Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ever since I built my shrine to Zoroaster my sorghum harvest has been enormous
Religion isn’t a solo act.
Indeed, Zoroaster has really been dropping the ball in matters regarding sorghum. :-(
Suppressing negative thoughts may be good for mental health after all
61–70 of 169 posts
Re: Suppressing negative thoughts may be good for mental health after all
#62I suppose it wouldn't be that surprising. Mindfulness for instance teaches you to "let go" of thoughts - which is really just a gentle form of suppression. CBT encourages you to redirect existing negative thoughts in a positive/constructive direction - ultimately steering you away from or undermining the original negative thought - but does not encourage you to do a deep dive on it. Not to mention that Freud was a qu…
The trouble with suppressing negative thoughts in the long run is that, eventually, reality may force you to confront them all at once and under far more difficult conditions. I'm a strong believer that you have to confront negative thoughts and resolve underlying issues as soon as they arise and not neglect them and tell yourself that everything is going to be OK. It's not going to be OK. Murphy's law; what can go w…
The underlying issue is the thoughts. Once you have done all you can do many start worrying the future won't unfold as they predicted. Fool yourself into thinking you live in some hell on earth is worse than thinking you might be happy with your current situation.
Re: Suppressing negative thoughts may be good for mental health after all
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't get me wrong, there was a lot of bad with religion but modern faith in places like the UK or the Nordics seems to be a net benefit IMO... Even in light of what the Christian Nationalist movement is striving towards in the US, and in light of the ugly persistence of fundamentalism in places like Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan?
I wonder if it's like any technology and trade offs between helping/hurting people. If religions help 95% of people be more loving and 5% be more hateful, would it be a net benefit? Does it depend what those 5% do with the hate or the 95% with the love? What if the percentages were different? Obviously an overly simplistic thought experiment, yet I wonder if we have any way, that isn't arbitrary, to say if a tool is…
If a religion be the cause of hatred and disharmony, it would be better for it not to exist
Any religion which is not a cause of love and unity is no religion.
Re: Suppressing negative thoughts may be good for mental health after all
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't need to dwell on it either - and that's the issue, most people dwell on it, because they're taught that all feelings are good and valid, and should be explored, my own experience says the opposite, not all feelings deserve exploration, and too much navel gazing is bad for ones mental health.
However, not being able to explore such feelings ends up making you an unsympathetic person, as you cannot bare these feelings with others. Another argument is that you are denying yourself of the experience of being human. These feelings exist for a reason, just as physical pain exists for a reason. You wouldn't hurt yourself on purpose (or maybe you do c;), but physical pain helps you stay safe. I feel this is the…
"Suppress" seems to be a loaded word.
In the context of "denying it exists", yes, it's clear to see that it's not possible to process the negative feelings if not explored.
But the positive interpretation would be to not spin on these thoughts endlessly. It's a trap for all of us and obsessing over hurts doesn't serve us well either.
I have a theory I call "the emotional digestive system": we take in these hurts, taste them, chew on them. Then they digest. If the process is working well, we shit them out.
Re: Suppressing negative thoughts may be good for mental health after all
#65Why are we still talking about Freud?
Some researchers studied how to be happy. Unsurprisingly they also found no support for Freudian ideas that were popular 30 years ago.
The Cambridge University PR office still leads by stating Freudian ideas as the "accepted narrative". Maybe they are? But this is the least novel result of the study, and yet it's in the headline.
Obviously we shouldn't shoot the messenger: science writers are just going for clicks like most of the internet. But wow, Freud dug us quite a deep hole to climb out of.
Re: Suppressing negative thoughts may be good for mental health after all
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
The trouble with suppressing negative thoughts in the long run is that, eventually, reality may force you to confront them all at once and under far more difficult conditions. I'm a strong believer that you have to confront negative thoughts and resolve underlying issues as soon as they arise and not neglect them and tell yourself that everything is going to be OK. It's not going to be OK. Murphy's law; what can go w…
The underlying issue is the thoughts. Once you have done all you can do many start worrying the future won't unfold as they predicted. Fool yourself into thinking you live in some hell on earth is worse than thinking you might be happy with your current situation.
I feel like happiness itself is also like a garden and needs to be maintained. You need to take intermittent breaks to look for weeds.
Re: Suppressing negative thoughts may be good for mental health after all
#67For ethical reasons, no participant was given a negative event to imagine, but only positive or neutral ones. 120 people and three months and during COVID. Just because it's from Cambridge don't assume credibility.
> no participant was given a negative event to imagine I feel that's taken a little out of context. There were two trials: > For No-imagine trials, participants were given one of their cue words, asked to first acknowledge the event in their mind. Then, while continuing to stare directly at the reminder cue, they were asked to stop thinking about the event – they should not try to imagine the event itself or use dive…
> I feel that's taken a little out of context
Not necessarily, for one how often people really stare at the cues of a negative event, and try to suppress it versus trying to suppress an internal imagination of the event? Secondly, there’s a greater confound in which externalizing your fear to begin with has a positive effect on processing the affect.
