INCRE-MENTAL
One's own mind, when it decides to come apart at the seams, does so with a spectacular lack of originality. The received wisdom, particularly for someone like me who had spent a professional lifetime working with the mind, is that you are somehow insulated by your own expertise. You are the mechanic, and your car simply wouldn't dare break down. This, it turns out, is a comforting fiction of the highest order. Many years ago, when my own world decided to implode, taking with it a loved one already here and another whose arrival was meant to be the next chapter, my formidable arsenal of psychological knowledge proved to be about as useful as a chocolate teapot in a blast furnace. The edifice of my academic and professional life, a rather proud structure I had painstakingly assembled over years, collapsed into a pile of smoking rubble, and all I could do was sit in the dust, contemplating the sheer, predictable banality of my own ruin.
The mind, stripped of its comforting routines and future certainties, became a hostile territory, a feedback loop of grinding desolation. The one thought that achieved the status of a hit single, playing on relentless repeat, was a morbidly romantic yearning to rejoin the departed, a siren song promising the sweet relief of oblivion. Well-meaning friends and colleagues would float by on clouds of therapeutic platitude, offering the sort of gentle encouragement that feels like being pelted with marshmallows during a hurricane. I was, by any clinical definition, sunk. I was a submarine with screen doors, resting peacefully on the seabed of a profound and seemingly permanent depressive state. The irony, a flavour I can usually savour, was now just a bitter coating on everything. I, the supposed cartographer of the psyche, was hopelessly lost in the wilderness of my own head.
I knew the playbook, you see. I could have written the textbook on my own condition. Cognitive restructuring, mindfulness, the whole smorgasbord of therapeutic interventions - I was not just familiar with them. I had taught them, prescribed them, and witnessed their effects. Yet every attempt to apply this knowledge to my own sputtering consciousness was an exercise in futility. A sunbeam through a window, a snatch of a song on the radio, the simple act of tying my shoelaces - any of these could trigger the same dreary, internal monologue. 'Everything is a conspiracy against your happiness.' 'You will be a failure forever.' 'The very act of trying is proof of your failure.' It was a monotonous internal drone, a cacophony of self-recrimination delivered with the flat, affectless tone of a provincial station announcer listing delayed trains to nowhere. I knew these thoughts were not, in the strictest sense, rational, but rationality had packed its bags and left town long ago.
The breakthrough, when it came, was not a thunderclap of satori or a grand epiphany delivered by a burning bush. It was, rather, a whimper of surrender. One afternoon, utterly spent from another failed attempt to wrestle my own brain into submission, I decided to stop fighting the heavyweight champion of my own misery and instead try to trip him up with a piece of string. As the familiar refrain, 'You're a failure,' began its tedious overture, I didn't try to silence it or argue with it. I simply, out of a kind of exhausted laziness, made the most minuscule of edits. I inserted a single, inoffensive little adverb. 'You're sometimes a failure.' It was pathetic. It was a semantic shrug, a meek little qualifier that barely registered. It wasn't a counter-argument; it was a grammatical sigh.
And yet, it was enough. This tiny, almost laughable modification was manageable. It didn't require the Herculean effort of believing a grand, positive counter-statement. It just created a crack of daylight, a sliver of ambiguity in an otherwise monolithic wall of despair. To my astonishment, this microscopic shift in syntax began to work a subtle magic. Over the ensuing weeks, that timid 'sometimes' gained confidence. It grew into 'in this specific situation,' which then blossomed, rather ambitiously, into 'when it comes to looking after yourself, perhaps.' Slowly, painstakingly, a more nuanced and, dare I say, truthful self-portrait began to emerge from the fog, one that could accommodate both the wreckage of my grief and the surviving fragments of my competence.
This experience sent me back to the drawing board, not just personally but professionally. It ignited a fascination with the sheer inefficiency of the grand gesture. Why did our field, so often obsessed with dramatic overhauls and wholesale reinventions of the self, so frequently fail? I plunged into the literature, not with the eye of a clinician seeking a cure, but with the curiosity of an engineer examining a design flaw. Neuroscience, habit formation, learning theory - it all pointed to the same conclusion. The human brain is not a computer waiting for a grand software update. It is a deeply conservative organism, a creature of habit and lazy wiring, exquisitely designed for incremental adaptation, not for overnight revolution. It learns by inches, not by leaps and bounds. Our attempts at heroic transformation are, in essence, a declaration of war against our own fundamental biology. And the brain, in that contest, almost always wins.
Over several years of experimenting, testing, and refining these insights with the kind of open-minded clients who make a career like mine possible, a coherent framework began to take shape. It became a system I call the INCRE-MENTAL approach. It is a philosophy built on the quiet power of the small, the precise, and the sustainable. The results have been consistently, and gratifyingly, positive, demonstrating that a series of well-aimed pebbles can bring down a giant more effectively than a single, poorly thrown boulder. This book is the culmination of that work, a synthesis of scientific reality and the messy, lived experience of being human. You will find no promises of instant bliss within these pages, no facile exhortations to simply wallpaper over the cracks with positive affirmations. What you will find is a more sophisticated toolkit for tinkering with the sputtering engine of the self, an approach that honours the brain's natural caution and works with it, rather than against it. It is a way to become a more artful navigator of your own interior weather systems, one small, deliberate course correction at a time. This is not about achieving a final, mythical state of perfect mental balance; it is about learning the lifelong art of adjustment. It is a journey that begins not with a grand stride, but with the quiet admission of a single, hopeful, and entirely manageable word.