A five minute break in my duties at work - and instead of stressing about the things that have been getting me down lately I'd like to return to my first passion and kick off with a few musings on the topic of minfulness.
It's a very fashionable topic in psychology at the moment - cognitive therapy has been slowly developed over the past few decades and established itself as quite distinct from the old "lie on the couch and tell me about your mother" routine.
Where psychoanalysis had its purpose in assisting people to understand more about the nature of their problems there comes a point where it can do a lot of harm by encouraging them to really wallow in their suffering. Cognitive and behavioural therapy on the other hand has a goal of teaching the patient to really let go of the pain and suffering and learn new, positive thoughts and activities.
I have recently been suffering from a double-whammy of eating disorder. I was anorexic as a teen and into my early 20s but have not really beaten it, I've just learned to tap into that greed for candy I felt as a kid and that led me to start obsessing with weight gain in the first place. I now fight bulimia and can binge with a change of the wind - but I fight it by holding onto the anorexia I want to let go of.
Understanding those complex motivations is certainly stage one of mindfulness and illustrates where some of the techniques of analysis still have their place in modern cognitive therapy. But the big goal I'm facing with my therapist at the moment is to learn to let go of these thoughts and the negative beliefs I have about food and body image that are really holding them in close to me.
The "cognitive" part is really learning to identify and slowly replace the convoluted and slightly ridiculous belief structure responsible for the negative thoughts and the "behavioural" part is about learning new habits - mental or otherwise.
I've done this quite successfully for a period in my life when I suffered from extreme depression. By discovering Buddha and learning that "with our thoughts we create the world" of emotion and feeling I learned to find new thoughts that decreased my suffering.
But true mindfulness in Buddhism goes beyond these notions of replacing one thought with another and really focuses on just letting go of belief, thought and feeling. At the essence of Zen meditation is the letting go of thoughts and keeping the mind clear and open. Try not thinking for just 10 seconds! It's harder than it seems!
And this is why I have been unable to apply the same techniques to a more complex set of motivations and beliefs and cure myself of eating disorder.
In cognitive therapy the goal is simply to build certain thought "habits" but habits are mindless and only see us through a certain set of circumstances. With mindfulness we can respond to any situation and maintain mental health and strength.
Your thoughts are as random as the quantum mechanical fluctuation that causes a neuron to discharge an electrical signal. Your emotions are simply a chemical response to electrical stimulation. But in your wisdom and mindfulness you can decide how much value to apply to those thoughts and you can examine your beliefs to determine why some thoughts affect you more than others. You can catch negative thoughts long before they become negative habits of thought and you can dismiss them as easily as a daydream.
So with mindfulness I am controlling my food intake. I can take an antacid to quiet a grumbling tummy and I can count out an appropriate caloric intake for the day. More importantly I am controlling my thoughts - if I find myself thinking about food or body image I simply dismiss the thought and continue working on my higher priority activities.
Cognitive therapy is a powerful tool because it simply applies the outcomes of mindfulness to the problem at hand - and is the major treatment for most mental illnesses these days. In a later post I will expand on my own experiences and I will also talk about how the brain works and what it means for mindfulness
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I am warming to your theme, for as a dissociative I am acutely aware of the need to 'think my way through' the hazards of daily life: the cumulative experiences of the monomind are not available to me, except perhaps fragmented, but never the whole (we are not quite 'one'). So is my reaction to the world in the natural sense of being spontaneous to it - I must always plan ahead through the agency of hyper vigilance because there is no 'one' set of experiences to draw upon: we are not often on the same page, singing from the same songsheet etc.
I have struggled with developing and maintaining habits, and the obvious reason for this is because of my lack of self, my inability to integrate the external into the fractured internal.
So 'thinking' it must be - and if I can be said to have developed any real habit at all it is in recognizing this key weakness, that being me/us requires enormous energy and concentration to achieve social success and to appear 'normal' in a hostile world.
Affectionately, Jay
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