I’ve been an advocate of CBT (cognitive-behavioral therapy) for years now. It taught me to ask myself, when I’m feeling negative emotions, “What thought is behind these emotions?” And having got there, I could address that thought in ways that helped me feel better/get unstuck.
For example if I’m putting something off because I’m feeling overwhelmed, I look for the thought and find I’m thinking “That’s just too hard, it’s impossible, I’m too tired, too busy” etc I can tell myself instead “yes that will be quite hard work. It may take a while. It may be boring at times. But it’s not impossible. I can start some of it today and there’s no rush. If I keep doing bits of it when I have time I’ll get there and I’ll be glad with what I accomplished when I do.”
I’ve found this powerful and helpful and also I often don’t do it, to my detriment.
So how is MOL different? I wrote about MOL on here once already but I understand it a little better today than I did that day since I’ve been reading the book about it.
I suspect that sometimes MOL is not very different from traditional CBT and sometimes it gets to the same place. But, MOL’s starting premise is not “there’s a negative thought behind those negative emotions” but rather “stress/distress results from having conflicting goals at some level”. In other words, rather than one negative thought (or one coherent system of negative thoughts) causing the emotional stress, it’s a system of thoughts in conflict which cause it. Maybe none of them are even negative, per se!
So, at the outset, the system of thoughts in my above example would be “I want to do this because it will be rewarding and satisfying to get it done.”, but also “I don’t want to start this because it won’t be fun and I want to do fun things” also “doing this will involve choices and I don’t like making choices because I’m scared of making wrong choices”. And so on.
None of those are ‘wrong’ per se. But, if I can see all of them I can then be open to solutions/resolution. Such as “let’s just spend a little bit of time starting that project. Let’s see how it goes. I can stop or take breaks if I need to. No-one cares how long this takes (except me?). No-one (except me?) will judge me on the choices I make along the way. If I can believe in myself then it will all be ok”
So…anyway I am going to change my question to myself now I’ve read about MOL. Instead of asking myself “what’s the thought behind this negative emotion?” I’m going to ask myself “what are all the conflicting thoughts I’m having which is causing this psychological distress?”
MOL says that awareness can lead to reorganization, which means, awareness will lead me to thinking of my own solutions and resolutions for my distress, probably in a random trial-and-error way, but, it will get me unstuck and moving again. It will give me hope where I have lost hope. It will work because it will not stop until it works. That’s why I believe MOL is an important step forwards in the theory of psychology. That’s why I want to understand it as well as possible!