In the Groove

Where do your thoughts go when you're unoccupied and non productive? In other words, what do you think about when you're brushing your teeth?

If there's been a recent hurt in your life, you might spend a lot of time licking your wounds and rehashing the issue over and over. Whether it is physical or emotional, pain seems to do that. It calls attention to itself and it's hard to avoid thinking about the pain, the circumstances that produced it and the ways in which we might escape it. Undirected thought seems to get sucked into the pain morass pretty quickly. It's important, though, to try mightily to escape.

Emotional pain can become such a preoccupation that it produces a kind of groove in our brains and ultimately, it's difficult to get out of the pathway. We get stuck and the world becomes a very dark place. This kind of depression needs some kind of external kick to force it out of the groove and into another path. Better to not spend much time in reliving painful memories in the first place.

I've concluded that God is the only answer to those inward journeys that lead nowhere good. In trying to "get over" the hurt, we carve it more deeply into our psyches by analyzing it, rehearsing it and feeling the pain over and over.

Developing a "mantra" that lifts the memory to God and asks for inner peace is the first step towards genuine healing. Deliberately thinking about something else is the second. We can't give the thought any more house room than the second it takes to recognize it.

The world will take on the images that are the most familiar to us. Spend a lot of time with violent media and we run the risk of seeing everything through that lens. Concentrate on the ways that others have let us down and we lose confidence that there are those who won't.

Where we take our wandering thoughts makes a difference. St. Paul gives some good advice:

Whatever is true, honorable, right; whatever is pure, lovely or commendable; if there is any excellence, and if there anything worthy of praise, think on these things.