Mind Healing Counselling

For example, it’s not always clear right away why someone takes longer than usual to answer your email or text or why they said something.

And when an event isn’t clear, it creates a “meaning vacuum” that can make us feel much less at ease than the clarity we prefer.

Some people can sit quietly in the middle of a meaningless situation and wait for clarity to arrive later. They might even admit that they may never fully understand what happened.

But when we try to give an event meaning before fully understanding it, we miss a great chance to learn from it.

Emotions make the mind work, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

But we can run into trouble if we always think that what we imagine is the whole truth and not just one way of looking at things.

People who are overwhelmed by strong emotions like depression, anxiety, or anger tend to rush to fill any information gap with a negative meaning and then believe that this made-up meaning is the absolute truth.

They might think that if an email or text response takes a long time to come back, the other person is mad at them, or they might take a vague comment as a criticism right away.

And this way of thinking makes people feel worse, of course.

Getting better at being able to wait (and be calm while waiting) for meaning to become clearer in its own time is a real skill.

Here are three ways you learn to wait for clarity before making a decision.

1. Cast subtle doubt

If you think that your friends have started avoiding you since you got depressed because you are such bad company, you can gently ask yourself evidence-seeking questions like;

“Do I have any proof that my friends have started avoiding me?”

“Have any of them said this to me?”

“Have I heard my friends say these things about me?”

“Have I asked them why they haven’t come to see me?”

“Could that be depression talking, or do I have proof that this is why I haven’t seen them in a while?”

This isn’t about telling yourself you’re wrong because you might be right. But if you think that you may be making up a meaning when there isn’t enough real evidence, you can have some doubts.

2. Are there other ways to understand it?

If you text your friend or leave them a voicemail and they don’t respond, you might think they hate you.

But is that the only thing you can say about it?

Why not:

The battery in their phone is dead.

They forgot to bring their phone with them.

Or dropped it.

They’re in the water.

Or while going to the movies.

Maybe they forgot to turn the ringer back on when they got home from work.

Who can say? You don’t know; that much is certain. There just isn’t enough information to say anything.

If you have interpretations of events that are clearly hurting you, you can “train your brain” to be more flexible by asking yourself to come up with many different possible explanations.

This allows your brain to let go of its usual assumptions and expectations and to learn how to “hold off” until the facts are clear.

3. How “believing” is different from “knowing.”

I’m guessing that you think the earth goes around the sun, and you have good reasons to think this. But you know from your own experience that banging your toe on a door hurts.

Some beliefs are backed up by more evidence than others, but direct experience is the only way to know something. The problem is that belief is often mistaken for knowledge, so we need to keep in mind the difference.

You can tell yourself the difference between what you believe and what you know, or you can say things to yourself in a way that makes it clear that there is a difference.

For instance:

Brain: I know now that she hates me!

You: What are the main things that make you think that?

Sometimes, arguing against illogical beliefs comes down to that last word: belief.

Because, in the end, we all need to be able to wait and let things calm down. Then we can see everything clearly and decide what, if anything, to do about