A Mind Set

The lady had just about driven me crazy. A sweet soul, she came to the counseling lab where I was doing my training. She was fifty years old and admitted that she felt a hundred and fifty. She had lost her husband some years prior. He had "run off" with another woman. The lady's negativistic personality was right up there with best of the nagatives.

The fact that she was a referral from a fairly popular counselor in town made me wonder if that good counseling doctor might have pulled one of my "Greyhound Therapy Tactics". Before a client drives you to the point of insanity, put them on a bus to another therapist that you generally don't like.


Ms. Negativistic admitted that she was negative about most everything; she had been that way all her life. At the end of the day she was satisfied with that "mind set". Her mind was set, made up, and she had no intention of changing it for herself or anyone else, which was her right.

The human brain produces thoughts in all humans. If there is no thinking, there is no life. If there is life without a functioning brain, the person is clinically dead. All life roads lead to the brain. The brain is an organ that creates a mind. The mind is thought central. A brain is an organ. We should be careful not to confuse the two.


Some brains have illness or injury and are not rational, capable or reliable. This is a fact of life. A brain that cannot function properly cannot be counted on to produce a mind that is reliable or stable. An individual possessing a perfectly capable, reliable and functional brain should have a mind that is capable of the same.

Minds can be injured. A child with a perfectly good brain can have a mind that is crushed under a load of shame from the power people in his or her life. An individual goes into battle with a perfectly good brain and a stable mind. In the coarse of battle the person experiences much trauma and stress. His mind is injured by the trauma and stress. He begins to have flashbacks and depression and anxiety problems. The brain is fine, the thinking is not.

The mind can be helped. Thinking can be challenged and changed. Perceptions can be altered and the mind salvaged and healed. However, if a mind is made up and a mind set has been established without acceptance of positive possibility, there is little or no hope for anything different in the indiividual's life. A tragic scenario indeed when a person fails to fall forward into mind healing.