Move over, Rationality won’t work anymore.
A lot of the lay-man counseling we do for each other and that which happens at the hands of professionals, has a very common aspect — we try to convince the person how they’re thinking is wrong or emotional, and not “rational”, it is distorted and we should try to fix it.
In the realms of professional therapy, it may take on the face of thought-based therapies like cognitive behavioral therapy and rational emotive behavior therapy. Both of these therapies have one thing in common — they don’t believe that events have any power, that it is only the person’s interpretation of the event that matters.
So if you have a horrible boss, he wouldn’t be as horrible if you could think differently about him. Erm, riiiight.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that we don’t bring in meaning into a situation. In fact, I think meaning-making is a big part of our stories and a lot of change comes from richer, or different meaning making.
But, what rationality based talks, in the therapy room or outside amongst friends does, is take away the weight of the experience and the individuality of the person. Spending time with twisted people at home or work IS BAD. Yes, you can help the person by getting them to see how they’re life is more than just that or how, there have been times that they have not let toxic people ruin their day. But this is not the same as discrediting them by saying that experiences in themselves mean nothing. We interpret each thing that happens to us in the light of past experience and people are shitty to each other all the time. When you tell me to change my thoughts about the person, you are taking away my past experience-based indicators — which, in a lot of other situations have proved right.
Secondly, the individuality of the person — how they have understood the situation and their own unique ways of tackling it, are lost when we treat the person like a computer.
INPUT>PROCESS>OUTPUT
It’s not simply a matter of introducing a new code to analyse the bytes of information. Humans are richer and more complex.
Quite honestly, its frustrating when we reduce people to their irrational thoughts and distortions. If we do that, they end up appearing like psychologically-illiterate emotional boomerangs. No one then tries to understand their lived experiences and the coping skills that they already have.
Newer therapies focus on meaning-making, generating solutions from the coping skills of the person that already exist and normalizing pain as a healthy part of living rather than some communicable disease. Psychological pain has been there ever since Adam and Eve. It’s time to stop penalising it and trying to strap it up with the whip of rationality.
Research suggests that change is more likely and sustained if the person has control over the goals set and they feel from within that they influence the change process. How can we achieve this when a therapist or a friend with some sort of a psychological cape, wants to act like a superhero and show the right ways of thinking?
When these therapies were invented, we thought humanity’s biggest problem is irrationality. And, if we could make people rational, one at a time, then it would fix the world. But people can use rationality to justify evil things. And rationality or “working on myself” can actually make systematic injustice and status quo even stronger. Because we place the problem in the person. But when you really look at it, so many problems are interactional and quite a lot are highly social and environmental. To make a person then, solely responsible for their thoughts is like giving them a spoon to remove the mud from a pit while we keep dumping truckloads of mud in the form of societal oppressions, systemic problems and injustice.
It’s time to treat people like people again and not problems to be analysed and fixed. Healing involves meaning and real stories and individuality and more importantly, putting the blame of social aspects where they belong — in the society, the environment and the discourse.
