I was 2 years and 10 months old when my brother was born, and as of writing this article he is very much alive and well, despite our acrimonious childhood spent violently warring with each other. This means that, once again at the time of this writing, that he has been in my life for 43 and a half years and was an almost continual daily feature in my life from the age of 2 and 10 months up until I left home at the age of 19. Since that time our lives have naturally grown apart as we have pursued our own lives in ways that feel best to us. I don’t know what his opinion on our relationship is, indeed, this is something I need to ask him, but for my part I feel we get on agreeably enough when we are in contact with each other, most often by a monthly-ish phone call but once a year face to face. Regardless of the increasing distance in our relationship as we have matured, it is fair to say he has been a significant and longstanding constant character in my life.
What has this largely unexceptional background to my relationship with my brother have to do with anything?
Well, as per the title of this article, which is hopefully curiosity provoking, and not too click-bait, sometimes I remember I have a brother. It is quite possible that I will go several days without a single thought pertaining to my brother or our relationship crossing my mind. Not one. And then inexplicably, and for no obvious or discernible reason he will appear in my thoughts again, sometimes for a moment and sometimes for longer. And this process will repeat.
This observation affords a reflection more broadly in respect to our relationship with thought, memory and the people and events in our lives. If someone with such significant an involvement in my life, especially my primary developmental stages of life, who has been in my life for 43 and a half years, can disappear completely from my conscious experience, then we do well to remind ourselves that so can, and does, every other thought and experience we have. Even in the instance of post-traumatic stress disorder there is occasional respite from the resurgent waves of thought and emotion linked to the trauma causing event or events.
This type of reflective realisation can help us gain better perspective into the nature of our thought experience. That our thoughts come to us without conscious control, and that even the most seemingly indelible, uncomfortable or painful thoughts will just as surely leave us in peace again, often without us ever consciously noticing it. One moment we are wracked with an unpleasant, anxious, depressed, bitter, or resentful chain of thought and another moment it is gone, like a cloud evaporated in a summer sky.
Thought isn’t always completely random of course, certain events and sequences in our daily lives can provoke a particular thought or chain of thoughts and his is where therapies such as Neuro-Linguistic Programming are used to break unhelpful chain and create new positive strutures in our minds. Complex trauma and PTSD often need a comprehensive package of therapies to support people to recovery, but it is important to be aware of and remind ourselves of the lack of control we have over our thought experience and that we are not our next thought, no matter how pleasant or unpleasant it might be.
The key to our felt experience is the relationship we have in respect to our thoughts and whether we apply a skill like mindfulness to our experience or whether we practice meditations on the lessons of stoics such as Seneca, the goal is the same. Helping us to break to the spell of our thoughts and to cease identifying ourselves with them, whether we are deluding ourselves that our wholesome thoughts somehow make us good people, or whether we are crucifying ourselves for thoughts that we find abhorrent. It won’t stop the thoughts, but when we accept that we are not our thoughts we can allow ourselves to make discerning choices in respect of how we might live a more considered and productive life in the service of the greatest possible good.
And if meditations and stoics aren’t your thing, I will leave you with some compelling truth from the 2005 film, Batman Begins.
“It isn’t what I am on the inside, but what I do, that defines me.”
We might all do well to remind ourselves of this a little more often.
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