( TMT is my term for the traumas and tragedies that come along and threaten to re-define the rest of our lives .)
Finally , I crack the egg into the sizzling skillet and say , “ This is your brain on The Massive Thing .”
You can take an egg out of the skillet after a few seconds or minutes , and although it will be forever changed , it ’ s still edible , even good . All the king ’ s horses and all the king ’ s men can ’ t put the egg back together again , but the hot skillet can still be just a thing that happened to the egg .
Or you can leave the egg frying until it ’ s a burned-up , completely destroyed , unrecognizable , useless wreck .
The skillet can be the thing that happened to the egg in its short life , or it can be a thing that happened on the egg ’ s journey to whatever purpose it was supposed to serve . ( I know — I can feel you rolling your eyes as I stretch the metaphor , but it ’ s a great visual , right ?)
If we let the egg burn to a crisp in the pan , then TMT is the thing that happened to it .
It would be silly to ask the egg , “ What ’ s the matter with you ?” The egg needed a treatment plan , but all it got instead was TMT .
Remove the egg before it ’ s completely destroyed , and we can ask it ,
“ What happened to you ?” Then the egg can answer , “ I was in the skillet for a while .”
TMT puts you in the skillet . The treatment plan pulls you out before it ’ s too late .
I went to school for all those years to become a doctor who could help people when they were going through their worst troubles , and then I had already started writing a book about it when I was thrown into my own worst troubles . Losing my son Mitch put me in the position of being one of the sufferers instead of someone simply studying how to help them .
And in all that time of evaluating people ’ s responses to TMT and then observing my family and me walk through ours , I ’ ve come to an important conclusion :
The response of our brains to the emotional assault of TMT parallels how our brains respond to the physical diseases I ’ ve spent my career treating .
Our brains on TMT go through a process of progressive disease and dysfunction that can crash our hope until we learn to handle our traumas and tragedies in a healthier way .
• We have intrusive thoughts about our TMTs that lead to mutated , unhealthy emotional responses .
• Left unchecked , this emotional cancer then spreads into a network of bad thinking that interacts with trauma ’ s lying voice ( wrong conclusions , false stories , etc .). These repetitive thoughts and behaviors can become programmed over time , just like the sick synapses that cause seizures to spread in epilepsy patients .
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