60 Innovative Cognitive Strategies for the Bright, the Sensitive, and the Creative

New Investigations Into the Home of the Mind

Eric Maisel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351203739
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy Counselling
• Index: Psychology

In this book, Dr. Maisel employs the metaphor of "the room that is your mind" to provide 60 cognitive strategies that enable smart, sensitive, creative clients to engage in dynamic self-regulation for greater awareness, insight, and enhanced mental capabilities. Issues that are examined include repetitive and obsessional thinking, self-criticism and a lack of self-confidence, anxiety and depression, reliving traumatic memories, and overdramatizing and catastrophizing. This is the perfect book for cognitive-behavioral therapists to suggest to clients and will be of great interest to clients whose needs for imaginative and metaphorically rich strategies often go unmet.

Part I
Dynamic Self-Regulation and Healthy Indwelling

1
Humane Help for Smart, Sensitive, Creative Clients

Smart, sensitive, creative clients—the folks most likely to engage in individual psychotherapy and individual coaching, given their psychological-mindedness, verbal skills, and basic orientation toward ideas like healing and growth—are both different from and not different from other human beings. To my mind, they are rather more different than not different. In a subsequent chapter, I’ll explain in what ways they are different and how those differences present a humane helper with special challenges. In this chapter, I want to provide a bit of an overview and explain what I’m attempting to do in this book.

I’ve been working, first as a therapist and for thirty years as a creativity coach, with creative and performing artists, scientists and engineers, academics and entrepreneurs, and other bright, imaginative clients. All have been troubled in one way or another and most have ended up with some “mental disorder” label, maybe a depression, bipolar, attention deficit or generalized anxiety label—or with multiple mental disorder labels. Nor, to my mind, is this small sample non-representative of the whole. I believe that all smart, sensitive, creative people are troubled enough to earn some mental disorder label, if one believed in those labels, because there is a necessary connection between intelligence, sensitivity, creativity, and distress.

Being smart, sensitive, creative, and troubled go hand-in-hand. But the current system that calls these particular troubles “mental disorders” and rushes to prescribe chemicals is misguided. I’ve laid out the ways in which the current, dominant pseudo-medical paradigm is flawed in books like The Future of Mental Health, Humane Helping, The Van Gogh Blues, and Rethinking Depression. In this book, I want to present you with a robust way of helping these folks, a way that doesn’t rely on the pseudo-medical “mental disorder” paradigm or on the second current dominant paradigm, the “expert talk” paradigm, either. Instead, I want to present a collaborative model that makes beneficial use of the cognitive and creative abilities that your smart, sensitive, creative clients possess.

These clients are bringing something more to the table in addition to their troubles. They are bringing an existential sensibility. They are bringing an imagination that can create worlds. They are bringing a love of language and metaphor. They are bringing an ability to get from the beginning of a thought to its end. They are bringing a taste for value. They are bringing respect for effort. They are bringing at least the remnants of a child’s wonder. They are bringing laughter, however muffled, and love, however cooled. They may not be bringing quite everything they need to bring, but they are bringing a lot.

Say that a smart, sensitive, creative person comes in to see you complaining of “depression.” All of the following may be true for him. He may have been born already a little sad. Reality may be making him sad. The hardness of his creative work may be making him sad. The harshness of the art marketplace may sadden him. The boring routine of his safe, “pointless” academic day job may be saddening him. So may the inevitable conflicts between wanting solitude and wanting relationships, preferring personal work to the commercial work that an audience wants, and so on.

On top of all that, he may have decided that life is a cheat, which saddens him even more. In addition, every bit of tyranny and injustice he encounters or hears about saddens him. His own shortfalls, for instance how often he dodges his creative work, saddens him. The criticism and rejection that his creative work regularly receives saddens him. This list is very long and could be much longer. What it causes is not a pseudo-medical mental disorder. It is sadness multiplied over and over again, culminating in despair. What human being wouldn’t be deeply troubled by all this?

