The Limits of My Language by Meijer Eva;

Author:Meijer, Eva;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Published: 2021-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Cognitive behavioural therapy: logic as a tool

Cognitive behavioural therapy focuses on separating positive and negative thoughts. The weeds must, effectively, be pulled from the mind. It starts with making a diagram, composed of three parts: situation, thoughts, and feelings/behaviour. The idea is that each specific situation provokes certain irrational thoughts, from which feelings and behaviour follow. Changing the thoughts will also change the feelings and behaviour. Undesirable thoughts can be challenged in two ways: by questioning their truth value and by showing that they don’t work. The thoughts may be something like this: I’m worthless; it’s all my fault; I’m a bad person; it’s better for me not to exist. With an eating disorder, there are also things like: I’m fat; I mustn’t eat. When you have thoughts of the latter kind, it’s good to realize that if you’re seriously underweight, they can’t be true. With thoughts about badness, it’s probably better just to understand that they’re not helpful.

CBT techniques were really helpful with regard to the anorexia. (Anorexia is, in fact, a very Cartesian condition: the anorexic sees the body as being separate from the mind, as something that the mind should curb, discipline and control.51) The thoughts that accompanied it, about my body and my weight, about being allowed or not allowed to eat, have completely vanished. They continued to haunt me for a while, like spectres, but they eventually gave up: I survived, I trained myself out of it.52 This way of thinking also helps with depression: being able to put ideas about worthlessness inside brackets is a useful technique for getting through bad times. It also taught me that I’m not always the right person to judge my own worth, which doesn’t alter the fact that I’m very self-critical.

The undermining thoughts beneath the eating disorder didn’t entirely vanish. Some of those thoughts I consider to be largely untrue (that I’m bad, that everything’s my fault) and when they come and visit me again, if I’m tired, or sad, or alone, then I can place them in brackets. Then I’m able to realize that although I may think these things now, this will change: that I’m just tired, or sad, or feeling lonely, and in these circumstances it makes sense to think these kinds of things. The thoughts do not say anything about me, they just say something about how my thinking works. At least, that’s the way it normally goes. When both life and thinking get fragmented, become tangled together and spin dark threads round me, this technique doesn’t work so well any more. Then I start to sleep badly, and when I sleep badly, I can no longer put things in perspective; then the negative thoughts lodge inside me, translating themselves into my feelings and vice versa; and then a mould begins to grow, first obscuring my joy and then my sense of logic, covering everything, until it’s all grey and hazy. When that happens, I switch into a military mode, in which discipline and order are central.

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