All of us have worries. We worry because we are intelligent beings. Intelligence predicts, that is its essence; the same intelligence that allows us to plan, hope, imagine, and hypothesize also allows us to worry and anticipate negative outcomes.
Interpretation
Worrying is a natural result of our intelligence, as it allows us to foresee potential problems.
In this quote, Norman Doidge highlights the dual nature of intelligence, which empowers us to think critically and creatively, while simultaneously making us prone to worry about the future. Our ability to anticipate outcomes, both positive and negative, stems from our cognitive capabilities, drawing attention to the fact that worry is not just a burden but also an integral part of being an intelligent human.
In practice
This quote can be shared in a mental health seminar to discuss the nature of worry and its relationship with intelligence.
Analysis helps patients put their unconscious procedural memories and actions into words and into context, so they can better understand them. In the process they plastically retranscribe these procedural memories, so that they become conscious explicit memories, sometimes for the first time, and patients no longer need to "relive" or "reenact" them, especially if they were traumatic.
Nothing speeds brain atrophy more than being immobilized in the same environment.
We must be learning if we are to feel fully alive, and when life, or love, becomes too predictable and it seems like there is little left to learn, we become restless - a protest, perhaps, of the plastic brain when it can no longer perform its essential task.
Psychoanalysis is often about turning our ghosts into ancestors, even for patients who have not lost loved ones to death. We are often haunted by important relationships from the past that influence us unconsciously in the present. As we work them through, they go from haunting us to becoming simply part of our history. (243)
Barking dogs may occasionally bite, but laughing men hardly ever shoot!
Since, according to me, your life is going to be a gradual process of becoming kinder and more loving: Hurry up. Speed it along. Start right now. There’s a confusion in each of us, a sickness, really: selfishness. But there’s also a cure. So be a good and proactive and even somewhat desperate patient on your own behalf - seek out the most efficacious anti-selfishness medicines, energetically, for the rest of your life.
There is no joy without hardship. If not for death, would we appreciate life? If not for hate, would we know the ultimate goal is love? At these moments you can either hold on to negativity and look for blame, or you can choose to heal and keep on loving.
If virtue & knowledge are diffused among the people, they will never be enslav'd. This will be their great security.
No psychologist should pretend to understand what he does not understand... Only fools and charlatans know everything and understand nothing.
Each thought is a nail that is driven In structures that cannot decay; And the mansion at last will be given To us as we build it each day.
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