johnpalmer

So... I've been thinking about a few things about mental health and such and I'm going to talk about that a bit.

One of the fundamental rules I'm recognizing for me is that the brain is noisy. I mean, a brain can just come up with the most ridiculous crap on the planet.

Now, on the one hand, Freud was right that there is a subconscious part of us. On the other hand, thinking about that without recognizing the noisiness of one's brain is a bit of a risk. If you think something that's bullshit, and you figure that it must be your subconscious, you can put yourself on a path towards screwing yourself up.

For example, let me describe something to you... this is something that might come into your mind.

I want you to imagine yourself with a banana in your hands. And I want you to imagine going up to someone you love, truly and deeply, and whacking them over the head with that banana!

(I'm assuming that you're going to imagine someone who can't actually be hurt by being whacked over the head with a banana. They might get "messed up", but in the literal, not figurative, sense.)

Tomorrow, you just might, out of the blue, for no reason whatsoever, imagine whacking someone over the head with a banana.

Does it mean you have some subconscious desire to whack someone with a banana? Does it mean that you want to engage in some kind of sex act (a banana could be seen as a phallic symbol...)? No, it means you foolishly listened to some long-haired weirdo when he was coming up with bizarre examples to illustrate his point.

That's the point. Your brain is noisy, and sometimes, at random, it pulls up a bit of noise that doesn't really mean anything. Some of this comes from your subconscious (if you imagine whacking someone with a banana tomorrow, it might take you some time to remember who put the thought of bananas in your head), but that doesn't mean that it means something.

Sometimes it does. You shouldn't completely ignore what your brain serves up; it's possible that it's revealing something that you should pay attention to.

At the same time, I had a dream where I killed one of my cats... it was a horrifying dream. If it bothered me enough, it might keep flashing in my brain. And it would be that much more horrible if I decided that meant I was possibly going to kill my cat.

Did you notice that? If it bothered me, it might keep popping into my brain. If I decided that it might be a product of my "subconscious", something I might really do, it would bother me that much more! Follow that path, and you're starting to understand one of the underpinnings of OCD... the fear of thinking about something becomes self-reinforcing, because the more fear you feel, the more power you're (inadvertently) giving to the thoughts that are upsetting you.

So part of the key to mental health is to understand that, sure, there's a subconscious... but just as a random thought can be about some deeply held feeling, it could also be about something that was completely random, and maybe meaningless.

This can be important because your mind and your emotions are tied together. If your brain is feeding you random garbage about how crappy your life is, it can help you feel down and maybe you'll start feeling the dark despair that surrounds you when you're having a major depressive episode. On the other hand, once you're locked into a major depressive episode, it's awfully easy for your brain to start feeding you random garbage about how crappy your life is (and while you're depressed, life is pretty crappy).

I don't want to talk about which is the chicken and which is the egg, and I sure as heck don't want to ask which comes first. But there is a connection, and it can go both ways.

Cognitive therapy is based on the idea that you can use your mind to affect your emotions. I think, someday, there'll be an alternative therapy working from the other side, when we learn a bit more about how folks can successfully shape their emotions... and, of course, there'll be combination therapies working with both.