mental-health

How to Make Your Mind Unhackable

Gideon YutzyLeave a comment

Park benches are like messengers from another world. Day by day, they noiselessly preside over the wharf, or over a church yard somewhere off to the side of a windstrewn hodgepodge of grave markers. At the church we attend, there is a bench with a message emblazoned on it. Having always assumed it said something like, Rest in Peace, Laura, I never stopped to take note of its message. At least 90 percent of park benches are inscribed to someone who’s deceased, which makes them all the more ghostlike.

Then the other day I took the time to read it. It has that old line, ‘Use your hands for service, your heart for love, your mind for truth, etc.’ It seems an entirely appropriate blurb for a church that claims John Wesley as its spiritual ancestor. So wholistic. John Wesley sought to be a Christian who is both pious and concerned about helping others. I can sign on to that. That said, it does seem like Methodism, in an effort to be wholistic, has become almost too unoffensive, if that’s possible. Someone called it the Canada of the Christian church. (By the way, wholistic and holistic are both valid spellings. I’m just trying to be a good Methodist and acknowledge both spellings.)

Back to park benches, what do you think of the quote? I know it has the ring of a cliche, and that it is almost trite enough to write inside a fortune cookie. But that bit about using the mind for truth is quite salient for anything it may lack in originality. Especially so, given the unprecedented amount of bad and deleterious information out there. Truth, my friends, that’s where it’s at. Just hold onto truth and you’ll be okay.

Of course, I say this tongue in cheek, because who could ever purport to know truth. Jesus said you shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free. Here’s a mini-syllogism for you: I know very few people who are really free all the time, so that must mean most of us haven’t really found the truth yet. Most times when we find a ‘truth’ that sets us free in one area, it brings with it a fresh bondage. For instance, if you become a billionaire, it will free you up to travel and enjoy all sorts of nice things, but you’re no longer free to be happy-go-lucky about your wealth. You’ll have to manage and invest it. Most billionaires also have to hire security detail, which is a phrase that, to this day, doesn’t intuitively make sense to me. Why the hell do we say security detail? The phrase sounds almost as de-humanising as the concept.

I’m probably being self-indulgent to pick on the rich, but I reckon Elon Musk is an example of someone who doesn’t use his mind for truth. He likes to put forth the image of being a modern day Nikola Tesla, but do we realise we cannot attribute a single invention to him even if we wanted to? But why would anyone want to? Fawn over a person who creates such vast economic injustice. He didn’t personally invent the electric car, internet payments, or any kind of underground tunnels, nor did he personally make any advances in rockets. At least with Grubhub, some dudes named Matt Maloney and Mike Evans invented something: online takeaway websites. But they did it quietly and regally, like park benches. They didn’t launch campaigns to convince the world they’re epochal geniuses. Also, they didn’t con governments into subsidising their failing businesses.

It’s also true that Elon Musk has mused repeatedly that the world could be a simulation video game that he’s playing. It’s not overly comforting: he is the person in charge of more of the world’s resources than any other individual in history, and he sees the millions of people deprived of life’s basic necessities as mere pawns and not even real pawns at that. And yet these same pawns in his game will happily put out for him in marches. How easily we are bamboozled into trusting the very people who have our worst in mind.

The current American president is the quintessential con artist. How was a billionaire huckster whose companies filed for bankruptcy six times able to get half the country to vote for him not once, but 3 times? His personal wealth has doubled since taking office the second time in 2024. How could he be for the working class? He also facilitated the most expensive U.S. House race in history at 35 million dollars to unseat one of the last principled, citizen-centred legislators in America.

It can feel like like a losing battle, but it is important to name and shame people like Trump and Elon, if for no other reason to maintain our own grounding in a reality that still assumes right and wrong. Clearly, these two snake oil salesmen extraordinaire are not operating from reality, at least not the reality that seeks to create justice and flourishing for all people on earth.

We must, however, exert significantly more energy into righting that which is wrong in our immediate sphere of influence. Whatever the best way is to think of the devil, the Christian faith teaches that he is the father of lies. How has he messed up our own minds and made so that we aren’t, as the park bench advises, using them for truth? I find that if I can harness my mind as an ally, the quality of my life improves by orders of magnitude. I desperately need a mind attuned to truth. Every time I turn around, some new lie awaits me. A vast chasm still separates what I want from what I need, from what nourishes me. Wasting two hours on the internet feels like the right thing at the time, but one feels truly horrible afterward. Running 20 kilometres feels unpleasant during the run, but you feel amazing the rest of the day.

