Making Passion Reasonable

By Dr. Omer Liran | Published March 11^th, 2010, 12:18 AM

Your soul is oftentimes a battlefield, upon which your reason and your judgment wage war against your passion and your appetite.

Would that I could be the peacemaker in your soul, that I might turn the discord and the rivalry of your elements into oneness and melody.

-      Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet, On Reason and Passion

The peace within the soul that Kahlil Gibran’s lines allude to may not be as elusive and unattainable as it seems to be upon first consideration. Indeed, there is a modality of psychotherapy that attempts to use the strengths of Reason to conquer Passion,  that in certain situations is significantly successful in the statistical sense of the term.

Passion, in broader terms, encompasses the thrill of romance, the ecstasy of love, the power of motivation to transform and move, but also the devastating consequences of rage directed both within and without, aggression, anxiety and depression. The organic, visceral, unfettered nature of emotional responses that we prize and romanticize in literature and art can, left to its own devices, also result in agony, anxiety and self-loathing.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy operates on the basic principle that thoughts influence feelings or mood and behavior.

Envisage a scenario: You are told, at your job or at your school, that you have an important performance review/ test scheduled the day after. It is reasonable to assume that your mood would change – even being exceedingly generous, your anxiety level would most likely increase. Your behavior would change as well - you may want to go to bed earlier or go over some material for the review. In general, your mood and behavior would become more goal-directed, more focused, more “on edge” in response to the propositional belief that you have an upcoming review/assessment.

Consider now, that you show up for work only to discover that the review/assessment has been called off. What, then, happens to your mood and behavior? Almost certainly, you are relieved, happier, less tense, more likely to relax and laugh over how futile your anxiety and stress turned out to be. The presence or absence of a certain belief/idea/conviction was enough to change your mood and galvanize you into action, or relax you.

What if you could harness this power of thought and idea to steer emotion? This, in essence, is the premise of cognitive behavior therapy: plenty of our moods and actions that are suboptimal or downright negative are based upon mistaken assumptions, or beliefs, called cognitive distortions:  thoughts that are not entirely in touch with reality, but instead refracted through our individual lenses.

For instance, take the example of the review. The automatic thoughts that the scheduling of an event like that invokes are:

• I am not going to do well.

• This is too short a notice and I am underprepared.

• I am going to do badly and not be promoted/fail the exam.

These thoughts exemplify a cognitive distortion called “catastrophizing,” meaning imagining catastrophes or disastrous outcomes or imagining that situations will be worse than they actually turn out to be. Cognitive therapy works by helping examine those assumptions and then proceeds to challenge them through the tools of logic. What evidence do we have to support the assumption that you are going to do badly on the review? You may, in fact, have scored not too poorly on the previous assessment! You may be underestimating your own personal resources to do well. Your level of preparation may be, at the very least, marginally superior to what you automatically assume it to be.  Even if you are indeed as under prepared as you think, your sense of dread may be prompted by an exaggerated idea of the consequences of faring poorly – de-exaggerating that idea can significantly reduce the anxiety it generates.

Cognitive therapy has many more tools in its armamentarium – but that is the stuff of another article. If you are depressed, suffer from panic attacks, are afflicted by anxiety, it is highly recommended that you seek the services of a professional therapist. Through this article, I hope to convey the powerful simplicity of the idea at the core of cognitive therapy: that changing your thoughts can change your mood and your behavior. To return once again to Gibran’s poetic prose:

Therefore let your soul exalt your reason to the height of passion, that it may sing;

And let it direct your passion with reason, that your passion may live through its own daily resurrection, and like the phoenix rise above its own ashes.

-      Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet, On Reason and Passion