How Are Your Thoughts Treating You?

There is a question I always ask of my patients every day, who are often depressed, suicidal, delusional, and/or hearing voices: how are your thoughts treating you? At first they often don’t know what I mean, but soon they get it – they realize that they are something apart from their thoughts. That is, they don’t want to be depressed, or think about killing themselves, or be paranoid, or hear voices. They find it comforting to reflect that all this unpleasant noise and chatter is squeezing the real them out of the picture.

A related idea, that the chatter in your head is not the real you, is a lot harder to fully get across to people – especially people who feel “normal.” Most people easily accept that their worries and anxieties belong to themselves, and that the news or other events that make them feel bad do so because they are connected to them.

But we have complete control over our inner landscape. We are not really connected to the chatter any more than one neuron is connected to another, or any atom touches any other atom, and our inner landscape is not connected to the outer landscape. We have tremendous power to choose what we think about, thus improving our well-being.

It is often difficult to convince anybody, regardless of his or her mental health, that most of their deepest beliefs also come from outside of them, and that even our deepest beliefs, too, are squeezing our real self out of the picture.

The qualia we choose to hold in our minds carries us out of landscapes and into ecosystems. Ultimately, our relationship is with ecosystems, not the landscape. But, just as chatter interferes with our inner consciousness, so too the ideals we inherit from the outer (primarily human) landscape interfere with our sense for ecosystems.

This is what it means when our thoughts are treating us well: we want both our inner consciousness and our sense for ecosystems to be as pure as possible. This is balance. Homeostasis. Qualiadelicious.