Better Mental Health Part 4: Retconning the Story of Your Life

 As per parts 1, 2 and 3. I'm not qualified, all that follows is my opinion based on experience.

Just as a little recap, parts 1 & 2 came first and second because they are really in my experience valuable tools for becoming aware of your own mental habits and their impact, and arresting it all for the purpose of change. Part 3 was about forgiveness, and really that's a valuable tool and mindset for focusing your efforts and investing your scarce resources into yourself, because you can control yourself.

Part 4, I want to get into how I approach therapy, when I eventually stop blaming all the IDIOTS out there who are RUINING my life. (part 3)

Here we would get into what I imagine would be most people's stereotype impression of Psychotherapy, you get in you lay on a couch and the psychologist says:

"So tell me about your mother..."

I actually feel this stereotype is fairly accurate and furthermore justified. (There may be a sex/sexual orientation difference that I am not going to experience as a straight man, I may one day attend couples therapy and see a counsellor open to my partner with 'tell me about your relationship with your father...')

But I'm going to attempt something incredibly hubristic and make an analogy between two disciplines I'm not qualified in.

Isaac Newton's first law of motion: In an inertial frame of reference, an object either remains at rest or continues to move at a constant velocity, unless acted upon by a force.

Now I do not know if personality - specifically considered as a set of stable behavioral traits is an 'inertial frame of reference' but I see echos of this law of motion in one of the quotes variously attributed to Lao Tzu and the Buddha (and therefore, probably faked):

“If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.”

But it's a pithy little truism none the less. And I do know that my high school principle definitely kept repeating ad nauseum the maxim:

If you always do what you've always done, then you'll always get what you've always got.

The low-hanging-fruit with any patient is going to be moving the unconscious influence of early life experiences into a conscious understanding of how it effects current behavior. 

One of the products you are likely, at the least, to get out of a form of talk therapy is a story of your life - A coherent intelligible explanation of where your behavior was inspired.

Like if for example your parents never once asked you the question 'what do you want?' might 'explain' why you are so submissive and non-assertive in your relationships.

Here though in the interest of brevity is what I would describe as the process, and the hard work of talk therapy:

1. Identify the origins of current behavior leading to poor mental health outcomes.
2. Move from unconscious influence to conscious recognition of these contributing factors.
3. Identify what did or didn't happen that would have lead to a different outcome/worldview.
4. Use cognitive empathy, to imagine the person you would have been if things had been different.
5. Apply conscious effort to behave like the person you never got to be.

I suspect in terms of achievement level, most patients get to 2, maybe 3. This is a win, because it's an understanding of 'why'.

Just picking up with 3, in the list above, Gabor Mate quotes someone, when he suggests 'there's two things that go wrong in childhood, the first is something happens that shouldn't happen, the second is something doesn't happen that should happen.'

So namely, who you are and the pathos you have that lead to poorer mental health outcomes is likely to be a product of either an act of commission (eg. childhood abuse) or an act of omission (eg. childhood neglect)

Now it needn't be anything so extreme. Rich kids that grow up with a collection of ponies and weren't beaten by their parents can have maladaptive cognitive distortions too. It may be that your attitudes to money were shaped by your parents never giving you an allowance and insisting you focus on study and can't have a part time job. Is that anything we think of as 'abuse' or 'neglect'? Probably not.

The fourth step, is the trick part. It's the big game changer in the story of your life. It is in essence, who would I be if that didn't happen? or who would I be if I'd gotten this support?

To accept this premise, we have to assume that there's a difference between two contestants in a karate contest where one's coach says 'if you lose, you'll embarrass me and disgrace yourself.' and the other's says 'You're already a champion in my eyes, now go out there and convince them.'

Essentially, you have to write a 'sliding doors' type screenplay in your mind. Now movies like the Mighty Ducks, where a former player obsesses over the penalty shot they missed as a child, right through into adulthood makes such exercises look unhealthy.

In my opinion, the key component is about relaxing blame. You have to accept what happened, and not use blame or employ it as an excuse to avoid responsibility for your ongoing mental health.

Eseentially, the exercise is to try and make what happened irrelevant as you live your life forwards. 

Just as a small example, when I started being an artist, one of the lessons you have to learn is to start asking people to pay for your art. Something that made me incredibly sheepish about asking for money, or demanding fair payment, I attribute to my parents never really getting a pocket money system going. I was a happy co-conspirator in not getting a part time job, but I really struggle to connect work with compensation. 

I in essence, often have to pretend to be somebody who cares far more about fair compensation than I actually do. It's easy for me to write off dead-losses, and terminate fruitless working relationships, so that's a plus of my natural disposition, but by the same token, often I find it difficult to set a price for patrons that are happy to pay for my work. With energy and concerted effort though, I will send that invoice.

As a result, I'm not stuck perpetually thinking of myself as an imposter and mere hobbyist. I spare myself a lot of the mental health costs of dwelling in that mindset, and I gain a lot of benefits mental health wise from behaving like the confident person I am not.

This is the best validation of 'fake it until you make it.' That I know of, and I am generally leary of the ready interpretation of that phrase to essentially pose and posture. Like present a fake persona in a job interview. 

I am more inclined to say it is incumbent upon us to start living the life we wish we had had. If your primary carer discouraged you from playing the guitar, what they did was discourage you. You still have the opportunity to play the guitar. 

Perhaps another way of putting it, is to externalize all the shit you have internalized, because internalizing it was a mistake.

This is the point of talking about your relationship with your mother, because there's a good chance that you just internalized those interactions as a set of rules (that don't exist) of this is how to relate to somebody you love. 

As Alain De Botton asserts, we don't fall in love with somebody who makes us happy, we fall in love with someone who makes us suffer in a way that is sufficiently familiar to convince us that the love is real.

The inertia of Newton's first law of motion, for me is analogous as internalizing a sense of familiarity and comfort regarding conduct, typically shaped by the interactions within our family of origin.

Therapy for me then, is a process of first telling these stories, and then rewriting them. If the story of our lives have 100 pages, and the present moment is currently on page 36. Then my best approach to being a patient is to reread the first 36 pages and try and figure out where the story lost you. Then do a fan-fic rewrite of the book, so you can take pages 37-100 and glue them in to the original copy allowing you to tear out how your life was going to go, without this intervention.

Therapy is an opportunity to make our lives incoherent in the best possible way. If we watched a movie, and inexplicably a killer clown attacks at the 15 minute mark, but it never goes anywhere and never comes up again, we'd probably call it a bad movie. If we could render the killer clown attacks of our past irrelevant to our future, in the therapuetic sense that would be an ideal outcome.

I feel confident at this stage I've made my point and continuing would only serve to produce more metaphors.

I'll probably take a break over the weekend, for my own mental health, but I hope this has been helpful, at the very least interesting. I'll be back on Monday.