Two years ago it was difficult for me to just be in a car, and driving one was a gut wrenching experience. I was struggling just to drive two blocks away to the shops via side streets and parking lots. But this morning I woke up early, made a cup of tea and decided to head out for a nice relaxing drive. I got in the car and drove to the shops 30mins away on roads going 45 mph. And it was relaxing.
How did I pull off that transition? Therapy. And this is why the chronic misunderstanding of therapy and mental health practices in general rather irks me. It is not self indulgent victim cosplay where we absolve ourselves of responsibility for the state of our lives. What kind of insanity would that be? Instead it is the intentional management of our mind and our thought processes. It is simply necessary maintenance for optimal health. You eat a decent diet, you try not to drink too much, you get good sleep, you stay close to your friends and family, and you consciously manage your mind. That’s some proper adulting.
When I say “mind” I mean your thoughts, your ideas, your “mindset”, your perspective on yourself and the world. It’s what happens in your brain that impacts your experience. We are only consciously aware of a small percent of what’s happening in our brain. The vast majority of what we “think” throughout the day we are not consciously aware of and this creates an interesting challenge. That one weird thing your uncle said to you about relationships when you were 7 might have formed some sturdy neuropathways in your head… and still be there to this day without you being consciously aware of it! So let’s hope your uncle was a wise and loving man otherwise that old thought pattern might be causing you some trouble.
You can think of your subconscious mind as the operating system that you are running. The issue is that updates don’t happen automatically. If you want to run a new and improved operating system, you have to painstakingly install a new one yourself. Sometimes one line of code at a time.
There is an interesting thing about humans, we are born too early. Now this has to do with complex evolutionary things like humans learning to walk upright and the size of our hip bones and what’s optimal for walking vs what’s optimal for childbearing. It’s complex, but long story short, we are born too soon. Most babies in the animal kingdom emerge capable of independent mobility and communication. But humans, wow are we helpless babies. And for that first year or two of our life, our operating system is still being installed. Our nervous system is still forming. And this brings us to a very popular therapy trope… Tell me about your mother!
That’s the cliche right? You walk into a therapist’s office, lay down on the couch, and the first thing your therapist says is “tell me about your mother.” Then you describe in detail everything your mother has ever done wrong, your therapist absolves you of any responsibility for any of your errors and you both toast your success with some champagne! Right? Of course not.
Questions about your early childhood, or your upbringing, and questions about your mother, or whoever raised you, are indeed very common. But here your therapist isn’t looking to find the person to blame, they are asking you, “what operating system are you running?” You see most of us get an operating system installed that is rather optimal for the environment that we were in during our early childhood. But decades later when we wind up on a therapist couch, or zoom meeting schedule, it’s almost certainly because that operating system is wildly outdated and no longer helping us. So it may very well be that you are having a problem with workplace anxiety and your therapist asks you about your mother. But of course none of this is about your mother, it’s about the operating system that your mother installed in your brain 40 years ago that desperately needs an update.
This stuff is of course complex and I don’t want to do it a disservice by over simplifying it, but, I do think it’s fair to say a very big factor, and for a lot of people, the primary factor in depression and anxiety are damaging old subconscious thought patterns. Our perspective on life and ourselves, our “mindset”, our damaging old operating system.
This is how “therapy” helps us improve ourselves. It is the work of determining what operating system you’re running, sorting out which parts of that are now holding you back and in need of an update, and going about updating that software.
Unfortunately, most of us don’t wind up “in therapy” until something has gone very wrong in our life. Therapy is expensive, it’s time consuming, it’s difficult, and there is still some stigma around it. And so we don’t make that call until we are really suffering and desperate for a solution. And when we do finally make that call we generally have no idea what we are doing and have no idea what kind of help we need, and so we start with some good old fashioned talk therapy.
Talk therapy might not be what you wind up needing, but it’s a great place to start to get an education. Comedian Vidura Bandara Rajapaksa has a great bit about going to therapy. He says he thought that a therapist would fix him like a mechanic fixes his car, but instead he found that therapy is much less like going to a mechanic and much more like Ikea for your emotions, “where you are given some tools and materials but you have to put your sh*tty table of a personality together all by yourself.” Because talk therapy is a great place to get an understanding of which operating system you are running and in which ways it’s erroring out, but you still have to do the work of updating that operating system.
For some people their operating system isn’t in need of that many updates and just talking to a therapist and installing a few new insights and perspectives will be enough of a solution. But for many others, a full upgrade may be needed, perhaps even some database migrations, and that requires some serious upgrade tools!
Thankfully there are many, many options these days. Deep journaling work like the Neurocycle process, Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT), Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), psychedelic assisted therapy, and many more. While all of these have their own approach, they are all essentially tools for a serious operating system upgrade.
And this upgrade is hard work! This isn’t about blaming grandpa, this is about re-wiring your mind, on a physical level, one neuropathway at a time.
You keep an eye on your blood pressure, you step on the scale to check your weight, maybe you use a sleep tracker! And, if you are being a responsible adult, you monitor your mind. When your blood pressure is too high you call your doc and take some pills and change your diet. And when your anxiety starts to kick up, you call your therapist, maybe take some pills, and update your operating system.
Therapy isn’t a pity party, it’s not about who to blame, it’s the conscious management of your mind. It’s hard work, and it’s proper adulting.
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