It’s also not clear enough how the operationalize “the suppress”, because it is a difficult and paradoxical task to execute volitionally especially in the context of acute anxiety, because anxiety’s job is literally to interrupt your normal salience structure, and make it self salient non-volitionally.
There is another devil in the detail, the target negative events are self-selected by the participants, so in all likelihood, the most disturbing events are not going to be readily consciously available, and whatever comes up here are going to be things that are already filtered to be easier to deal with.
In contrast in obsessive compulsive disorder, the intrusiveness of the imaginations will be all consuming. In which case it is contraindicated to try suppressing the thought, because it definitely will backfire, as it is precisely what maintains the disorder, but instead it is about learning to stay unresponsive in the face of exposure (ie not scratching the itch) of such thoughts, which is known as exposure and response prevention. Yet still, this method is not found to be necessarily more successful than straight out CBT either.
Re: Suppressing negative thoughts may be good for mental health after all
#68When ever this notion comes up i cant help but wonder how good crashing and burning thanks to ignoring reality is for your mental health. Just because stuff isnt nice doesnt mean its safe to ignore. Its worth mentioning that dealing with negative thoughts and experiences is part of how we grow as people. Its why Bambis mother got shot in a Disney movie. Because sooner or later, kids have to deal with harsh stuff. Unf…
I regularly dismiss thoughts that are distressing but not at all necessary to dwell on. For instance, sometimes when I'm working, a certain problem I'm having or technology I'm working with will remind me of some stressful work situation I've had in the past. There's no reason to relitigate some bullshit that happened years ago, so I do my best to set it aside. I'm not ignoring any important reality, none of that mat…
Thanks for the feedback. I think this boils down to your ability to determine what is beneficial to revisit and what isnt. I would argue if you are able to differentiate the two reliably and are further able to tell that
>There's nothing further for me to learn from the situation
its unlikely that you are suppressing anything. To be at that point you have to had dealt with it already and are just not getting hung up on the past anymore. Which you arguably shouldnt, having dealt with the situation means you know what to look out for in the future to not become that version of yourself again. There is nothing left to suppress here, people arent a static entity through time.
Suppression for me implies not having dealt with the situation and not having learnt its lessons. Otherwise you wouldnt need to suppress it.
The whole thread is really a great showcase for assumed attribution of meaning and the inherit loss in complexity in language.
Re: Suppressing negative thoughts may be good for mental health after all
#69I suppose it wouldn't be that surprising. Mindfulness for instance teaches you to "let go" of thoughts - which is really just a gentle form of suppression. CBT encourages you to redirect existing negative thoughts in a positive/constructive direction - ultimately steering you away from or undermining the original negative thought - but does not encourage you to do a deep dive on it. Not to mention that Freud was a qu…
The trouble with suppressing negative thoughts in the long run is that, eventually, reality may force you to confront them all at once and under far more difficult conditions. I'm a strong believer that you have to confront negative thoughts and resolve underlying issues as soon as they arise and not neglect them and tell yourself that everything is going to be OK. It's not going to be OK. Murphy's law; what can go w…
My view is it's sort of a balance. There's a place for confronting negative thoughts but it's possible to spend too much energy doing so which can also have negative consequences.
The problem is that you can't "weed" your mind, that's not how minds really work. It's not a garden at all, it's a learning system. The things you pay attention to are also the things which become more prominent. Attention is ultimately sunlight and water for memories if we need to use a gardening analogy.
The problem really comes when the memory becomes intrusive. At that point you're forced to do something to tackle it because it's growing anyway.
Re: Suppressing negative thoughts may be good for mental health after all
#70Working through multiple traumata for a few years now. I've found that if you work through a negative thought long enough, it will eventually reveal its purpose. I've started journaling in 2016 or so, so it takes a long time, since I didn't have coaching or anything. Internal dialog goes like this:
- feeling numb and like dieing ~ what's the issue? - I don't work, feeling guilty over not working, I'd wish they'd fire me over that ~ That true? - I want to get fired so my destiny comes true again, ima fckup, looser ~ you're not though (examples of achievements) - reality fcks with my belief... (some silence, processing, giving it time) ... so, I'm not a fckup? ~ No - That feels ... hopeful? (haven't felt that in a very long time) ~ weird, hm? - why do I believe this? (ima fckup) ~ Feels safer that way, others can't hurt you if you do it first and harder. Nobody can hurt you like you do... (mix of loving feelings follows)
I've done byron katie's work for a while, and some of her voice was internalized (listened to her youtube dialogues for 2-3 weeks), that might be, where the nice questioning voice must have come from.