Homo Perditus

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) has been the talk intervention of choice for treating mental illness for decades. The basis of this treatment is to get the client to take an honest look at the thoughts, feelings and attitudes underlying their belief system so they can decide if the stories they believe about themselves and the world support balanced mental and emotional health. It basically works on the premise that as humans, we can operate from unhelpful cognitive distortions learned in childhood, and that it is possible to replace these distortions with more balanced narratives.

I call the collection of narratives we live our lives by our “programming.” We may be consciously aware that we are running it, but often are not because it is the proverbial soup that we grew up in. The gift of being diagnosed with a mental illness and going to therapy is nothing short of the opportunity to literally deconstruct our psychic landscape in order to reshape it after a more desirable version of ourselves. We can also think of it as a trade-up, from a fossil-fuel burning jalopy to a modern-day Tesla.

What we can do individually we can also do en masse, and this is the subject of the trilogy by Yuval Noah Harari collectively known as Sapiens. In his books, Yuval takes us back to the origin of the Homo genus, walks us through the history of the rise of our species, speaks to where we are now, as well as what our potential alternate futures could look like. And he does it all with incredible insight and an unflinching ability to question everything we ever thought we knew about our species, ourselves and the world.

I highly recommend you pick up Sapiens, Homo Deus and 21 Lessons, and allow the author to take you through the equivalent of a historical mind-bending acid trip of discovery. I guarantee you will come away from his books with more questions than answers, which is the goal of any successful CBT session.