A few years ago my friend Ned inadvertently taught me a very
important lesson. We were discussing a
chronic health problem that had plagued him for many years. I asked him when he first learned of the
problem. Ned’s story:
I was a little boy and
my mom was taking me someplace in the family car. I had just eaten my lunch. She asked me how I was doing and I said,
“Great Mom, except for the huge pain in my stomach.”
She responded, “What
do you mean, Ned?”
I answered, “Oh come
on Mom, you know … that huge pain that everyone always gets right after they eat
a meal!”
My mother realized
that I was serious. She pulled off the
road, stopped the car and asked me again what was going on. Soon after that I had an appointment with a
medical specialist and learned that I had a serious digestive illness that would eventually be
diagnosed as Crohn’s Disease.
The very important lesson I learned from Ned was that humans can
easily assume that everyone sees the world the same way they do. As such, there is no reason to change because
everyone is in the same boat. Without the intervention of his mother, Ned might have gone through life assuming everyone suffered a severe stomach ache after every meal!
Soon after learning this important lesson, I was
interviewing a single woman in her late twenties. Our conversation turned to the topic of
trust. Her words shocked me, “Oh come
on, you know that you can’t trust anyone - everyone knows that!”
I asked her if she was serious about this. She looked at me as if I was the crazy
one. As a young girl, this woman had
been the victim of abuse by a family member who was highly trusted. No one in her family believed her when she
accused this person of abuse. And to make
matters worse, this person was a leader in their community and was esteemed as a
person of good character and high integrity.
As a result of this, this woman created a rule for living – a rule she
assumed everyone else had also already made. The
rule was: No one can be trusted. And then she lived by this rule, and proved
it to be true, for the next twenty years. It permeated, defined and controlled all aspects of her life.
This type of thinking is what I call “Bad Thinking”. It forces a distortion of reality and
prevents a person from becoming whom they are capable of being. The longer one lives in such a trap, the more
difficult and damning it becomes. There
are enough “false positives” in life to convince a bad thinker that his or her
view of reality is, in fact, real.
It’s my growing view that much of what we call mental
illness is the result of deeply entrenched bad thinking, often initiated at a
young age as a means of coping and surviving.
Whether caused by another person or self-made as a way of
protecting oneself from pain, embarrassment or heartache, the results are the
same: a distortion of reality that prevents a person from becoming whom they
are capable of being.
