Oh man, I. Love. This. Do not apologize for this ramble.
This is an incredibly good ramble.
Let's keep going with it: How many times have you heard
members disparage themselves for being a person who thinks too much? Or how
many of you here were a Mormon who "thought too much," or had lots of
roiling ruminatey type thoughts? Maybe this is one massive reason why! Because
when you try to suppress something natural, it always grows—actually it fights
back, with vengeance.
If you’re a thinker (let’s be generous and say most
humans are, to a certain extent) and you get told over and over and over and
over that you have to “Go and do!!” and not ruminate on God’s commandments, and
any time you did start to ruminate you’d smack your forehead in self-loathing,
then 1. Not only do you never learn how to have positive, critical thoughts
that lead to conclusions (and CHANGES), but 2. That ruminating tendency goes
into overdrive, with the same principle on which so many men (and women) get
shamed into thinking they are sex addicts.
Yeah, it’s a common meme here that Mormons are kept so busy
they don’t have time to really think about the truth claims of the church. Partially
true, I’m sure, but I bet plenty of Mormons are doing tons of thinking about
the church and it’s truth claims, it’s just that the messaging they’re getting
about thinking is so incredibly dysfunctional and manipulative it puts them
constantly in a quandary. (God’s thoughts are higher than man’s thoughts, and
similar bull shit.)
I’ve recently become aware of how negative I am toward
myself when it comes to thinking about my thinking. My meta-thinking is very
negative. When I really start to mull something over, I leap immediately to the
meta thought that this mulling and ruminating is bad for me, that I should have
already had a conclusion, or that the very fact that I am ruminating at all
means that I am a negative, depressive, person. Maybe that’s a result of “I
will go, I will doooo!” being pounded into my 5 year old brain.
Thanks to recent therapy, though (therapy is so essential
for fucked-up ex-cult members), I’ve learned to start putting a positive spin
on my thinking. My thinking, even my ruminating, is indicative of a very
positive trait!, says my therapist. It shows that I am critical, interested
improving the conditions around me (a basic evolutionary impulse, I imagine)
and concerned with excellence. Thinking is good. Fuck, over-thinking is good.
We can use our thinking and our meta-thinking to help ourselves out of negative
feedback loops, discover the things we really value, prioritize those values,
and aim our lives in a direction that aligns with our values. We can decide if
Mormon God or Jewish God or Catholic God, or NO GOD aligns with our values, and hang onto or throw
out any or all gods. We can think; and
then, after a while, after the thinking creates new neurons and changes the
actual physical structure of our brains, then we have become a different
person, who chooses different things than when we first began thinking.
So yeah. I guess Mormonism in general, and that little
ass-wipe Nephi in particular, fundamentally impede natural human brain
development.
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