Nonsensical

This thread is a good read.
I was on a road trip to a wedding with Mrs Nons recently and she pulled up some podcasts from NPR's Invisibilia. I believe it was the very first ever Invisbilia podcast that dealt with this topic. It was about a man who couldn't get thoughts of doing horrible violent things out of his head, and he became very depressed because he was sure it meant that deep down he was a horrible violent person.

He finally found relief with a therapist who was able to demonstrate that he was not a horrible violent person. He was obsessive. He found these horrible violent thoughts to be VERY horrible, and it made him obsess over them. It wasn't the cause of the thoughts that was important, it was his obsessing over them that was the root of his problems.

I couldn't help but relate to this in terms of my AV. It generates thoughts (feelings, really) about drinking (of course!) That was never really the problem, though. The problem was ME obsessing over those feelings.

In the Invisibilia piece the therapist actually had the patient hold a knife to the therapist's throat. Shocking, right? But the therapist wanted to demonstrate that even given the unobstructed opportunity to be horribly violent, the patient would choose not to be horribly violent.

As I sat sipping my coffee, iced tea, and ginger ale at the reception and then the after-reception party...passing wine across the table to those who were drinking it...finding the last bottle of white because the hostess couldn't remember where she'd left it...listening to my beast make ridiculous suggestions...helping to clean up all the empties and half-full glasses after the amateur over-doers schlepped off to their rooms...pouring the leftovers down the sink and packing up what could be salvaged for someone to take home...I thought about that patient with the knife in his hands...and I smiled.

Invisibilia : NPR