Might there also be some biological, neurological, hormonal, or similar reason for his unhappiness? Who can say? But isn’t the above list quite enough to account for his despair? Why add other reasons for which there is zero proof? It is impossible to prove the non-existence of non-existing things, which, for example, is why you can’t prove the non-existence of gods. But you can remain highly skeptical about them, given how closely they resemble petulant human beings, and you can demand compelling proof of their existence. Likewise, you need more to validate your claim that “depression” is a biological disorder than intoning, “One day we will surely have proof.” You need not add any non-scientific label to what your creative client is presenting, which both on the face of it and after examination looks like despair.

That long, incomplete list of causes of your creative client’s sadness is completely sufficient to explain why he is sad. What can possibly help with what’s troubling him? Well, many things. We could go down that list and pinpoint exactly how we might want to help him. For his lack of success, we might want to help him become successful. This doesn’t sound like a psychotherapist’s job, but it is certainly a humane helper’s job since that is one sort of help that he needs. We can help him better deal with criticism and rejection so that when it happens again, which it inevitably will, it will sadden him less. We can help him get to his creative work more often, so that he is no longer saddened by his lack of effort. And so on. This isn’t so arcane or mysterious. Certain things sadden him; we endeavor to help with each one.

Many things can help. But one of those many things is by far the most important—and it is one that he has direct control over. We can help him get a grip on his own mind. Philosophers from the Buddha to Marcus Aurelius have announced the extent to which this is a top priority. Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) is the modern way that this age-old message is delivered. Almost everyone knows a little bit about cognitive-behavioral therapy and many people have worked with a CB therapist. Why is CBT so popular, so popular that CBT is the primary therapy provided by the United Kingdom’s National Health Service? Because its central message is indubitably true: you are what you think.

However, the ways that you are invited to get a grip on your mind, whether those invitations come from traditions like Stoicism or Buddhism or from cognitive-behavioral therapists, are a bit on the dull and unimaginative side. Sit there and meditate? Block a thought and substitute another thought? How playful or inspired is that? As a smart, creative, imaginative person, your client deserves more interesting—and more potent—tactics than those. This book presents sixty of them, based on twin concepts of dynamic self-regulation and healthy indwelling. Toward that end, I’ll introduce the metaphor of “the room that is your mind” and explain how you can use that potent metaphor with clients.

A major shortcoming of cognitive-behavioral therapy is that it doesn’t speak to what it feels like to have a mind. We don’t just “have thoughts.” We keenly experience what it feels like to dwell in our mind. It is sometimes a comfortable place and sometimes a tortured place where we spend much of our waking and sleeping hours. Descartes pictured it as a stage where we play out our dramas. Most people experience that “place that is our mind” as located in the brain: our mind feels located above and behind our eyes. That—and not San Francisco, London, or Berlin—is where we live.

Rather than dubbing your mind a place, I’m designating it a room. That “room that is your mind” turns out to be a room that you can decorate, air out, furnish, and much more. Indeed, you must make that room as friendly and comfortable a place as possible if you want emotional health and a creative life. By making use of the sixty cognitive strategies I’ll present, your smart, sensitive, creative clients can finally stop pestering themselves, they can lose that low-grade case of the blues, and they can upgrade their formed personality to become the person they always meant to be. Each strategy addresses a particular problem and the sixty together will help your clients enter into a new and much improved relationship with their own mind.

And this work may prove really enjoyable for them as well! These strategies are a little absurd, a little tongue-in-cheek, a little Alice in Wonderland, and perfectly suited for a smart, sensitive, creative person. They will help them live a less fretful, less claustrophobic, more creative, all around improved life. If your client can put even one of them into practice, it might transform his or her life. And at the same time, they may make your clients smile a little.

Shouldn’t they have a little fun as they heal, grow, and change? Indeed, they should! Let’s move on now to one of the two concepts I mentioned above, the idea of dynamic self-regulation.

2
Dynamic Self-Regulation

A brain’s true brilliance is its ability to chat with itself, enter into self-conversation, and as a result of these conversations engage in dynamic, system-wide self-regulation. Is anything in the universe more amazing than that? Nor is any brain feature more important to you personally or to your clients, since this dynamic self-regulation is the brain feature that allows for mental health and emotional wellbeing.

