One Year to Change My Brain

This year, I badly need to get a grip on my mental health.  But then, I have been telling myself that for most of the past ten years – or perhaps nearer twenty.

I am not alone.  According to the World Health Organisation, nearly a billion people worldwide live with a mental illness.  The commonest is depression, affecting around 300 million people.

However, I suspect that most people in poorer or war-torn countries aren’t worrying about their mental health itself, so much as the specific things they are depressed or anxious about, such as ‘My entire family were killed when the country next door bombed our town,’ or, ‘How can I feed my family when all our crops are dying of thirst?’

I am hugely privileged compared with many people.  I am happily married to PDB11, a wonderful man who, for reasons I don’t understand, thinks I am a wonderful person too.  We live in Somerset, one of the most beautiful parts of the world that I know.  I have mostly good physical health, apart from slight tinnitus which seems to be going away (I hope), and needing to take medication for epilepsy (I haven’t had a seizure for over sixteen years, though it’s possible that the medication itself could be contributing to my depression).  We have enough money to live on.

But then, I have always felt privileged.  When my job was changing dementia patients’ incontinence pads, I felt over-privileged to have a job after years of unemployment, and wondered when the managers of the care home would realise their mistake and sack me.  When I was unemployed, I felt privileged to be able to survive on Jobseeker’s Allowance.  When I was working on a zero-hours contract, sometimes having no income at all for a month, I didn’t exactly feel privileged, but did feel guilty that I couldn’t afford to give money to charity, or to my friends when they ran short.

When I was a child, I felt that having food, shelter and education meant that I was so disgustingly over-privileged that Jesus was going to send me to hell for having enjoyed all my good things in this life.  I wondered why we were supposed to thank God for our food, when God was going to punish us for having received food.

I should emphasise that this was not what our church taught.  It was just the interpretation of Jesus’s message that I had arrived at when I read the Bible for myself, and it didn’t occur to me that not everyone interpreted Jesus’s words the same way.  So, as I couldn’t clearly explain what I believed, it didn’t occur to my parents or teachers to tell me that I had misunderstood.

And this is the heart of my problem.  My brain works so differently from the way any normal person would think, that I worry about things that would never occur to a normal person as possibilities.  So it doesn’t occur to most people to reassure me that I don’t have to worry about them, and by the time I realise (sometimes decades later) that my interpretation may have been a misunderstanding, the habit of worrying is lodged in my brain.

Judging by some of the memoirs I have read, such as Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert, and Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottlieb, a journey of self-discovery often starts with the break-up of a relationship.  In my case, the reason I have been trying to overcome my depressive tendencies for the past decade was that I am in a loving, committed relationship.  Anyone else can walk away from me if I am too exasperating.  A partner who has vowed to love me in sickness and in health can’t.

So why, after talking to a number of therapists, on the NHS or privately, in person or by phone, on my own or with PDB11 (one of his blog posts was a review of a book our therapist had lent him), have I not made much progress?  I think the main reason is that, until recently, I felt that it was virtuous to be miserable, and selfish to want to feel better, that it was narcissistic to think about my own mind and want to understand myself, or that I was evil and didn’t deserve to be happy.

Although I had written blog posts for years refuting these ideas, it wasn’t until recently that I managed (I think) to let go of them.  But then, my mind started putting up new defences, saying that even if it might be good to be able to change the way I think, adults cannot change because the brain stops developing at age 25. 

But I know that isn’t true, either.  I decided to begin 2025 by reading up on neuroplasticity to try to understand how our brains can be developing throughout our lives if our unused neural pathways have all been pruned away by the time we reach adulthood.  I am currently partway through The Brain that Changes Itself by Norman Doidge.

So my mind started throwing up more excuses: ‘Oh, well, people in general can change.  But you can’t make progress, because your brain has been irreversibly damaged by perceived experience of rejection as a child.’  Seeing that it was getting nowhere, it went for, ‘Well, mental recovery for adults is pointless even if it is possible.  You are unemployable because you haven’t been in a paid job for eight years.  Leading a useful life in your forties and fifties depends on having built a career in your twenties and thirties, and being able to do that would have depended on having developed in an emotionally healthy way in childhood and adolescence.’

Why do my thoughts do this whenever I try to change the way I think about something – whether about religion, or about my own brain and its capacity for change?  A religious answer might be that I ‘come under attack’ when the Devil doesn’t want to let me escape.  An evolutionary view might be that we evolved to be lazy because the brain is our most energy- hungry organ, and thinking new thoughts and building new neural pathways, like taking up any other exercise programme, burns energy which our hunter-gatherer ancestors might not have been able to afford, so we try to avoid the effort.

There is probably truth in the latter, and may be in the former.  But I think another part of it is that I don’t want to take risks.  My mind is, however misguidedly, trying to protect me, and it assumes that it is safer to maintain the status quo that I am used to than to risk changing anything.  But if my mind is trying to protect me, that implies that it can learn better ways of doing so.

The idea that ‘my mind’ can have different ideas sounds close to Dissociative Identity Disorder, which I don’t have.  But maybe what makes DID different is that separate parts of the mind are dissociated, rather than the fact that the mind has separate parts at all.  The Internal Family Systems model of the mind, developed by Richard Schwartz, argues that it is normal for everyone’s mind to contain multiple sub-personalities.  Maybe what one writer with DID describes, about even persecutory alters (personalities that drive damaging behaviour) trying to protect the system (the group of personalities sharing a brain and body) as they understand it, is also true of the way my different sets of thoughts, different aspects of my personality, function.

At any rate, I think I may have reached the stage where it is worth having one more go at psychotherapy, and seeing whether I can make progress this time.  If I have learned not to offer theological justifications for my self-destructive behaviour, but to see it as a psychological symptom, maybe I have a chance this time.

Many models of therapy these days assume that a course needs to be short, typically 12-16 sessions.  But then, many websites on health insist that it is essential to seek medical help as soon as possible if you experience depression for longer than two weeks.  If I have forty years’ worth of damaging ways of thinking to overcome, I suspect I may need longer than 16 sessions to recover. 

As PDB11 said when we discussed this, we probably need to budget for at least six months of sessions, and accept that it may need to go on for a year.  But assuming that it needs to be time-limited and not more than a year might challenge me enough to work at changing.  And if I write about it, perhaps that will, as well.