If I had a single grain of rice for every time I heard someone say “talk therapy doesn’t work” or at the very least read it on social media or on a website I would have enough rice to feed a family for 4 for a year. But when the mind is broken how else do people think it is going to heal? With a pill? With some sort of operation to “fix” the broken part of the brain? No, it’s through reprogramming the mind to fix itself. You can’t take the broken part out of you, but you can learn to slap a band-aid on it and move on with your life. Understanding the mind healing process is the key to these self-help pages actually helping you…
If you had an accident and broke your leg, what do you think the healing process would be like? You would probably visit a hospital, get bandaged up and then slowly, but slowly start to heal again. But this wouldn’t happen overnight, it would take a good while for that leg to heal as you will be constantly using it making the healing process seem a lot longer than you might think. It doesn’t matter what mental health issues you have from BPD to Bipolar, they are all caused by a fault in the brain, but you can’t put your brain in plaster and wait for it to heal! Let’s look at this through the doctor’s eyes…
So, let’s take someone with severe depression as an example. What is actually wrong with them? They are feeling so depressed that they are feeling suicidal and possibly self-harming. The first thing anyone would ask when reviewing this patient is “why?” (much like we have already done in Week 16) “Why is this patient feeling so depressed?”. The real answer to this question might simply be that the patient just doesn’t know. So what can we do for them? We can give them some form of antidepressant medication but that will only last for a while and the last thing you want to do is to get the patient addicted to them from long-term use. In fact, if you have BPD any form of medication will probably not work for the main symptoms of it, so there is no point in taking them. So what can we do now? The only logical answer is to somehow fix the mind.
We can’t drill into it and fix it, the brain doesn’t work like that. You can go through electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), but the results are less than encouraging and it could even make you feel worse. So the only logical thing left to do is to try and reprogram the mind. It is little more than an organic computer after all! Sadly you don’t have a disc drive built into it nor a micro SD card reader so we are going to have to download the information. That is all these weekly self-help pages are trying to do, they are trying to reprogram the mind so that the things you are currently suffering from no longer have an effect.
There will be many of you reading this who will feel it is best to go to a one-on-one therapy session to fix themselves, but they will only tell you the exact same things you are reading here only a little more targeted. Sadly this isn’t the future, I can’t press a button and make you all feel better, but I can try and help you to fix yourself. It is up to you if you want to download the information or not.
This Week’s Homework: This week I want you all to visit all those BPD and Bipolar pages you follow on Facebook and ask people what cured them. Most of them will tell you that it was DBT or CBT and lots of them will tell you that it was themselves. They watched videos, read books, they read self-help pages just like this one and at the end of it all they felt much better. None of them are going to tell you they just woke up one night and were healed, nor will they say that they had a small operation and now they feel fine. Understanding that talk therapy is probably the ONLY way to fix the brain should help you absorb the information it is trying to download and help fix your brain
