I was introduced to an interesting concept today. When I first heard it as an idea, I thought it was obvious. But once I got to thinking about it, it unravelled itself in many different layers. What I heard was simple: “Thoughts precede feelings, you only feel a certain way because you think a certain way.” ‘Yes, and?’, I thought, until it was explained. Later I found it online. Apparently, it’s linked to psychotherapy… Wikipedia: “Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is based on the idea that how we think (cognition), how we feel (emotion) and how we act (behaviour) all interact together. Specifically, our thoughts determine our feelings and our behaviour. Therefore, negative - and unrealistic - thoughts can cause us distress and result in problems.”
The earliest form of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy was developed by Albert Ellis in the early 1950s. The basic premise of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy is that if you can control your thoughts, you can control your emotions. Often, the ‘automatic reaction’ we have to certain situations come from core beliefs learned very early on and often formed in childhood. Hence the way ‘we see something’ is embedded in our psyche. These automatic thoughts only become problems when they are inappropriate to a certain situation. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy aims to “identify what it is about them that is irrational or just not helpful; this is done in an effort to reject the distorted thoughts and replace them with more realistic alternate thoughts, in a process sometimes referred to as cognitive-shifting” (Wikipedia).
Related to my post on self-control, it’s interesting to see how controlling one’s mind can control one’s emotions and hence control and transform a response. For some reason I’m thinking of Sylvia Plath. In the early 50s, Plath was at Smith College. In 1953, she made her first suicide attempt, which she later wrote about in her novel The Bell Jar. She was briefly sent to a mental institution and subjected to shock therapy, the treatment used for depression back then. She later committed suicide in 1963, at the age of 31, after locking her children in their bedroom, sealing herself in the kitchen, swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills and sticking her head in the oven.
The first anti-depressant was called Iproniazid. Originally developed as a treatment for tuberculosis, it was widely used in the late 1950s to treat depression. It belonged to a class of medications known as monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs). This type of drug later revolutionised depression. I’m wondering how her life would have been different if she had been medically treated for her bi-polarity and seen a therapist familiar with the workings of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy.
Lastly, I’m reminded of something my friend’s mother used to say. “It’s hard enough having a feeling. Why make it harder for yourself by having feelings about your feelings.” There’s also this site that says CBT (Coginitive Behavioural Therapy) is based on stoic philosophy. CBT teaches the benefit of feeling, at worst, calm when confronted with undesirable situations. It also emphasises the fact that we have our undesirable situations whether we are upset about them or not. If we are upset about our problems, we have two problems – the problem and our upset about the problem. I’m wondering how the two of them can correlate to create a situation where we have a problem, have a feeling about the problem, are able to (without judgement) think about the origin of that problem. And then change the way we think about our problem in order to influence and correct the negative feeling. Sigh. Ideal ideal worlds.
To end, here’s one of my favourite poems by Plath, inspired by her stay in hospital after an operation to have her appendix removed...
Tulips
The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.
Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in.
I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly
As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands.
I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.
I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses
And my history to the anaesthetist and my body to surgeons.
They have propped my head between the pillow and the sheet-cuff
Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut.
Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in.
The nurses pass and pass, they are no trouble,
They pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps,
Doing things with their hands, one just the same as another,
So it is impossible to tell how many there are.
My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water
Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently.
They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep
Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage
My patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox,
My husband and child smiling out of the family photo;
Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks.
I have let things slip, a thirty-year-old cargo boat
Stubbornly hanging on to my name and address.
They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations.
Scared and bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolley
I watched my teaset, my bureaus of linen, my books
Sink out of sight, and the water went over my head.
I am a nun now, I have never been so pure.
I didn't want any flowers, I only wanted
To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.
How free it is, you have no idea how free -
The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,
And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets.
It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them
Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.
The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.
Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe
Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby.
Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.
They are subtle: they seem to float, though they weigh me down
Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their colour,
A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck.
Nobody watched me before, now I am watched.
The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me
Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins,
And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow
Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips,
And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself
The vivid tulips eat my oxygen.
Before they came the air was calm enough,
Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss.
Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise.
Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river
Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine.
They concentrate my attention, that was happy
Playing and resting without committing itself.
The walls, also, seem to be warming themselves.
The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals;
They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat,
And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes
Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.
The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea,
And comes from a country far away as health.
- Sylvia Plath
