Welcome to Emotional Wellness Daily, a project of SIMHA, the Sephardic Initiative for Mental Health Awareness.
Yesterday we spoke about Torah Psychology, a term coined by Rav Wolbe, that applies to the mussar approach that the Torah has.
In his sefer Alei Shor (volume 2, page 169) he discusses slightly different approaches to this mussar approach.
He says that when a person is learning mussar and working on himself, he sometimes stumbles upon a certain habit or character trait that is not befitting his current status. It may be left over from his childhood. People ask themselves where these traits comes from, and they often try to look back to events in their childhood that might have been the cause. He says that this approach of going backwards is not beneficial for the individual.
He issues a disclaimer that although this is something that psychology embraces, it should only be used for very serious ailments, that a person is literally sick over. That means it has become a disorder and if you're not a professional, it's not something you can take care of on your own.
So, we're not talking about someone who had a very severe trauma in their youth. We're talking about a regular, functioning, healthy person who is always teasing people, for example. Does he now have to go back and start figuring out from his childhood why he teases people today?
Do I have to look backwards, trying to find out if my mother used to tease me or if my grandmother used to tease me etc?
Rav Wolbe says this is not going to accomplish anything.
He says this concept of trying to look for some kind of small trauma as the cause is not going to work.
What is the Torah/Mussar approach? You don't have to look backwards. You don't have to start looking to hang it or link it to anything.
Rather, look forward.
You have this issue at hand? Deal with it. Learn mussar about this topic.
Using our example of a person that teases somebody else, he probably feels threatened.ֶ
He says that in general, these automatic reactions are pictures, or images of how I react in a certain situation. But we can switch our way of looking at something, by being aware of its negativity. As he said, when you learn mussar, you keep on reviewing again and again and again, and you start realizing the negativity of this. This is the mussar appoach.
The truth is that even today in modern psychology, there is more of an emphasis on what Rav Wolbe was talking about. They say not to necessarily go and psychoanalyze and go back into your past, but to deal with your current thoughts and to label them as thoughts and to teach yourself to react differently. That is the approach of CBT, which is Cognitive Behavior Therapy, or DBT, Dialectical Behavior Therapy.
or ACT- these are the newer ways of approaching it.
They're all dealing with the present and not so much delving into the past.
Rav Wolbe writes that this is more of the Torah approach, to take the present and deal with it rather than searching back for causes.
Have a wonderful day.