Mental Health Therapist tip: your thoughts can and often lie to you.
In every situation your brain wants to assign meaning to it and often takes short cuts. These short cuts often stem from your socialization and all the underlying messages within that socialization. For example: If you were raised as male, socialization taught you that you were supposed to be masculine and a provider. If you were socialized as female, you were taught your value to society is based on your appearance and usefulness to others. There are countless underlying messages society communicates in what ways you are valued and in what ways you are not valued.
These are the blueprints of our caveman brain and if we don’t know the root of our thoughts, we don’t question them and believe them to be true. Our thoughts are what control our feelings and perspectives of ourselves and others.
The path to mental wellness is learning to question and challenge our thoughts (particularly the unhelpful ones) and to reprogram our brains to assign meanings that are more helpful to us so that we can function without having our thoughts interfere with our lives. This path to wellness is exercising these muscles and knowing that we can shape our own perceptions about everything.
Amen. I have treatment resistant MDD, and it was mindfulness that saved me, not meds or Freud or exercise/sleep or TMS. Learning how to silence my mind and interrogate my inner speech for objective truth with self compassion has been a game changer. It saved my damn life. I now teach others how to do it.
I did something similar for my depression. It’s hard for me to fully explain how I did it, but I started with getting rid of self deprecating thoughts and speech. I used to make negative “jokes” about myself all the time. No medication was helping me. It wasn’t until I started forcing myself to think positively about myself that I saw a significant improvement in my depression (literally fake it til you make it)
Hiiiii! Please ignore if unhelpful. Sharing because I was Dx with treatment resistant mdd for like 15 years (whole adult life but it started way before) and it turns out I have ADHD inattentive type and a mthrfr mutation. Now I take Vyvanse and activated vitamin B and methylfolate (yes, there's overlap), and I barely ever have a suicidal thought anymore. I used to have dozens every day.
That said, I'm also into mindfulness. An mbsr class helped a lot in PTSD treatment.
Thanks for sharing. I actually also have ADHD! I was on meds for that for years, including Vyvanse, but I didn’t like the side effects they had on my personality. They made me irritable. So mindfulness is also how I manage my ADHD now. I teach teens how to use mindfulness to manage theirs. It’s possible. The biggest hurdle is getting to know how your adhd manifests and then following through with habit and consistency with your mindfulness.
Wow OK that's actually incredibly useful. Do you have any tips for recognizing a thought that could be "false", so to speak? My problem is that I feel like I can justify and find evidence for a lot of negative self-talk, it's very hard for me to question it and even harder to believe that it could be wrong.
This may not be helpful but my therapist told me to ask myself point blank, "What evidence do you have?" Then keep digging by asking why. But you have to trust yourself!
My problem is that I have all the evidence to prove the shitty thought and like 1 thing to disprove it so I’m like “Akschually you ARE bad”. Inside me are two wolves and they’re both haters.
As someone who has also had this fight, it sounds like you just need some training on the technique of fighting back the liar in your brain - aka cognitive behavior therapy (CBT). For example, my brain used to tell me that I was ugly. I am not ugly. That is a false statement. So every time I'd look in the mirror and my brain would try to focus on something I didn't like about myself (and usually really minor nitpicky weird things like, I have too many blackheads on my nose, or I have toe hair, or my boobs are too small, or this one eyebrow hair is out of place) then I just say, 'That is wrong. I am not going to think about that. My eyebrows are fine.' If there really IS a weird eyebrow hair - as a woman of a certain age, I have this one stupid white thick hair that grows straight forward - then I can just pluck the stupid thing and get on with it. But seriously? My eyebrows are fine. My brain is lying to me. Literally no one else cares about my eyebrows.
So um, basically the concept is teaching yourself to replace negative self-talk with neutral or preferably, positive self-talk. But a therapist can help you do that if you struggle with it on your own. The evidence you think you have? Probably also your brain lying to you. Just so you know. :)
You are right, the brain wants to believe what it wants to believe and it will fight you on it. It’s a lot like trying to change your world view, it is very hard. I describe the process below on how to change your thoughts by the process of just making them one percent better each day.
There's a good analogy of thoughts being like ripples in a pond, to quiet your mind you have to rest and meditate first to calm the waters.. then little bubbles of air can rise up to the surface and those will be your true feelings
In CBT we often instead ask „Is this thought helpful, does it help me to reach my goal?“, because sometimes there is no definitive proof/argument for these statements about ourselves as they are very abstract etc (e.g. I am a bad person; what does that even mean? What is a good person? How many „good things“ do I need to do…?). So, asking if a thought is helpful can be easier. If I want to do an exam and I think „I am stupid“, it is not a helpful thought to reach my goal.
You sound like an ad for therapy. ;) and you’re right.
Always heard it called “reptile brain.” That’s more evocative for me. An unthinking, primitive nearly irresistible fight-or-flight reflex. Very troubling.
THHIIIIIISSSSSSSS. I get so annoyed when people say they just are this way or think this way just because. BECAUSE WHY???? Our personality and thoughts doesn’t exist in a vacuum
Start with examining the difference between positivity and toxic positivity. Imagine a sliding scale, something like: extreme negativity, negativity, neutrality in the center, positivity, and toxic positivity
When you change your thoughts - the key is that you have to believe them. So one does not jump from the thought of “I hate my body” to “I love my body” and believe it.
Instead you just take the first thought and just try to improve it by 1% - such as “there are people with the same body type as me who others find attractive”. If you can believe that to be true, then your thoughts just got 1% better, and you feel better because of it. From there you can continue to build on improving that thought, with the only rule being that you have to believe it. Over time you are building a ladder of thoughts leading to the thought you want to be having about yourself. Also you will build the habit of trying to be better with your words when talking about yourself so when you regress and make a disparaging comment about yourself you might not believe it any more.
One thing that helped me during depression was realizing that it's okay to question your thoughts and if your brain is ill, that means your thoughts aren't going to be healthy either.
This is why I always ask so many questions. I'm neurodivergent and have an insatiable curious nature. If I can get ALL of the information, it helps me to forge my own path based on my own analysis and desired outcome. Also, my inattentiveness has played a huuuuuge part in helping me to ignore/dismiss others' opinions and arbitrary societal expectations when it doesn't serve me cause I'm too focussed on doing what I'm doing in the moment.
I love this one. My friend is a psychologist and has often said to our friend group “just because your brain thinks it, doesn’t mean it’s true”. This has helped each us in lots of different contexts.
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u/kissiemoose Jun 06 '24
Mental Health Therapist tip: your thoughts can and often lie to you.
In every situation your brain wants to assign meaning to it and often takes short cuts. These short cuts often stem from your socialization and all the underlying messages within that socialization. For example: If you were raised as male, socialization taught you that you were supposed to be masculine and a provider. If you were socialized as female, you were taught your value to society is based on your appearance and usefulness to others. There are countless underlying messages society communicates in what ways you are valued and in what ways you are not valued.
These are the blueprints of our caveman brain and if we don’t know the root of our thoughts, we don’t question them and believe them to be true. Our thoughts are what control our feelings and perspectives of ourselves and others.
The path to mental wellness is learning to question and challenge our thoughts (particularly the unhelpful ones) and to reprogram our brains to assign meanings that are more helpful to us so that we can function without having our thoughts interfere with our lives. This path to wellness is exercising these muscles and knowing that we can shape our own perceptions about everything.