My current top 5 hacks for making my mind unhackable:

  1. Do things that are more body-centric. I’ve been acquiring simple physical exercises I can do in my living room, such as glute bridges, planks and sit-ups. None of the activities in my repertoire are terribly fun at first, but I have found some that are habit-forming and not too strenuous. Other activities, push-ups, for example, I find even less fun, so I mostly avoid them.
  2. Breath and breath prayers. Scrunch up the muscles in a given area of the body on the one breath, and luxuriously release them on the out breath. Pray, ‘Jesus, Son of David,’ on the in breath, and, ‘Have mercy on me a sinner,’ on the out breath.
  3. Positive distractions. I try to keep an assortment of interesting podcasts and audiobooks, so that when there’s a lull, I have something I can turn to. I find it good to keep a to-do list of manageable, bite-sized activities around the house.
  4. I like to log on and allow myself one game of Scrabble online against the computer, then note down new words the computer plays. My goal is still to reach a 1700 WESPA rating by 2030. Woogle.io is ad-free, and the best site I’ve found so far.
  5. It’s worth it to pause and get into another person’s orbit. Make eye contact with them and empathise with their problems. Musk is wrong, life is not a simulation. Having a solipsistic outlook makes me miserable. I will schedule a walk or a jog with a friend when I start feeling disregulated.

Can Humans Flourish Without Therapy?

Gideon Yutzy2 Comments

Inevitably, whenever there is a conversation about therapy, somebody will proclaim that back in the day nobody knew what therapy was, and didn’t they get on just fine without it. Then, after pausing to bask in their fond nostalgia, they might add something like, my goodness, I bet everyone led happier lives without therapy, that in fact *in some cultures today* they still don’t have therapy, and aren’t they some of the happiest people out there and isn’t suicide pretty much nonexistent in Africa, et cetera.

You can tell from the way I’m setting this up that I take issue with this line of thinking. My reasons are numerous, but one of the primary ones is that therapy has improved my life. As the blind fellow Jesus healed in John 9 might have said, “I do not know who or what is sinful, one thing I do know, I was blind and now I see.” The advantage of therapy, provided you are lucky enough to find a good therapy program, is that it gives sight to your blindness. It brings resources for navigating this treacherous maze we call life, and at the end of the day resources are resources no matter their origin.

Notice I said, provided you find a good program. There is a growing number of people criticizing therapy today, and as far as I can tell they all get caught in the same trap: they assume all therapy is the same. But saying all therapy is bad is like saying all food is bad. Any humans dependent on nutrients for survival are going to need food. So also any humans whose lives got messed up–say, by school bullies or war or their parents’ abandonment or spiritual abuse or witnessing an armed bank robbery–need therapy if they wish to flourish. And how does the percentage of people who get messed up psychologically compare with the percentage of people who need nutrients? Hint, it’s the same number in both cases and it has 3 digits.

There are various ways to delineate approaches to therapy. One helpful way is to think of formal therapy versus informal therapy. In the past few years, I have been enrolled in a specific formal model of therapy known as Internal Family Systems (IFS). If you are at all into therapy, you have probably come across it because it’s trending, but if you haven’t, here is a quick summary. IFS envisions the human person as made up of many parts. As the title of Richard Schwartz’s book says, there are “No Bad Parts,” only good parts that are stuck and must be loved into change.

We get to know our myriad parts–whether firefighters, managers, protectors, or exiles–by communicating with them, and even thanking them for the role they have played. No matter how ‘off course’ the parts have been, so goes the theory, they don’t have bad intentions. If we shame our parts, they might go into exile, and we will have fallen that much further behind in the process of finding redemption for them. And let’s remember they can rear their heads again at any moment. Of course, we can always employ the services of a screaming exorcist, and he or she may even appear to be successful, but as often as not God will change our parts the same way God changes people: through love and patience, and free from violence and denunciation.

In my experience, it is a hopeful and redemptive approach to therapy. And it never promises a panacea, as is the criticism (sometimes valid) of so many other kinds of therapy. In fact, IFS is a direct rebuttal to the burgeoning number of quick fixes out there. It is premised on the assumption that communication with our parts will continue the rest of our lives. “Thou desirest truth in the inward parts: and in the hidden part thou shalt make me to know wisdom” (Psalm 51:6). I don’t mean to proof-text, but I can’t help but think verses like this anticipate IFS. As it says in the Epistle to the Romans, “The good that I would, I do not,” and then later, “Present your members as slaves to righteousness.” Yet how can we present our members for righteousness if we are not acquainted with them?

The central idea is not to blame our bad parts but to listen to them, show compassion to them, and engage them so we can gain clarity about our condition. Schwartz identifies 8 C words to recenter us if we are caught in anxiety or shame or other dysfunctional states of mind. My graphic below shows each C-word on points of a star. When we are stuck in the shadowlands (the words in red), the C-words help us find the path back to our true self or, as we might say in the Christian faith, to our identity in Christ.

Like any healthy therapy, IFS does not purport to be the only show in town. But does it nonetheless make life more doable? You already know my answer is yes. That does not mean there are no other paths to self-knowledge and healing, perhaps even some paths that are less formal and thus more playful. Long ago when people still read books, we got self-knowledge and inner healing through literature. Now, for better or for worse, many learning institutes have replaced literature modules with psychology modules. In some sense, formal therapy (psychology) has superseded informal therapy (literature). There are many things to lament about our decreased literary appreciation and the insights into human nature that came with it, but that is no reason to reject models like IFS.

