A mental health-related self-help book that I heard about because a friend posted this interview with the author connecting it to writing practice, and it was enough to intrigue me: http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/…/writing-brain-exercise-i…/. I have some significant misgivings, which I talk about below, but there are some core practices in this book that feel solid, useful to me, and probably quite broadly useful. According to the book, a lot of our time and energy goes into trying to avoid negative feelings, when instead what we really need to be doing is building up our capacity to experience said feelings and keep moving forward despite them towards what we really want. We need, it suggests, to examine the logics of the decisions in our lives, from the moment-to-moment choices we make to the big life altering sort. Often, those decisions are what he calls “compulsions,” aimed at stopping the experience of negative feelings through avoidance, checking, or control. We need to develop our capacities to interrupt those compulsions, and instead work to base our decisions not on immediate reactivity to feelings (or to the possibility of feelings) but on a sort of whole-person sense of what our long-term values are. Sometimes, getting to where we want to go involves being able to sit with things that don’t feel very good in the moment. “Values” is the key term the book counterposes to “compulsions.” Mindfulness is one of the key tools the book recommends to build our capacity to intervene in our decisions in this way. This sort of careful consideration of how we make choices and how we spend our time is right up my alley, and it feels quite useful to me…though, to be honest, it felt like a lot of the ongoing reflection on time-use choices that have been part of my everyday since I decided to give being a writer a shot 21 years ago means I’m not starting from quite the place that the book anticipates.
My concerns with the book are extensive, however. What gets built on top of its core insights and practices has obviously been very helpful for the author, and may be very helpful for you, but I have much more mixed feelings about a lot of it. Most seriously that includes the claim the book makes – with appropriate caveats that it’s not anti-meds and that it is quite actively pro-therapy, of the right sort – that the approach in this book can cure any mental illness. I don’t have the same kind of remarkable lived experience as the author, and I don’t deny the book’s approach could do considerable good for lots of people, but this feels like an overly-broad, misleading, and even dangerous claim. The book also does things like explain its take on mental health/illness using strange and simplistic comparisons, sometimes to physical health and sometimes to other things. Not that I’m against pushing back against a purely medicalized way of thinking about mental illness and mental health – I think it’s critical to open spaces where people navigating the forms of distress that get read into mental illness categories can do exactly that – but the comparisons it makes are mostly just assertions, and as I said simplistic ones at that, without any kind of evidence or genuine critical engagement.
As well, it felt like some of the material involves the author generalizing some elements of his experience, as someone who is in recovery from what sounds like quite severe obsessive compulsive disorder, to people whose selves may be put together quite differently and/or whose mental illnesses might work quite differently. The book gives lots of examples of different kinds of behaviours drawn from everyday life, and they seem to overrepresent the author’s experiences and not necessarily capture how other people may operate by quite different logics. I think it’s also reflected in a more subtle way in the range of potential responses to the book that the writing seems to assume. For instance, it felt that someone already more prone not to the sort of in-the-moment compulsive behaviours that beset the author but to a sort of calm, careful, rigid, rule-bound “shoulding” (it me!) could very easily read this approach into a set of practices that is puritanical and unhealthy but in a very different way than what is mostly shown in the book. I think that is clearly a MIS-reading, and there are already resources in how the approach is presented to avoid it – rigidly following “should” like that would clearly be a form of compulsion, in this framework – but it doesn’t seem to be a mis-reading that the author has given much consideration or done much in the writing to actively counter, particularly given that it would be very easy for such compulsive “shoulds” to masquerade as values.
Related to that but going far beyond, I don’t think nearly enough critical attention is paid to what “values” actually means in the compulsions vs. values formula. It is treated as an obvious and natural category, when I don’t think that’s true at all. It is explicitly framed as distinct from and opposed to desires, whereas I would understand embodied desire to be present in both compulsions and in a whole-person understanding of values. It doesn’t address the ways that “values” sometimes fails as a category, especially when considering large scale decisions. I, for instance, have managed to navigate my way into a life in which I spend rather a lot of time on my own. I really value and enjoy that and recognize it as central to me being able to do many of the things I want in life – I *like* solitude for its own sake, and it makes reading and writing and otherwise making stuff possible for me in a way that they might not otherwise be. But I also recognize that it gets in the way of other things I want in life – most particularly, the range of interpersonal intimacies that I crave, but also certain kinds of work-related opportunities – and on a certain level having a life shaped like this was at least in part a product of me making lots of (compulsive) choices in lots of moments over lots of years to reduce (avoid) social anxiety. Is having a life organized this way a product of my values? Of compulsions? What does it mean for this approach that it is really both? Plus, there’s no exploration of the ways in which “values” are in fact not purely expression of individual essence but to a large extent socially produced.
Anyway. The point is, a lot of the practices the book suggests beyond the most basic ones don’t feel like they particularly speak to how I’m put together as a person and to how I experience life. I do want to take up the practice of thinking about my time-use decisions in terms of the logics underlying them, as part of my extensive already-existing practices related to how I spend my days, and I do think it will do me good to cultivate a capacity to remain in rather than seek to avoid certain kinds of negative feelings. As well, mindfulness is always a good thing. But beyond those basics, a lot of what the book tries to do just doesn’t feel relevant or useful.
Originally posted by Scott on Goodreads.