Understanding Your Resistance to Listening to Yourself
Do you tell yourself any of the following things?
“I’m too busy to do an interview.”
“It’s too long and complicated.”
“Why should I listen to imaginary creations of my own mind?”
“It’s impractical. My time is better spent (making money/exercising/on the computer/watching TV/meditating/eating, etc.)”
“I don’t tell myself anything I don’t already know.”
I worked weekly for some months with a lady that was so depressed that she was in a mental hospital. She was diagnosed at one point as bipolar and at another as having a psychotic depression. She was on strong medications and they were encouraging her to do a series of shock treatments. She did perhaps some thirty interviews over perhaps that many weeks. That’s a lot. The feedback she consistently got from parts of herself was that they weren’t depressed, and one of the reasons that they weren’t was because they didn’t crowd out positive feelings by constant negative thinking, like she did. So they related her depression to how she thought, which implied a cognitive-behavioral approach to treatment. While this client was good at doing interviews, she did not feel that they were making much difference. Also, she was not very good at following up on the many recommendations that came out of them, such as getting out of the role of victim, smiling, become this or that high-scoring self-aspect at low times, reading over interviews, especially before sleep, stop analyzing, go with the flow, remember to breathe, stop hesitating, see the humorous, joyful side of life today, and letting go of pain from the past. She broke off work in discouragement and I did not hear from her for ten months. When I enquired, she said that she did not know why or how, but that she had made a miraculous recovery and that she had no depression and that she was happier with her life than she has been in a long time! She said that she was experiencing much joy and living in the here and now.
Such a complete recovery is shocking, if it lasts. Will she have a relapse? Is she in a manic phase of a cycling bipolar disorder? Assuming that her recovery is real and that it lasts, this is an outcome that is difficult to explain by attribution to traditional drug or psychotherapeutic methods, particularly since she had been exposed to many while she was in-patient for months.
My belief is that life forms are self-regulating and not only seek equilibrium, but attempt to grow. When we listen to those parts of ourselves that are these things – self-regulating, seeking of equilibrium, and that want to grow – then those responses are much more likely to occur. However, this growth is from the inside out instead of the outside in approach that we normally take when we consult a doctor, go to a seminar, or do something to try to help. It is organic, like physical maturation, learning to walk, or talk, which are normal human aptitudes that young humans achieve as part of inborn neuronal competencies. The downside of this is that the growth is not often obvious to the person themselves, because they are too subjectively enmeshed in the process to observe the changes. Also, as biological clocks slow, internally motivated development tends to stop.