Bad Thinking

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.