What’s So Bad About Bad Thoughts?

So, what constitutes an unhealthy brain? 

Certainly there are indicators that guide professional inquiries around this exact question, be it psychological interviewing, assessments, biological markers, etc. But when we dig deeper and look more “moment by moment” at a normal brain that may pass the traditional psychopathology test, some more unsettling questions arise:

What”s really intrusive about an intrusive thought?

Is redirecting, ignoring, or changing the thought the best option?

What’s irrational about a thought if the brain uses irrational means to act on that supposed rational input anyways?

These are the late night musings of a brain geek, but stick with me here folks, as I promise it gets better.

And so, as I pondered this quagmire on the plane this morning up to St. Louis, a flood of memories came back around for me about how I was trained, most specifically the cognitive-behavioral camp that preached that our thoughts caused our feelings and behaviors.  And when you discovered the “faulty” thought you changed it. Phew. Thank God that’s all I have to do, eh? 🙂

Well, not only is it now in question that the cognitive part of our brain drives behavior (vs. the limbic system), I am not so sure that even if we changed our thoughts to more positive ones we would have a better world. As James Hillman once said, “We’ve had a hundred years of therapy and the world’s getting worse.”   To me, it appears that change agents missed a huge nuance to the whole thought/feeling/behavior mess. That is, could it be more about the conviction level of an emotion or a thought? Did psychotherapy and other means of counseling others have a way to uncover the limbic level of conviction behind a “loosely organized” process of the brain and a “hard-wired” one? I never felt convinced that we did. It was the words used not the implicit framework around the words that we gave most airtime to.

Perhaps we all stop “getting hooked” around who is winning the “what causes what” battle and instead start with performing a knowledge angioplasty on our brains, cleaning out the levels of conviction about knowing itself. It is in this certainty addiction around things that really messes life up. And ironically, fixing the bad thoughts will ironically do more to delude yourself that you have a leg up on your brain. And then that’s when things really get ugly. And you will know so, because you will feel fine.