Why You Should Trust Your Mind to Help You Heal

Why You Should Trust Your Mind to Help You Heal
Mislav Marohnić/Creative Commons

Podcasts are great road trip companions, especially when driving back from visiting my baby. They keep my mind off the growing physical distance between me and him.

On our way back from our most recent visit, Neil and I listened to NPR’s podcast “Hidden Brain,” hosted by social science correspondent Shankar Vedantam. In episode 42, “Decide Already!”, Vedantam interviews psychologist, author and Harvard University researcher Dan Gilbert on the brain’s decision-making processes. (Listen to the full podcast below.)

Posing a question to Gilbert, Vedantam observes that “painful decisions are often painful largely because we haven’t made them yet.” Gilbert responds:

Well, surely that’s true for all of us. We agonize between two things that seem awfully close. We finally choose one. And in a small or medium amount of time, we look back and wonder how we could ever have been trying to decide between them.

 

“Why did we make that mistake of thinking the two alternatives were so close when in fact they were really far apart? The answer is they weren’t really close and they weren’t really far apart. It’s just a matter of how you look at it. And when you’re on the front side of a decision, alternatives seem to be very close.

 

“But once you’ve chosen one, the mind gets going doing what the mind does so well: convincing you that the thing you’ve got is better than the thing you’ve left behind.

 

“Now, if psychologists are trying to cure that, we call it rationalization. If we’re trying to sell it, we call it coping. But whether you call it coping or rationalization, it’s the same thing. It’s the mind finding realistic ways to see the world so that it feels better about the world in which it finds itself.”

Although I don’t consider an adoption decision a choice between two close alternatives, I do think a grieving mind copes with or rationalizes the world in which it finds itself.

Gilbert does not use the term specifically, but what he is describing is the mind’s process for overcoming or avoiding regret.

Regret is powerful and prevalent among birthmothers. In a previous post, I suggested empathy as a way to heal regret. Gilbert is observing that optimism can also help.

Perhaps Gilbert was speaking more of the mind’s subconscious process, but I think his observation can be used for conscious healing.

When I asked birthmothers to describe times when they feel the most peaceful, the common thread was seeing their child happy and successful. Whether knowingly or unknowingly, they focused on the positive outcomes of their choice as sources of peace.

Coping with the ambiguous loss of adoption is hard, but there are healthy ways to do it. Reminders of the good things that came from placement can sometimes be the push needed when lost in regret.

 

Do you find Dan Gilbert’s research conclusions to be true in your life? Does your mind automatically focus on why what you have is better than what you gave up? Birthmothers, how does this apply to your adoption decision? Leave a reply in the comment box below! Please be familiar with the comment policy.

 

One thought on “Why You Should Trust Your Mind to Help You Heal

  1. Megg

    That’s the hard thing about decisions. Even if you try to step outside the situation to see it more clearly, do research, or ask others with more wisdom and experience….I think a person is always going to “second guess” so to speak. I found Gilbert’s comments very interesting and it makes sense to me that the brain has a natural “survival” instinct.

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