The Thinking Tree Is Shaped By the Power of Our Own Thoughts

“If you leave me in the room without a computer or TV, I can keep myself busy for weeks worrying. I can endlessly think of everything I didn’t do, or I did wrong, or I completely forgot to do,” said Suzanne with a big sigh of frustration in one of our recent sessions.

“You are going to laugh at this,” she continued, “but sometimes I am thinking that all my thoughts take the shape of a tree. Something like…like a thinking tree. But I can see how badly misshapen mine must be. If every branch is a thought, then my thoughts are so much of the time so out of balance that it will only lead to an ugly, off putting kind of a tree, right?”

I imagine it will look something like this:

I wasn’t laughing; I was actually amazed at the power of her metaphor.

“So what can you do to shape this tree more beautifully?” I asked.

“I need to change the way I think; but of course if I knew how, I would have done it long ago.”
Suzanne is a young lady but she is no stranger to the struggle with anxious and obsessive thoughts. Often they don’t allow her to sleep, making her lay awake for hours “thinking,” as she calls it. They are all ruminating thoughts, filled with regret, guilt and unhappiness.

When she first came to see me a few months ago, I made the comment that antidepressant medications could help her quite a lot. But she wouldn’t hear of it. She felt that if she took medications, that meant she accepted her defeat against these anxious thoughts, and she wouldn’t have it.

We started talking about cognitive behavioral techniques and how to recognize and stop the negative, ruminating, emotional thinking with the power of the logical mind. She learned the 10 dysfunctional patterns of thinking from Dr. Burns’ book, Feeling Good, and gradually she became very good at catching herself when her negative emotions threaten to overcome her.

As we speak, she is in the process of learning how to control these emotions one by one, as soon as she identifies them. It’s slow and difficult work. But she is very brave and she decided that quitting is not an option.

I thought this would be a good moment for her to use visualization to help her better stop the negative thoughts. I used her own metaphor and applied to it the neuroplasticity theory. According to this modern and very sophisticated theory, our brains are remarkably adaptive. The brain has an incredible power to act, react and ever change its patterns according to what happens outside and inside of us.

What Suzanne didn’t know, which shows how creative her mind is, was that forming new synapses in the brain happens in a way that looks a lot like pruning and it’s called just that: “synaptic pruning.” Through this process, the brain can erase old connections and develop new ones—highways of information on which the neuronal impulses travel at amazing speed. Even more surprising is that these new synapses are molded, among other things, by the power of our thoughts and our own way of thinking. That is way, if we change the way we think, we break some old connections and build new ones—a lengthy process that requires a great deal of motivation and persistence. Suzanne has both. In addition, she has a sparkling intelligence.

“Imagine,” I said, “that your thoughts are like branches of a tree—the more beautiful and complex your thoughts are, the more intricate the branches’ patterns become and the more colorful the tree becomes, lighted up with bright, sparkling thoughts. Every time your thoughts go again and again over the same obsessions, you kill the spark. That area of the tree becomes gray and dead. But every time you stop that negative thought process and replace it with fresh, creative thoughts, you can light up that area of the tree, making it shine with colors. So you have a choice. What kind of thinking tree do you want to have?”

“The bright and colorful one, of course!”

“Then take care and don’t kill any portion of it. Use the power of your rational, practical mind and stop the obsessions. You do have a choice and it is up to you how beautiful of a thinking tree you create. And the good thing about having a beautiful thinking tree living in one’s mind is that the thinking will improve along with one’s actions and attitudes. If you manage to carry that kind of thinking in your mind, everyone will be surprised by your brightness of spirit, pleasantness and enthusiasm. ”

“Me like that? Doctor Forest,” she said with a slight irony, “who are you talking about?”

“Why, you, of course!” I replied, dead serious.

Then we made an agreement. I will paint the two thinking trees: one overcame by obsessions and dead branches, looking empty and sorrowful; and the other, a thinking tree brightened up by positive, enthusiastic, new and renewed thoughts--beautiful and diverse products of an active, spontaneously creative mind.

Her part of the bargain is to make sure that she will nurture and cherish her thoughts and her thinking so that she will know that her brain, just like my healthy thinking tree, will be light with beauty and liveliness.

She agreed with this wholeheartedly.

And here it is--my part of the bargain. We will see in due time how well she does.

If you want your own thinking tree to go from this:

To this,

dare to be curious, to ask yourself and the world questions rather than passively accepting reality, to decipher the mystery of life and to allow yourself to wander at the marvels of the world.

What has been your experience with changing the way you think in order to make better decisions or feel better about different situations in life? Have you has to change old ways of thinking or doing things? With what results?