[Dr. P],
Thank you very much for sending me that link. I read the article yesterday morning, and I’ve been passively thinking about the concepts over the past day to figure out which points stood out to me the most. I really liked that he pointed out psychology’s roots in philosophy, and I see no rational reason for which to disagree. If the bifurcation is as widespread as he says, I think that it’s an important problem that should be addressed.
Speaking from anecdotal experience (I’ve been through various psychological treatments over the past 7 years), I’d say that all good counselors and psychiatrists embrace (consciously or unconsciously) the essence of logic-based therapy. But, I also recognize that those same counselors were not guiding that type of discussion with me, I was the one begging for them to rationally evaluate my thoughts.
Perhaps with a more “generic” patient, they’d be applying more “generic” methods of counselling, but I’d be lying if I knew what those “generic” methods were. I’ve never educated myself on counselling methods. I’m self-educated on the psychological/biological aspects of mental disorders, the history of psychology, and psychological theories on “why things go wrong”. The only treatments I’ve ever researched were biological (e.g. medications and electroconvulsive therapy), because my interest is in the fundamental causes of human thoughts and behavior, and philosophical concepts (e.g. the will to power), just don’t cut it for me.
This may be a bit of a long read, but I’ll try to walk you through my method in a chronological way.
The first step is to figure out what is unchangeable:
For the past few years I’ve been borderline obsessed with finding a biological diagnosis for myself, and to do that, I’ve experimented on myself. Through blood-tests (from a very strange rhuemotologists that became intrigued by me), I found out that my body-serotonin levels are almost undetectable. Serotonin cannot pass through something called the blood-brain barrier, so all of the serotonin in the brain must be produced in the brain. So although it can’t be tested, it’d be fair to say that my body may have a problem with producing serotonin, and that the levels in my brain are probably lower than average. Putting aside the low-serotonin-causes-depression or depression-causes-low-serotonin debate, it’s obvious that the low levels of this neurotransmitter are going to affect me regardless of what types of psychological tricks I play on myself. It has become an unavoidable truth in my life (a facticity if we were speaking in philosophical terms), so I’ve attempted to find the unavoidable consequences of it.
The unavoidable consequences (according to scientific research), are problems with digestion, pain/sound/light tolerance, sleep, food cravings, and emotional regulation. Possible consequences include OCD-like thoughts, anxiety, depression and other mental problems.
I have all of the unavoidable consequences, and I run through cycles of OCD tendencies, anxiety and depression. (The main cause of these cycles may be due to being bipolar, but the following still applies). The next step in my method is figuring out how to work with the unchangeable in a productive way, and devaluing the negative consequences that are unavoidable.
When I recognize I am having an OCD fit, I attempt to redirect my attention to a more meaningful task. So if I find myself anxiously counting my steps to make sure I get from point A and B to point C in the quickest way possible, I make the conscious decision to go clean my desk or my car instead of walking around the house aimlessly. The OCD anxiety remains while I’m cleaning my desk, but I’ll remind myself that it doesn’t truly matter how clean the desk or car gets, it’s only important that I have an outlet for my ritualistic need to make things momentarily more efficient/clean/organized. So I’m shifting the value from the task, to the purpose of the task (which is to relieve the anxiety caused by the compulsion to complete the task). It’s then that I calm down, because I recognize that something is just misfiring in my brain, and I’m just acting out because of it. In time it will pass, and in the mean time I am doing something productive. This is something I’d consider to be a logical-based method.
But that doesn’t do much to capture the true essence of my method, I think a more interesting process is how I handle depression.
I recognize that I am predisposed to, and will have, long periods of severe depression. Common sense tells us that depression is a “bad thing”, but in recent months I’ve found it to be a gift. By manipulating the symptoms of depression, and critically evaluating the ideas of “happiness” and “sadness”, I see depression as a period of extreme self-reflection and an opportunity for abundant personal growth.
Common symptoms of depression are low self-esteem, low self-worth, feelings of guilt and pessimistic thoughts. Typically, these are regarded as “bad things” to have, but think of the discoveries you can make if you question these thoughts and change the implications of these symptoms (we’re doing Nietzsche-style work here):
Low self-esteem and self-worth: (Positives) You’re looking at yourself critically, finding qualities that you dislike about yourself, considering how others may see or value you because of those traits. (Negatives) You’re likely to devalue or ignore positive traits you possess in this mode of thinking.
