By Erin Beck
There’s a saying, “everyone is fighting a battle you know nothing about.” There’s also a psychological method called cognitive restructuring. It’s about taking an emotional thought that’s causing you pain (maybe an anger response covering up fear or sadness), a story you tell yourself, and determining if another story could be true.
Let’s think of some examples.
Maybe you’re an elected official. A constituent calls your office every day. You decide to disregard the complaints because, “These complaints must be personal, not professional. All this person wants to do is cause trouble.”
Let’s think about that another way. Maybe they have memory loss and don’t remember calling you. Maybe the person doesn’t know how to navigate our purposely convoluted healthcare system, if you could even call it a system versus a conflicting, tangled spider web of ways to catch a human life and wait for it to wither and die.
So, it’s not all about you.
Another example. Maybe someone said to you, “People who don’t want to work are lazy.” And you think, “Something must be wrong with me” and that they’re criticizing you.
But nothing is wrong with you. Maybe you’re working on building new skills because your job doesn’t exist anymore. Maybe politicians lied to you about the future of that industry. Maybe the other person is actually criticizing themselves, because they experience a lot of shame from when they stole food from their friends’ parents’ cabinets as a child because their parents were poor. Maybe you don’t dream of labor for the rich, but you enjoy lots of activities that bring value, and that is work.
Ask yourself, “Do I care what this person thinks? Do I think something is wrong with me? And if so, what happened that made me think that?” Then figure that out and return that remark to its sender, because that has nothing to do with you.
Maybe you have a friend that makes you feel good about yourself. You’ve known them for a long time and consider them to be one of your closest friends. Someone says that your loved one deliberately harms others. You think that must be untrue. That person must be lying, because you see no evidence of that. You become angry.
Is it possible they aren’t lying? That maybe people repress or hide certain parts of themselves? Or that maybe you’ve never seen that side of them? Maybe it’s not about you.
Then, ask yourself why you’re angry. We all get by relying on stories. In this example, the story might be that you’ve surrounded yourself with safe, supportive people. Do the comments disrupt that narrative? Is another perspective possible?
Maybe you frequent a popular store regularly. You recommend it to others, so it feels like a representation of you. You suggest that the store put your business cards on the front desk, and you suggest you will do the same for them. The clerk goes in the back to call the owner, and the owner says no.
Maybe you decide the owner never appreciated your business after all. But maybe you were the third person to ask that day.
And where are your emotions coming from? What’s your story? Maybe you are worried because your business is struggling. Maybe earlier that day, an offhand remark put you on edge.
There’s another saying I like: “These thoughts are not your thoughts. These thoughts are your conditions.”
Think about that. We come into this world with countless future forms. We arrive with parents and genes and predispositions. Then the world exerts its might, and we are grains of sand.
We become.
We become people with different coping skills, internal struggles, defense mechanisms, hobbies, likes and dislikes, professions, experiences, joys, pains, opinions, perspectives, perceptions, and… thoughts.
Maybe there is one truth, but to find it, you’d have to consciously decide to do the work of peeling back every layer, eliminating all external factors acting upon you and everyone else, all human and ego-based desire for validation, and that kind of labor would take you 24 hours a day.
But while there are 24 hours in a day and 12 months in a year, is time something different to a newborn baby and a person in hospice?
Does time change for someone the last time another person ever speaks their name?
And to a child, is the world not a scarier place than it is to an adult?
I’m not sure the soul has thoughts. Whenever I try to capture the essence of soul in my mind, I imagine an endless bright light. I think we find glimpses of it in our own ways. For one person that might be meditation or yoga; for another it might be in nature or a passion; for another in repetitious work or a child’s eyes.
I think thoughts are the culmination of things that happen to us and choices we’ve made, and that we should try (often failing, because we are human) to be compassionate to people when we consider their choices, because we are unaware of every influence, incident and perspective.
I also think we should be compassionate because every time we consider placing value or judgment on a choice, we too are choosing to accept that societal conditions, morals and values and consensus represent universal truth. For instance, that tying healthcare to work is not a social construct but inevitable.
As if finding truth were like barreling down a highway, with only one destination, instead of an exploration of the unknown and the unseen.
As if truth changed when we discovered gravity pulls us toward the earth or when we discovered the pull of the ocean tide toward the moon.
As if your own truth hadn’t been shape-shifted, as if it wasn’t camouflaged, wasn’t molded into itself based upon everything that’s happened to you. And if you held it tight enough, it would never change and never betray you; as if you never had to depend on faith because you were omnipotent. As if you could know every smooth side, every jagged edge, and every crack.
As if truth was something you could grasp in the palm of your hand and never let it go. As if it could save you.
