On Paradigm Shifts

Sometimes we need to change our perspective to improve our mental health

For most of my life, I have been a “glass half empty” kind of guy. When I was a freshman in college, I read Pulitzer Prize winner The Road by Cormac McCarthy (later made to a movie by the same name). It is a dystopian novel set in a future where a father and a son walk through the burned wasteland that America becomes after some terrible natural event. They are survivalists, and the boy being so young does not know of life before. Through their journey, they get to see the worst of humanity — from stealing to cannibalism. Things are so bad, that the father has a few bullets reserved to end their lives in the event that they are about to be caught by a group. They have seen what happens to people who get caught. Interestingly enough, the boy has more good in him than most adults around. Where his dad might want to avoid helping someone for the sake of avoiding possible danger, the child wants to help someone for the sake of being kind and providing comfort to someone. In a way, it reminds me of the different sides of humanity that we saw during the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Fast-forward to my time as a teacher, when I am having a discussion with a co-worker of mine. There were certain novels we loved assigning our students annually, and she particularly enjoyed assigning The Road. We had talked about it a few times, but this time, I confessed to her my reluctance to ever assign it to anyone, “I just feel like that novel drained my soul with how negative it was. From the time it begins, there is nothing good happening. Everything is so dark, people are dying, eating others, killing themselves, looting, raping, just struggling to survive, etc. The man roamed the earth in constant fear of what could happen to his son.” She agreed that the novel was full of much evil and general bad. “However,” she noted, “The light was always there. Even though all those horrible things were going on, the father and the son were ‘carriers of light’ and spread good.” I was left speechless.

Photo by Linus Sandvide on Unsplash

I had a sudden realization that she was right. She was right, and I had become so fixated on the bad that I overlooked the good that was around them as well as the overall message of the novel. How often have I become so hyper-focused on all the negative around me that I forgot to be thankful for the good? How long has this been my default, operating setting? Now that I am a therapist, I understand the cognitive distortion of filtering and the importance of reframing thought patterns for clients who suffer from anxiety and depression. The symptoms of anxiety and depression are just that — symptoms. They are signs that something is not right.

I have previously referred to our consciousness as a river through which thoughts flow. Anxiety tells us to grab on to those thoughts, as many as possible, and hold on tight to them or hurry them along if they are not desirable ones. It often seeks to gain more control over situations in which we do not always have control. Depression has us hold on to the ones that are all too familiar, comfortable and safe, even if they are not good thoughts. It defaults to the few things that have been proven to make us feel good and tells us to avoid those which do not. But mindfulness teaches us to observe these thoughts, allow them to pass as they wish, and then recollect ourselves when we analyze them in tranquility. It is through this analysis that we find patterns of thought that we frequent and hurt us. By reframing these thought patterns, we are able to slowly change our perspective, ultimately leading to a paradigm shift — a change in fundamental thoughts that happens after we challenge the anomalies within us.

For me, this is what “working on myself” means. It means giving my thoughts the freedom to flow, not holding on to any of them for too long, recollecting myself, and making changes so that the less desirable thoughts become less frequent. It means being mindful about the fact that the light is always there. And that is one example of what therapy can help us do.