Tending the Garden of our Mind
Last year’s BBC Reith Lectures were given by forensic psychologist Dr Gwen Adshead who has studied the minds of society’s most violent perpetrators for more than 30 years.
Dr Adshead has come to the conclusion that the capacity for evil is to be found in all of us and in one lecture she suggests that individual minds are like a garden that needs close tending so that its boundaries are not obscured and lost. Neglected weeds so easily choke all else to death in an untended garden, and so she proposes the importance of cultivating goodness in the individual mind, and so more widely in communities. ‘We need to grow goodness by practicing compassionate states of mind which can lead to the growth of tolerance, gentleness and patience. Such virtues act as a protection against violent and destructive states of mind.’
Dr Adshead believes that defending against such states of mind means developing a capacity to take horrible emotions, like rage and hatred, seriously. We especially need to recognise in ourselves the kind of anger that leads to a wish to hurt others, so that we then take care to protect ourselves and one another.
She concludes that this kind of self-care is vital given the wilderness of combative attitudes and aggressive ideologies to which we’re regularly exposed. It is perhaps especially important for those of us who have suffered trauma and for whom anger may be a constant struggle to manage – anger which could so easily be the connection with later violence.
St Paul urged us long ago in similar vein: ‘Whatever is true, pure, pleasing and excellent … think about these things … and the God of peace will be with you.’
The Rev’d Dr Richard Hines
Rural Dean for Wisbech Lynn Marshland