. Life flows. When the mind is doing the same, fresh ideas and insights come when they are needed. Busy thinking and fixation takes us out of that flow.

My body immediately became more flexible. I felt lighter. As I walked through the bush I noticed the meanderings of the dogs, the birds flying, the colours of green in the leaves. By the time I arrived home, my mind had moved on to dinner and was engaged in the possibilities. I noticed I felt fantastic. I realised I couldn’t remember what my mind had been so caught up in less than 20 minutes beforehand. Personal truth is liberating. Seeing/voicing/realizing our truth disconnects us from the habits of thinking that say we know noThing. We know all that we need to know, moment, by moment, by moment. Trust it.