Welcome to Emotional Wellness Daily. We spoke previously about the concept of the many voices inside of us and how that traces itself back to Adam HaRishon before the sin. We will now find that these concepts are also involved in mental health, and we’ll see how we can use mental health concepts to deal with our emotions, our desire, and even the area of positive and negative.
There’s a book called Brain Lock by Dr. Jonathan Schwartz about OCD. He writes about his approach when people get stuck with intrusive thoughts, and says that the first step is to separate yourselves from your thoughts and realize that your brain is creating messages. He likes to quote a line from one of his patients, who used to say, “It’s not me; it’s my OCD.”
This is a concept called CBT, Cognitive Behavior Therapy, where a person recognizes his thoughts—cognition is thoughts—and says to himself, “Label the thought. That thought is an OCD thought. That’s not me. It’s something inside of me that’s talking to me.” And as I said, we can apply that to Avodat Hashem (service of Hashem) as well. When you walk by and say, “I want the ice cream,” you have to label it: “That’s a desire thought. That’s not me talking. That’s my desire.” Grab the microphone, and it’s talking. The voice sounds like mine, but it’s not. You don’t really want to eat it.
But due to the sin, the voices inside of you, we can’t separate ourselves from our voices. Rav Wolbe bases this on a Gemara. The Gemara is talking about a person who gets angry. It says that today the Yetzer Hara (evil inclination) tells you, “Do this,” then that, and then tells you to worship idols. The Pasuk (verse) says, “Eizehu el zar”—who is the foreign god that’s in your heart? That’s the Yetzer Hara. Simply speaking, the Yetzer Hara is like a foreign god because you’re worshiping the Yetzer Hara.
Rav Wolbe gives a deeper explanation. He says the Yetzer Hara is a god of strangeness. He makes you strange to yourself. He makes you think that the emotions and feelings inside of you are you when they’re not. He said specifically that, when it comes to anger, a person will be angry, and in his anger he punches someone, breaks a wall, or breaks something. He says, “I wasn’t myself.” What does that mean, you weren’t yourself? That means you’re realizing that that force wasn’t you. That was somebody else inside of you that you thought was you. That’s what anger does to you.
And it’s not just anger. The Yetzer Hara can cause you to think that you’re someone else. That’s stage number one: to peel yourself away and realize that that’s not you. This is important. We’re going to be talking about what it means to tolerate or hold something. You can’t tolerate or hold a feeling if you think you are the feeling. In order to work with a feeling, you have to work with a thought. The first step is to realize that that thought is not you. That feeling is not you. It’s just a thought. It’s just a feeling.
Rabot machshavot b'lev ish va'atzat Hashem (Many are the plans in a person's heart, but the counsel of Hashem). Rabot machshavot b'lev ish va'atzat Hashem. This is an important first step in emotional wellness: to start realizing that your thoughts and your emotions and your feelings aren’t you. Who are you? We’ll have to stay tuned to find out who you are.