Emptying The Courtroom In Your Head
If you’ve ever seen a therapist for a disorder involving self-directed negativity (depression and anxiety especially) then you’ve probably been asked to “put your thoughts on trial.”
The idea is that by conditioning yourself to serve as your own defense attorney and not just your own prosecutor you judge your behavior more fairly. You less often find yourself in kangaroo courts and witch hunts of your own making.
Taking steps that stop these unfounded accusations at their source — changing your environment in ways that improve your mood, maybe — is crucial. That said, it’s impossible in practice to prevent them all from getting past the gates. Tactics like these have a place.
You feel how productive they are as you do them because even a sound verdict can be evasive and defending it can take constant and diligent work. This practice doesn’t necessarily stop you from asking more questions than you had in the first place and trapping yourself in court. It’s no guarantee that you’re out of the woods even when you land in what seems like a good, solid, self-reassuring answer to a conundrum you’ve posed to yourself.
The real work, then, comes not in the mechanics of holding these little trials for yourself but in finding the ability to lean into the verdicts emotionally.
Being unable to do so leaves you preoccupied with those multiplying questions. It leaves you feeling like you can’t let go of the specific worries behind them, as if doing so would be to let them off the hook too easily, and to let them and their causes back out onto the streets of your mind and your life, ready to come back for you at any moment unless you deal with them, logically and rigorously, right here and right now.
This, ironically, creates the paralysis and inaction that will leave them out there, untouched. It prevents you from going through whatever real-life motions are most likely to tackle the sources of those worries or show that they’re unfounded.
It behooves you to send court to recess when your monkey mind starts turning it from a helpful legal-ish process into a Kafkaesque swamp of one. Sooner or later, and usually sooner, you need to turn your attention back to the physical world, maybe to some helpful or pressing task at hand, or maybe just because.
Research shows that this works not just as a diversion, but in itself, and often more than any other tactic or technique. Things like daily meditation and grounding yourself in the physical world (breath-counting, body-scanning) are incredibly effective long- and short-term defenses, respectively, against both the causes and symptoms of such disorders.
You can only be your own internal critic and judge for so long. Eventually you need to stop and listen to what the world has to say. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself spending a horrifying chunk of the pie chart of your life on a conveyor belt, a treadmill, a Lazy Susan, that takes you from major worry to major worry forever. This is not a way to live.
Even if that treadmill lets you go around and fix every major worry you pass, you’ll still have to deal with getting off that treadmill, at the end of the day.