There are countless ways of thinking about human nature and what really makes us tick. One way is that we are biological machines controlled by our genes, our hormones, our nervous system, and other aspects of biology. When, for example, we sustain a brain injury and lose our memory, that is one sort of proof or evidence that we are our biology. Much less explicitly than you might imagine, this is the predominant view today with respect to mental health. The “medical model” view is that we are mentally healthy when our biology is functioning and we are mentally unwell when our biology fails to function properly. In this view, we should treat mental distress as a biological matter requiring medical treatment, primarily medication.

A second way to think about human nature is that we are primarily psychological creatures who are more or less held hostage by the way our brain, acting as and experienced as our mind, develops, makes sense of our experiences and our circumstances, and manages our desires and our instincts. In this view, we are mentally healthy when our mind refrains from distorting reality, creating unnecessary inner conflicts, succumbing to emotional cravings, and so on—when, that is, it serves us rather than weakens us, harms us or tyrannizes us. This view underpins psychotherapy, which is the second dominant mental health paradigm after the medical model paradigm.

A third way of looking at human nature is that we are this thing called personality, that we are from birth or become over time a formed creature who reacts repetitively and rather without thinking in ways consonant with our genetic predispositions, the lessons we learn from our lived experiences, and our many diverse self-identity pieces. Each person is identifiable as fundamentally himself or herself. In common parlance, we describe people as introverts or extroverts, bubbly or melancholy, rigid or reckless, conventional or iconoclastic, or, in mental disorder language, passive-aggressive, borderline, and so forth. What’s implied by these designations is the idea that “everything comes together” as personality, making each of us a predictable, recognizable and rather intractable unity.

A fourth way of describing human nature is by asserting that, fundamentally and above all else, we human beings are social creatures defined by our social roles, social interactions, and relationships. In this view, phenomena like “mob mentality,” “authoritarian acquiescence,” and “family conflict” reveal our true nature and put the lie to the idea that we are independent actors. In their different ways, family therapy and social therapy both champion this idea by, to take one example, seeing every “problem child” as a family problem. In this view, individual mental health is necessarily contextual and inseparable from family dynamics, group dynamics, interpersonal relationships, and social life. Social psychology is the branch of psychology most curious about these matters—and their experiments are rather convincing in supporting the idea that individuals are much more like herd animals than people might like to imagine.

A fifth view, rather ignored by psychology and psychiatry, is that we are embedded creatures whose circumstances matter much more than we are typically willing to admit. It matters if we must go to a school where we feel unsafe and where we’re bullied mercilessly; it matters if we resent and don’t like our mate; it matters if we must toil fifty hours a week at a menial job or a high-pressure job. In short, circumstances matter and dramatically affect our mental health. In this view, which I think ought to strike you as common sense, you would expect a homeless refugee to be “anxious” and “depressed,” a marginalized youth to be “oppositional” and “defiant,” and so on. Any reasonable mental health model must naturally take a person’s circumstances into account.

What each of these five views has in common is a rather stark failure to picture human beings as possessing a real mind of the sort that human beings actually have. These models on the whole tend not to credit human beings with the ability to chat with themselves about life, actively make sense of their instincts, desires, psychological workings, and personality, or realize that there are efforts they might make to help with their sadness, anxiety, and other mental health challenges. This is such an odd failure, really, to forget or ignore the fact that human beings are able to chat with themselves about what’s going on. Indeed, how could something like psychotherapy possibly work if we didn’t have a mind that was able to comprehend, if we didn’t possess self-awareness, or if we were just a collection of biological functions, unmediated urges, blind spots, and unconscious processes?

This is a sixth view, then, that we are dynamic, self-regulating organisms that, to put it colloquially, can chat with ourselves and aim ourselves in one direction versus another, toward, for example, calmness versus anxiousness, passion versus indifference, love versus enmity, and so on. We may often do a poor job of dynamic self-regulation, indulge ourselves in thoughts and behaviors that don’t serve us, and actually prefer to think that we can’t self-regulate. However, that’s a shame and not an argument against the reality of self-regulation. We may be some impossible-to-deconstruct conglomeration of drives, appetites, thoughts, feelings, memories, neural events, and everything else human, but what we are in addition to all that is a conscious being who knows things, understands things, and can try out things so as to help our situation improve.