I offer one final way to distinguish among different types of therapy: narcissistic versus interpersonal. The public perception around therapy tends to change from one generation to the next. As Trevor Noah says, “Longer ago, you would have avoided telling a potential dating partner that you’re in therapy, but now it could very well be a selling point.” I am optimistic that at least some of the people in our generation go to therapy with the aim of becoming mature, productive members of society. Therapy, if it is to be effective, requires something from us. It is hard work. Therapy naysayers are correct that navel-gazing for its own sake gets us nowhere. But it is also true that exploring our past story in the right way really can help us find healing and flourishing in the present.

To sum up, we have all been broken and wounded. God can use any instrument to heal us, but the path to healing will never happen in a vacuum. In its most general definition of the word, therapy is nothing more or less than our path to redemption and healing. The human experience is not for wusses. Our path may be winding and may even include some shock therapy. But whatever the path, we ought not to shun God’s instrument of healing.

Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase of Ephesians 6:13, somehow at once slightly twee and profound (welcome to The Message), puts it well: “Be prepared. You’re up against far more than you can handle on your own. Take all the help you can get, every weapon God has issued, so that when it’s all over but the shouting you’ll still be on your feet.”

Thus Saith the Lord, Slow Thyself Down

Gideon Yutzy3 Comments

I committed two highly avoidable (and highly costly, for a working family) blunders in the last six months.

However, my frustration did not reach its fever pitch until yesterday. I arrived late for my morning class because: a. I encountered snarls of traffic after dropping the girls off at school and b. I then still took the time to pick up some miscellaneous hardware at the local Screwfix. In my frenzy, I wretchedly parked on a double yellow line, a fact I was not fully cognizant of until I got out of class three hours later, whereupon I found a menacing yellow clamp on my front driver’s side tyre.

After paying the 60-euro fine, I had to wait nearly two hours for ‘yer man’ to come de-clamp me, by which time I was twenty minutes late for my afternoon class on another campus. My English language students were patiently waiting and greeted me with pleasant smiles. I gave them an impromptu lesson on the words clamp, de-clamp, and government overreach.

That was actually the final lapse of judgment in a series of three. I haven’t even told you about the first two:

  1. I hastily put some kind of inferior, off-road fuel into our brand-new lawnmower. Obviously, I was trying to save money, but I had to pay 60 euros to have the fuel lines drained. Just like the de-clamp: 60 euros. That must be my default stupid tax.
  2. Then, the other day in the final lap of the final mowing of the season, I was mowing too close to the conservatory window, which caused a stone to ricochet up and shatter a significant portion of the same.

Esther says it only goes to show I’m not really a fully-functional adult but only posing as one. Actually, what she said was, “This means you are spinning so many plates that a few of them have to shatter.” I said, “Thank you, dear wife, that’s a very charitable reading of the situation.”

But I also think I have absorbed the lie that I am infallible and infinite. The reality is that I am profoundly limited. My plan for the next few years is to earn and learn (finishing a degree in English and Religious Studies, yay!). Moreover, I am trying to pour my attention into my daughters before they cross the Rubicon into adolescence, not that I expect all communication to be cut off at that point, just that it might become more complicated. All these endeavors require serious energy and time and I don’t have much left over.

At any rate, last evening as I did the examen*, the Lord said, slow the ____ down! John Mark Comer, citing Dallas Willard, said that the only spiritual advice we really need to follow is, “Ruthlessly eliminate hurry.” I try to take that onboard, more because Willard said it than Comer. Somehow, he comes across as superficial, but I know that’s a harsh evaluation. At any rate, I did read Comer’s book on ruthlessly eliminating hurry–albeit on 1.45 speed!.

Several specific actions I could take to train me to slow down:

  1. Set the timer for one minute and do nothing.
  2. Ride out the impulse for checking my phone. Time how long the impulse lasts. Work on building the concentration muscle.
  3. Say out loud several things that could go wrong in any given situation. It sounds stressful, but I think it might help me close the loop between what my subconscious is trying to tell me and the realm of the fully conscious.

* No, I don’t have elite spiritual practices, the examen is just something I stumbled across through an odd sequence of events, i.e., reading the above-mentioned J.M. Comer, as well as his holiness, the Bishop of Waterford, recommending it. It really does work. Surprise, surprise, right? It’s not like it hasn’t been around for 5 centuries.

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The other morning I read a news headline out loud as we ate breakfast: “There were three executions in the US in the last week.”

My 10-year-old daughter’s instinctive response: “How are the bad guys ever going to learn if the government kills them?”

My 7-year-old daughter’s equally fast rejoinder: “Yeah, and don’t cops know the murders have a bad mental illness!”

I smiled paternally but could not help agreeing. The catalogue of explanations for their responses surely includes the following:

  1. They are speaking from the God-given sense of right and wrong.
  2. Their parents indoctrinated them;
  3. They have lived in western Europe for too long.

Sorry for all the lists in this post.