Does Feeling Bad Do Any Good--Part II

Rumination is the royal road to despair.  It “provides depressed individuals with the evidentiary base to justify withdrawal and inactivity.  When people ruminate, they build a mountain of evidence that all is hopeless and that they might as well give up” (“Rethinking Rumination,” page 407).  Rumination may appear to a bereaved person as the rational response to the loss of a loved one.  I can tell you that the death of a loved one taught me some things about how little control I actually have over life events.  I experienced a kind of “learned helplessness” as a result of the loss and my inability to save Anne’s life.

See "Rethinking Rumination" at  http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~sonja/papers/NWL2008.pdf.

Functional MRI studies have shown that rumination activates significant parts of our limbic system.  The amygdala lights up to a greater degree when people are rumination while being scanned with the FMRI machine.  This means that the reactive, non-verbal, fight/flight/freeze system is more highly activated than our more rational and cognitive functions in the cortex.

So, what can we do to break out of cycles of rumination.  Nolan-Hoeksema, Wisco, and Lyubomirsky assert that “the key to therapy is for people to stop automatically accepting the truth value of their negative thoughts and to choose to substitute these thoughts with more rational and adaptive ones” (“Rethinking Rumination,” page 417). 

Jill Bolte Taylor gives a much more concrete description of what such a process looks like.  When she finds herself moving into a negative cognitive loop, she begins to ask questions of herself.  First, she asks, how do I feel physiologically?  “Neuronal loops (circuits) of fear, anxiety or anger, can be triggered by all sorts of different stimulation,” she writes.  “But once triggered, these different emotions produce a predictable physiological response that you can train yourself to consciously observe” (My Stroke of Insight, Page 151).

She observes her body.  If she notes that her body is acting anxious, fearful or angry, she pauses for ninety seconds to let the physical symptoms die down.  Then she has a conversation with her brain, she says, “as though it is a group of children.”  Her lecture to that neural group of youngsters is worth repeating here: “I appreciate your ability to think thoughts and feel emotions, but I am really not interested in thinking these thoughts or feeling these emotions anymore.  Please stop bringing this stuff up” (Page 151).  Sometimes she has to be more demanding.  Once in a while she even has to stand up and literally wag her finger to get attention of those gray-matter juvenile delinquents.

Anne died on the twentieth of the month.  The twentieth of each month for several months after was a small nightmare of tears and depression.  After about eight months, Brenda gently asked me one day, if this was how it was always going to be.  I simply hadn’t considered it up to that point.  I thought it was sort of like a weather front that arrived on the twentieth and left on the twenty-first.  I hadn’t considered that I might actually be creating the emotional storm rather than merely enduring it.

So I examined my thoughts and feelings.  I discovered several things.  To some degree I was indulging my appetite for self-pity (it’s a large appetite at some points, as my spouse will tell you).  I had a little meeting with myself and decided that I would do my best no longer to feed that hunger.  The more I fed it, after all, the greater it became.  The less I fed that appetite for self-pity, I found, the smaller it became.

Then I realized that not all of my anxieties and hurts could be traced back to my grieving.  Real life with its attendance worries and frustrations and disappointments continues to happen.  I needed to be much more intentional and deliberate about sorting out my thoughts and feelings.  Just because my body showed symptoms of anxiety or worry or anger, that didn’t mean of necessity that I was grieving.  I needed (and need) to step back for those same ninety seconds along with Jill Taylor Bolte and ask myself what precisely was going on.  I have similar debates with the juvenile delinquents inside my own head. 

Now, the twentieth of each month is just another day.

So the opponent of rumination is mindfulness.  It is the conscious awareness that we can assess our feelings and thoughts.  Then we can make choices about how to respond.  Feelings may come on their own.  How we respond to those feelings can always be a choice.  And I find that the healthy choice always leads to greater hope.