Let’s imagine how these six models might intersect. You are drinking too much. Your cells are adapting to your drinking habits and now crave alcohol. You certainly have a “biological” problem (and you may have had a biological predisposition to begin with). Your mind likewise craves the alcohol. You now have a “psychological issue” with respect to drinking. You also self-identify as a hard-drinking, passionate artist type and see your drinking as a personality fit. Your “personality” helps sustain the problem. In addition, most of the adults in your family love to drink and you are caught up in a social dynamic that supports your drinking. On top of all that, your job is stressful and your marriage is on the rocks and you drink to relieve those stresses. It’s abundantly clear how all five—biology, psychology, personality, social pressures, and circumstances—contribute to your problem drinking.

But here’s the human-sized miracle available to you. Through dynamic self-regulation, simply by having a certain sort of chat with yourself, you can from one minute to the next stop drinking—despite the powerful nature of those five intersecting challenges. You can enter into what is commonly called recovery, which is essentially an ongoing self-conversation about why you intend not to drink. There is a “you” that wants to drink but there is also a “you” that knows better—and that latter “you” actively thinks, observes, reflects, counter-argues and maintains an ongoing internal conversation in the service of sobriety. Without that dynamic self-regulation piece, sobriety simply isn’t happening. By virtue of it, sobriety becomes a reality.

This is so important. Those five views were influential but not determinative. Isn’t it to your great benefit to remember that this is possible and that this power of dynamic self-regulation is available to you and to your clients? And really, isn’t this the best way to picture a human being, not as a strictly biological creature, not as a strictly psychological creature, not as a strictly personality-defined creature, not as a strictly socially compelled creature, and not as a creature who is completely at the mercy of his or her circumstances, but rather as a creature who, through self-conversation, can figure things out?

This is a decision that you get to make, both as a person and as a humane helper, to view yourself and others in this way. You can learn how to engage in useful and powerful self-conversation and you can help your clients engage in similarly useful and powerful self-conversations. This view honors the reality of our capacity to think and constitutes our best path to mental health and emotional wellbeing. A dynamic self-regulation model of this sort does not reject the biological, psychological, personality, social, and circumstantial causes of mental and emotional distress. Rather, it rejects a reduced, inaccurate view of human beings as just their biology, just their psychology, just their personality, just their social interactions, or just their circumstances.

A dynamic self-relationship model takes the most into account and, as a result, provides you and your clients with the best chance to achieve mental health and emotional wellbeing. My goal in this book is to help you explore the ins and outs of this dynamic self-regulation process by employing the playful metaphor of a “room that is your mind” where, seated comfortably in your easy chair, you learn how to reduce your sadness, halt pestering thoughts, calm your nerves, eliminate unnecessary dramas, and in other ways radically improve your mental landscape. This dynamic self-regulation is your brain’s true brilliance—and it’s in your power to choose it as your way of being and to help clients choose it as theirs. If you do, you will have done yourself and them a giant mental health favor.

3
Healthy Indwelling

It is commonplace to have a thought like “It’s getting late and I need to leave now.” We have millions of these. They do not feel like the result of some inner dialogue, conversation or argument. Rather, they feel exactly like those millions of simple, everyday thoughts that arise in all the ways that thoughts arise, from instinct (“I sure am hungry”), from associations (“That blue is so like the color of my first car!”), from annoyance (“Can’t he stop slamming the screen door?”), from fear (“He’s driving too fast!”), from sensing and appraising (“This café is very crowded”), from our inner to-do list (“Time to do the dishes!”), and so on. There isn’t anything very remarkable there.

Or is there?

Why is it that we he...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• PART I Dynamic Self-Regulation and Healthy Indwelling
• PART II 30 Cognitive Strategies for Mental Health
• PART III 30 Cognitive Strategies for Increased Creativity
• Index