Feelings of guilt: (Positives) you’re evaluating your actions and classifying them based on your own set of moral principles, and you’re reflecting on the consequences of your actions. (Negatives) You may begin to feel like you are unworthy of things you have or your position in life, because you are overlooking the positive things you have done to achieve them, or looking at those positive means of achievement in a negative light.
Pessimistic thoughts: (Positives) you’re looking very critically at your environment and the people in your life in ways that you may not do in an optimistic mindset. (Negatives) you may irrationally blow things out of proportion and become delusional/paranoid that “everyone is out to get you”.
Looking at this list, you may realize that logical exercises will diminish or eliminate all of the “negatives” to these modes of thought. The biggest problem in depression is irrational ego-centric thinking, where you irrationally attribute all negative life circumstances and personal attributes to your own thoughts and actions, instead of recognizing that you are a product of your biological make-up and your environment. Negative things about yourself that have been caused by circumstance/conditioning/biased thought, can all be changed. Using the positives of “depressed thinking” to determine the traits that you dislike, and critical evaluation to determine the traits that you can change, is a pathway to developing a plan to improve yourself.
Switching gears, let’s evaluate emotions. They’re biological reactions caused by physiological processes in your brain always induced by some type of stimuli. Most people will react with anger when they watch someone kill a puppy, because that is an extreme violation of their value system. But most people will not have a feeling of anger throughout the day (people like that come across as “irritated” or “short-tempered”), and if they do, there must be an underlying cause to it, and that cause must be constantly stimulating a feeling of anger. Self-hatred is a possible cause of this, because hatred and anger are closely related, and having hatred for the self is to constantly be exposed to a thing that you hate. So you must take it deeper and find the cause of this self-hatred, and that is impossible to do with the irrational thought pattern of seeing yourself as a singularity. It’d be impossible to view all of your traits as negative, it’s when we view ourselves as wholes that we can blanket ourselves under labels such as “good” or “bad”. Everyone is a combination of good and bad, even under their own subjective mode of valuation. By removing the fallacious view of seeing yourself as a singularity, self-hatred would be impossible. If applied universally, hatred as a whole would be almost impossible towards anything as complex as a person if you had knowledge of all of their traits. People hate what they don’t understand, because it’s impossible to view something that you don’t understand as anything more than a singularity. Apply that concept to communism, pedophilia, islam, etc. There are certainly qualities of those things that justify hatred, but not hatred for the whole. (I have some ideas on the concept of love as well, if you’d like me to share my writings on it, I’d be happy to send it to you)
But I’ve gotten off topic, emotions are a result of stimuli. Sadness is an emotion, in depression it could possible be caused by the same trigger of self-hatred. It can be dismantled in the same way, critical evaluation. All emotions can be dismantled in this way, but within the realm of human experience, it’s only productive to do this to ones we classify as “bad”. Emotions such as “happiness” are the same, but most people attempt to chase after happiness by inducing a stimuli that triggers it (gambling, shopping, hobbies, reading, etc).
Ask someone what’s making them happy today and they’ll probably give you a descriptive answer. Ask someone what’s making them sad and they probably don’t know or are too ashamed to say it or even think about it. That’s the problem with sadness-inducing stimuli, we try to avoid them, but a depressed person can’t because of the “symptoms” we looked at earlier.
But embracing those symptoms, and the positive aspects of them, can help us actually avoid the emotion of “sadness”. If we were to stop looking at ourselves as singularities and honestly got to know ourselves, we could figure out ways to extremely reduce our “bad” qualities and traits (the ones that violate our value system), and that would lead to a reduction is sadness-inducing stimuli that originate in the self.
Anyways, I think that this email has gone on for long enough. Hopefully you find it somewhat interesting and comprehensible. As you could probably imagine, I don’t have many people to talk to about these concepts because they lack the ability to comprehend. I want nothing more than somebody who can understand my ideas and offer insights.
Thank you for your time,
Jane