The mind is a shape rotation engine not a wordcel takes generator: how therapy and affirmations work

This post is intended to be taken as an extended koan. Aim to see something in the underlying phenomenology of your mind instead of engaging high-level cognitive machinery.

The content of your experiences does not matter as much as the way they are arranged in your mind. Experiences take various shapes. Nice symmetrically organized shapes feel good. Unpleasant asymmetrical structures feel bad. The goal of successful therapy and emotional processing is to take unpleasant shapes and make them pleasant, simple and symmetrical. The very different shapes might generate the same words.

The process of letting go is actually the process of making shapes symmetrical and less detailed. The mind drains the color from experiences and simplifies them, which is good for unpleasant experiences.

Stress is stored in asymmetrical shapes. Some are particularly nasty because often they soak up incoming stress and it pretty much gets stuck there. On the other hand, simple symmetrical shapes in the mind dissipate stress efficiently. Which is why you should aim to make more of them. Make beautiful shapes in your mind.

Therapy and affirmations

Typically therapy is based on words, because words are how humans communicate. You are supposed to say something to therapists, and therapists are supposed to respond back. Words are a tool invented for the purpose of saying them. 

Minds don’t exactly run on words. Minds run on predictive models arranged in shapes. Successful wordcel therapies like CBT can be improved by assuming that words don’t matter as much as underlying shapes that generate thoughts. 

I don’t think CBT therapists know how to do CBT correctly. Here is the trick. To successfully do CBT you are supposed to tap deep into the depth of your predictive machinery and rearrange underlying shapes into something else so that they generate better thoughts. Otherwise you’ll end up copypasting happy thoughts on top of a fundamentally unhappy mind, which is never going to work. 

The same is true for affirmations. To make them work you need to tap into depths of your predictive machinery and enhance predictive models that correspond to something like “I’m awesome”, “I’m great at X” or whatever. Cleaning up predictive models that tell you that you suck also helps. Again, simply throwing thoughts into verbal space like some kind of a mantra wouldn’t work.

Language doesn’t shape thought. Underlying shapes can be more or less symmetrical, define how you feel, generate your thoughts and create language.