A few years ago I jotted down a note that said “external resources don’t solve internal problems.” This note predates my shift from military counterintelligence and law enforcement work to clinical mental health counseling and teaching. I like to think my education, training and experience has helped me refine this thought a bit. But it is still a fun one to wrestle with.
The internal problems I was exploring back then centered around problematic thinking or cognitive distortions. In intelligence circles we tend to group this in with cognitive biases or heuristics, but as a counselor I have learned that these are distinct features of our own thought patterns that lead to a breakdown in critical thinking and short circuit our ability to regulate emotions. In a sense this breakdown makes us more vulnerable to other cognitive biases because our own thoughts are disordered.
Generally speaking, external resources are the things we try to add to our lives to solve problems. I like to group external resources into two broad categories: Things and People. We might try to spend (or use) our resources to overcome a challenge and that’s fine when it is an external problem. For example, a leaking pipe needs us to spend some money to hire a plumber. However, the disordered thinking that leads to a raging fit about how unfair the world is to put this leak in our life isn’t going to be solved by simply throwing money at it… or even by fixing the leak. This internal problem requires us to be aware of, and actively seek to repair our disordered thinking.
Even working with a therapist or counselor isn’t going to magically solve internal problems relating to cognitive distortions. It is likely to help you become more aware of your potentially harmful or disordered thinking but it is up to you to do the work of challenging and changing those habits of thought and mind.
