Maybe healing isn’t about correcting your thoughts, but learning to live with them
The only reliable way to spot AI + an editing tip (Issue #330)
Cognitive behavioral therapy calls them distortions: thoughts that lie, spiral, catastrophize. The ones that whisper you’re unlovable, a loser, an embarrassment. For writer and law student , they were relentless. Even after years of medication, depression clung to him. It wasn’t until he began CBT that things started to shift. He learned to identify distorted thoughts, like Just because I feel like a failure means I am one, and challenge them with facts. The tool was simple: two columns, Evidence For and Evidence Against. Over time, logic helped quiet the noise.
Still, some beliefs remained. Gupta continues to feel love is out of reach. He knows the thought is irrational, but just can’t stop believing it. I’ve run into the same limitation with CBT. As someone who went to law school like Gupta, I’m good at logic. I can spot a distortion, build the case against it, cross-examine the thought like a witness. And still, part of me believes it.
That gap between knowing something and being able to live differently with it is central to the work of psychologist , featured in issue #324. In a recent article, Hayes critiques the traditional reliance on diagnostic categories like “depression.” Gupta carried that diagnosis for years, but the label alone couldn’t explain why his beliefs were so hard to shake — or how to loosen their grip. Hayes calls for a shift from labeling what people have to understanding how they relate to their thoughts and emotions over time. That idea underpins process-based therapy, and it’s most clearly expressed in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), which Hayes co-developed. While CBT helps us name distorted thinking, ACT explores how those thoughts function and how we can respond to them in more flexible, values-driven ways. Essentially, ACT is about not changing our behavior, but listening to it.
Together, Hayes’s model and Gupta’s story show two sides of the same puzzle. Gupta shows how powerful it is to name your thoughts and challenge them. Hayes offers a path when challenging them isn’t enough. One gives clarity. The other gives motion. And both leave us with the same question: what if healing isn’t about correcting your thoughts, but learning to live with them?
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🖍️ Also today…
- When your kid outgrows a toy, use it to make art of your own. ()
- “The greatest educational fallacy… is that you can get it without stress.” — Jim Stockdale, Thoughts of a Philosophical Fighter Pilot
- The only reliable way to spot AI today, according to essayist ? Volume. “It’s a very, very rare human being who can churn out stories every day or even two or three stories every day without using AI.”
✍️ A dose of practical wisdom
“Revise toward brevity — remove words instead of adding them.” — Verlyn Klinkenborg, Several Short Sentences About Writing
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