Myth 1

About a year ago when I was having my traditional springtime existential crisis, I had a chat with one of my mentors at school, Keri Tolboe, and she advised my problems by introducing me to the three social myths that plague our world. Myths in society keep us from growing and keep us from truly expressing ourselves. Since they resonated so much with me at that time (and still do), I began to view and analyze them in my everyday life. And since I'm such a psychology weirdo, I was obviously intrigued. 

For our senior year "big project" at my school, we had to write a ten-page research paper and I chose to disprove the Three Myths using my favorite, neuropsychology. 

Myth 1: "If you ignore it, it will go away."

“It” is anything. “It” is everything. It’s pain, relationship struggles, bills, homework, a messy house. To be able to ignore “it” and make it disappear, although seemingly convenient, is a fantasy, because ignoring problems will not fix them. This is an example of a just world belief. The Just World Theory is a term coined by social psychologist, Melvin Lerner, and can essentially be summed up in the popular phrase “you get what’s coming to you.” In social situations, believers in a just world tend to be indifferent, ignoring problems rather than facing them or trying to solve them. (Andre)

The idea pervades that if we set something aside and pay it no attention, it will magically disappear. If something is in the back of our brain, it will eventually leave our brain altogether. In truth, this is numbing our problems. The problem with numbing emotions is that numbing is all or nothing. “You cannot selectively numb emotion. You can’t say, ‘here’s the bad stuff. I don’t want to feel these’... You can’t numb those hard feelings without numbing the other emotions” (Brown). By numbing negative emotions, the positive emotions are also prevented from showing. Numbing creates voids.

Voids are the product of numbed emotions. They are spaces created by our unwillingness to face problems, by our acceptance of the first Myth. Voids are a source of slavery because they must be filled. Like any other thing, this filling can be good or bad. Fill a void with love and care from a friend or family member, or with a productive hobby that can make you happy. Unfortunately, positive filling is not human nature. As humans we don’t fill voids in a productive manner, but rather fill voids with addictions, harmful habits, time-wasting, and mind-numbing. The United States is the most highly-medicated nation in the world, with 49% of Americans using at least one prescription drug. (Global Research) This is glaring evidence of numbing. Rather than delving down to discover the true problem, we simply numb the symptoms with medication. Medication isn’t necessarily always prescription drugs, but anything that distracts from this discovery of the underlying issue.

For example, the average American watches more than five hours of television daily (Hinckley). Over a year’s time, that’s more than 1800 hours wasted, or 75 days, not taking into account time spent online or watching movies. “They’re doing anything to distract themselves from the fact that they feel empty inside. Distractions, however, are temporary…” (Albow). Distractions, here in the form of television, are just like prescription drugs: they divert our attention from the real problem by temporarily correcting the symptom.

One thing that seems to be ignored most is personal, emotional problems. Because these emotional problems do not manifest themselves physically, they tend to be ignored. For some reason, if the problem isn’t tangible, it truly seems like avoiding it will make it slowly go away. In reality, an emotional or mental problem is just as real as a physical disease. Numbing takes place, and healing is avoided because it can take a long time and a lot of work. Most don’t even believe that real healing is possible, which is another Myth accepted as truth.