Dr. Hanscom's Blog Mental Rigidity - A Core Trait

[JanAtheCPA]

From Dr. Hanscom's latest newsletter.

Mental Rigidity - A Core Trait of Many Mental Health Diagnoses

• Mental rigidity is a transdiagnostic process that spans many mental health diagnoses
• Creating mental flexibility may be an important early intervention in successfully treating them.
• The need to suppress unpleasant thoughts is a driver of this process.
• Creating mental flexibility is challenging in that people must be trained to tolerate and process unpleasant thoughts.
• Mindfulness Based Interventions (MBIs) have been shown to decrease mental rigidity.

See the full article here:
Mental Rigidity - A Core Trait of Many Mental Health Diagnoses - Back in Control

 

[Cactusflower]

This is important, and I think it is where CBT can do some good. A lot of Byron Katie’s work is in this area A book I’ve mention before: Tame Your Gremlin is about how your inner self critic can really force us into this rigidity.
I’ve been trying to do a lot of personal work in this area, and there are some really good Youtube posts from various tms practitioners under the term “mindset” that help address some aspects of rigid thinking because they mostly just deal with TMS, which are a good springboard for using it within your overall thinking. It’s not just rigid thinking about symptoms -it’s everything, and it has a lot to do with control and perfectionism, doesn’t it.
Monte, who used to visit this website a lot (you can find his old posts by searching) called his method breaking out of this habit as “thinking clean”.
I’m reading Sarah Blondin’s book Heart Minded, and she terms this rigidity and constant stuckness as a “closed heart”, a form of inner protection of the mind which inevitably becomes our own prison.