Good and Bad

 

Being an engineer has taught me important analytical skills to sort ideas and concepts into categories. This black and white approach is compellingly simple, but can it be sustained.

Binary Thinking:
So much of my world view is rooted in a framework of truth. Things are either in or they're out. The laws of classical physics are in, and books of science fiction, may be fun to think about, but are clearly not in the truth framework. Early in my life these things were categorized on my behalf and for the most part I didn't question them. When life became complicated my framework became much less stable.

Over time there was a growing third category of things that I couldn't easily figure out. My assumption was that each item in this 3rd category of things is actually in or out but I haven't quite figured out which one it is. Not knowing how to categorize something is quite stressful and thinking about it consumed a tremendous amount of energy.

A big part of my mental health journey has been recognizing feelings and naming them. With binary thinking, each feeling was identified as good or bad. As the number of feelings got more nuanced this sorting process became more difficult and evidently not very helpful. Naming a feeling as bad and then realizing that I couldn't remove it from my experience became very disconcerting. What was a bit more helpful was changing my categories to constructive and destructive. These labels indicate whether I should be encouraging a feeling or not.  Recognizing a feeling that's destructive isn't bad in a guilty kind of way but rather it's a stimulus I can choose to give less or more influence to depending on its helpfulness.

Categorizing my feelings as constructive and destructive is much more helpful than tagging them as good or bad. Unfortunately, identifying them as opposing forces that can't co-exist is still problematic. For example, I want desperately to experience joy which is on my constructive list but across from it on the destructive list is anxiety. Anxiety is not something I can engineer out of my life easily and if joy and anxiety can't co-exist then I have to destroy anxiety before I let myself feel joy.

This binary thought process, results in me subconsciously pushing down joy every time I feel anxious. The binary brain can't understand how they live together. The problem is that they actually do live together. My experience shows me that joy and anxiety can co-exist, and that causes my binary brain a lot of stress. When I don't let them co-exist, there is almost no joy in my life during seasons when anxiety is strong.

A new way of thinking:
A new concept for me is that every idea, belief and emotion has both good and bad elements. There are many things that are better understood if they're not categorized as true or false. In addition to that, constructive and destructive feelings can and do live together. That doesn't make me a freak. It's probably more normal than the binary view.

When someone asks me how I'm doing I don't have to discern a specific feeling that describes my whole state of being because that's not the nature of my experience. When I tell someone that I'm doing awesome it doesn't mean that there's not some really aweful things going on in my brain. It also doesn't mean that I'm lying if I'm not completely awesome. I can feel awesome at the same time as awful. 

So if all these things are happening at once there's a few new skills I have to learn.

• First I will stop judging myself for feeling bad things and good things at once. Apparently that's normal.
• I've found that the feelings I focus on are also the ones that grow. The ones I don't focus on slowly fade into the background. Note: they usually don't disappear.
• When someone asks me how I'm doing, I can choose what to focus on in an authentic way and answer in a balanced way.
• My energy shifts away from suppressing destructive emotions and shifts toward growing and focusing on constructive emotions while the destructive ones are staring me in the face.

As with all these lessons I'm learning, I lose track of my new way and get pulled into the ruts that I've formed over 50 years of life. This journey isn't a straight line forward and that's ok. I can see my new way of thinking take hold a bit more every time I choose to embrace it. As it turns out, making peace with the way things are can actually be much less stressful than jamming things into a binary framework. The delusion of binary simplicity is just not an option any more.