At Home – by Rudy Gray

How we think is paramount to how we live. Psychiatrist William Glasser has noted that mental illness is basically unhappiness. He says that unhappiness is a time and place in our lives when our lives are not the way we would like. He is not an advocate of any drug therapy. He promotes thinking as the way to change our feelings. He states, “If you are capable of carrying on a conversation, you should seek counseling when you are unhappy.”

Rudy Gray

Please understand that he equates unhappiness with mental illness and stresses that a person cannot live in an unhappy state for four or five months without showing symptoms. He embraces the metaphor that happiness is mental health, and unhappiness can never be mental health.

We cannot be happy all the time. Unhappiness is bound to come into our lives. But how does it get there? In the end, we are unhappy because of how we think. Our interpretation of circumstances, changes, etc., creates our response, not the thing that actually happens to us.

Psalm 1 is a description of a happy person. He or she is a person who avoids bad company and embraces a discipline of growing in God’s word. As a result, that person prospers.

Psychologist Archibald Hart has observed, “Reality thinking is positive. It stares truth in the eyes, allowing us to find constructive and liberating ways to deal with it. It refuses to deny the actual negatives of life.”

One of the greatest deceptions we use on ourselves is to immerse our thinking in unreality or fantasy. Imagination is a good gift from God, but becoming bound up in fantasy is a potential for disaster. It has been suggested that the human mind easily falls prey to impulsive reactions that invariably lead to difficulty or regret.

While some personalities are more prone to spontaneity than others, impulsivity is harmful. Impulsiveness can often be a refusal to confront reality.

God’s word is truth. It is faith in His Son the truth, and obedience to His word the truth, that can give a person the freedom to think clearly, realistically and rightly. By learning to think God’s truth, we can live God’s truth. Learning to think using God’s truth is not a one-time experience but a lifetime journey.