When we write inventory, we have to fill in a second column in relation to the resentments, in which we present others' crimes: the things that they have said or done that have bothered us.
Sometimes the second column is full of facts, like, 'My neighbour plays his drums three evenings a week' or 'My boss did not award me a bonus' or 'Susan has purple hair' (and Susan does, indeed, have purple hair).
Sometimes the second column is paranoid, delusional, or plain fabricated. Now, if I believe something, it will upset me whether or not it is true. It stays on the inventory, as the purpose is to identify how and why I am reacting the way I am (check out the third column material for this; there are lots of blog entries on this subject). But the fact that the second column is divorced from reality must be faced, somehow.
So what do I do with a second column that is paranoid, delusional, or plain fabricated? Well, as the book suggests, some resentments are fancied rather than real. This a fancy way of telling me I'm nuts. Now, all resentment is nuts (again, see other blog entries), but sometimes the nuts-ness resides at the level of what I genuinely think is going on around me, and I need to be brought back down to earth, hence: Ground Control to Major Tom.
Sometimes this will require me to rewrite the second column. Sometimes this will require me to put the word 'fancied' after the resentment (or 'imagined', 'speculated', 'as reported by X') to indicate this is not the God's honest truth but a phantasm. Sometimes the untruths will have to be picked apart in the fourth column (under the heading of 'mistakes').
What types of delusions sometimes arise in the second column?
There are two particularly common types. The first type is paranoid delusion about others. Most people know a jerk or two. Hell, some of us have been a jerk or two. But anyway, sometimes I will take a jerk personally and think that everything about them (their tone of voice, the way they look at me, tiny inconsequential actions) is aimed at me and designed to upset, unsettle, hurt, criticise, humiliate, or punish me. Here, I have to be super strict with myself:
- I separate what they're saying or doing from what I think they're thinking or why I think they're doing it
- I recognise I do not have reliable access to others' thoughts or motivations
- I recognise that any speculation about such matters is just that: speculation
- With sponsees who think they can read people's minds, I ask them to tell me what I'm thinking: I've never once been told accurately what I'm thinking, and I keep asking them to guess until it becomes clear they cannot
The second type is a resentment about some state of affairs in the world, either of the conspiracy theory type or of the let's-demonise-another-category-of-people type.
Now, neither phenomenon is new, but both have acquired a particular piquancy in recent times, and both seem to figure more commonly on people's inventories than a number of years ago. I, too, have been guilty of falling foul of flawed thinking in both these regards.
Here are some questions I ask myself when I find myself irked at affairs of the world:
- Am I resentful at a particular person or institution or am I tarring an entire group of people or category of institutions with the same brush?
- Do I recognise that any generalised statement made about 'The XYZ Church' or 'The ABC Industry' or 'PQR nations' or this ethnicity or that socioeconomic group is by its nature a gross simplification or an attribution of a localised or sporadic phenomenon to the entire group?
- Can I reword my understanding to reflect the actual 'culprit' and the actual 'crime'?
- Do I understand that there is almost no situation in the world I am qualified to personally judge?
- Where am therefore I getting my information from?
- Are such sources qualified, reliable, and credible?
Incidentally, delusional thinking is an equal-opportunities disorder. It can affect the well-educated and ill-educated, the left wing, the right wing, the small-c conservative, the radical, the establishment, the fringe. Being in any of these groups confers no particular protection, although my reading suggests that there are some predisposing factors.
These questions help me pull myself up short when I find myself credulous of the incredible and incredulous of the credible, when I cherry-pick isolated reported propositions to construct a psychologically satisfying narrative.
Remember: if resentment didn't feel good, it wouldn't be fostered. The purpose is always the perverse satisfaction it supplies. It's never really about the content! That's why it's important to learn to spot and defuse the tissue-weaving machinations of the ever inventive and ingenious ego in its attempts to paint a fearful demonic world, whether at the book club or at the level of global events.
One note of caution. I have in the past suffered from mental illness which involved severely delusional thinking, and I was not ready to face the fact and submit to processes that gradually untied the knots in my mind until I was ready. Some people are ready to face the flaws in their perception and thinking. Some are not. Just as I was not ready until I was ready, I have found it useless to try to work with someone who promptly becomes resistant and shrill when challenged. Delusional mental structures, being fragile and poorly founded, must be highly defended, and any attempt to 'storm them by force' will cast the storming party as part of the conspiratorial enemy hordes massing in darkness against the dwindling band of rogue truth-seekers. When I realise that's what I'm dealing with, I wish them well and back off.
Here are a couple of useful references if you're interested in the pathology behind this sort of thinking: