The Limping Shrink Rule 4: Your solution to life's problems isn't necessarily the best solution for everyone else (or even for you)

When you have finally discovered a way to solve your own problems, it's tempting to believe that everyone else only has to do the same and they will feel as sorted as you. 

This is a common human fallacy,  and especially when people first get into a new model of looking at things it is pretty normal. We go around thinking that it's useful to see everything through the filter of our new psychotherapy specs, or Marxism specs, or exercise is good for you specs, and it can take a long time, sometimes a lifetime, for us to see that, after all, there are areas where this new idea works, and others where it isn't so relevant or useful (although it may well be entertaining).

Things you should stop doing today (because everyone in the world is overdoing them as much as I used to).

Why you should take up yoga immediately (Don't you just love this 'immediately')?

How a gratitude journal will change your life (I'm so grateful for this one).

Why you should delete all social media 

Creative commons https://www.pikist.com/search?q=destroy&page=5

There are two problems with this:

1. Everyone else's life difficulties are not the same as yours, caused by the same thing, or solved by the same technique. Mental health care examples of this would be psychiatrists who prescribe antipsychotics to people with severe social deprivation rather than working on getting them enough money to eat. Or the social worker who suggests a schizophrenic person's life would be immensely improved by their accepting Jesus into their lives. Or the nurse who tells a severely depressed person to get out there and exercise for 30 minutes 5 times a week. The difficulty with this idea is that one size does not fit all, however much you wish to share your joyful discovery with the world. 

2. We are each drawn to a solution that fits within our view of ourselves and the world. When the best and most sticky solution to recurrent life difficulties has to be found by going outside our comfort zone. 

To use facile examples: 

• If you tend to get into trouble with the law for robbery, the best solution is not to get better at robbing. It's to find another source of income.
• If you tend to get exhausted because you are constantly trying too hard to be successful in the world, the best long-term solution is not to try harder! It's to find out how to get the feeling you're looking for another way.
• If you tend to have your friends turn on you because you're being radically honest with them all the time, the solution is not to blame them for misunderstanding or being mean to you! It's to learn to disidentify with your feelings and values and develop some tact, compromise and small talk.
• If you tend to feel incredibly ashamed about how untidy your home is, the best solution is not to drive yourself to make it look perfect, not to avoid thinking about it! It's to learn that feeling shame doesn't kill you. And that siding with the self-shaming rather than having compassion for yourself is the real problem. 

So the tactic that has given you personally immediate relief is good for showing you your personal blind spot, and not good at hitting everyone else's blind spot. You only have to look around your own family to see that there are multiple blind spots here in humankind. Pointing to everyone's collective blindspot is arguably the job of religions.  

Oh, and if you tell someone directly all that will happen is that they will go away slagging you off for not listening or not understanding, because OF COURSE they can't just START something - that's the problem they CAME TO YOU WITH!

So what does the meta-view '(or even for you)' bit of this rule refer to?

We are always looking for solutions that are things we can do, exercises, changes in habit, relationships, nutrition, environment (See links above). But external or practical changes are ultimately temporary plasters on the recurrent problems we have, and if we look back on our lives it's obvious that despite this kind of solution we tend to repeatedly come back to the same difficulty they were designed to solve. (This becomes easier to see the longer we live of course, which helps explain the phenomenon of mid-life crisis.) 

So even for you, who have had so much relief from your particular troubles by, say, taking up ultramarathon running that you want the world to know that's all they have to do to feel great, this solution is only a temporary one until the imbalance that drives you finds another way to get your attention. This is what we see in our patients over and over again. So what makes you so special?

So what is the better, longer-term solution? 

To know for sure that the model and the rules that you have to keep you safe, loved and respected in this life are not just ineffective and often counterproductive, but unnecessary because they are the thoughts that got you here. In fact, when you let them go you find, everything is all right already.

But then I would think that...