My Bibliothreapy

Warning, Nerd Alert!

I practice biblio-therapy – that is, when I am in doubt I read. The wisdom literature of God’s word teaches that there is “wisdom in counsel of many.”  I didn't realize that there is such a thing as bibliothearpy until I just googled it and sure enough, I didn't coin the term or the concept. I think it is most likely that I read it or heard it sometime in the past and put it away in some hidden corner of noggin. Anyway -

I am reading a book on how we do or don’t understand our own motives or even our own emotions. It is a thoughtful summary of various studies by Timothy D. Wilson. The title of the book is “Strangers to Ourselves; discovering the adaptive unconscious.” I am nearly finished but I was halted by a concept he calls our "emotional immune system." According to Dr.Wilson, who is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, our joys and our emotional pain do not remain at the same level of intensity for the rest of our lives. Consider your happiest moment and your most painful moment. Are you still as happy and as hurt as you were initially? He doesn't suggest that these emotions are unavailable to us. We can, in the strangest moments, revisit them. CS Lewis recounts this so poignantly when recounting an tragedy regarding the death of his wife, in A Grief Remembered.

Wilson explores what he calls an Adaptive Unconscious. For this layman, I was informed by the concept. I ask myself, “Could it exist?” Wilson builds on Freud, while often correcting him or updating his observations through citing a myriad of research. Apparently, thoughts as well as feelings can be stored in a part of our brain that is largely unavailable to our conscious thoughts. We may feel what we don’t realize and we may think what we are not  really ready to admit. Therefore, we are largely strangers to ourselves.

Negative and positive feeling states are managed in our adaptive unconscious and, of course, in our conscious thoughts and feelings. Getting married makes you happier than being married. Even when we are happily married, the daily joy of marriage differs from the momentary joy we first experience at the wedding, and shortly thereafter. This also applies to our deepest sorrows and disappointments. “This too will pass.”

I think the greatest stress comes from the days, months or years before an impending crisis. I think the greatest stress comes from the anticipation of a tragedy. Maybe Jesus is right when he counsels us to “let the cares of the day be sufficient for the day thereof.”