Thankfulness and Gratitude on Thanksgiving Day: Unsticking the Phonograph Needle
As a psychologist I think a lot about my own inner emotional life, and I try to use images and metaphors to help my clients do the same. Some people have said, Carl, your mind is like a steel trap"! Actually, I think of it more like a phonograph! Remember the vinyl 33 rpm record albums when we were kids? Remember how annoyingly the needle would sometimes get stuck and play the the same lyrics over and over? Sometimes a few minutes might go by before your realized it! Then you'd get up and tap the needle to get it back in the groove. It often seems that our minds are like that phonograph. We get caught on a track thinking about something, worrying about something, over and over ... We dwell on it, and it continues until something else comes along to tap the needle. Often we are then dwelling on the next topic! Our inner lives too often seem like an endless progression of these. We worry about one thing until the next worry com...