Mind Pollution

We legislate against what we can measure. Emissions, effluent, plastic in the water. Nobody writes a policy about the traffic inside a man’s head, and yet that traffic is where every measurable harm begins. The factory is downstream of a decision. The decision is downstream of an appetite.

In forty years of consultations I rarely met someone whose life had been wrecked by a single dramatic event. I met people whose lives had been slowly silted up — a resentment left standing, a fantasy fed daily, a grievance rehearsed until it wore a channel. Pollution is not usually a spill. It is an accumulation nobody noticed being permitted.

The clinical work is to name the inflow. What are you letting in, how often, and what does it leave behind? Most people can answer this accurately within ten minutes of being asked plainly. The difficulty has never been diagnosis.

The difficulty is that a mind cannot scrub itself with the same hands that dirtied it. This is where I part company with the purely psychological account, and I do so on the basis of what I have watched rather than what I was taught. Something has to come in from outside the system. For me, and for many I have sat with, that something has a name.

Start there, and the environmental question answers itself in time. A man at peace consumes less. He needs less to be soothed, less to be seen, less to be safe. The order matters, and it is not the order we usually attempt.