What if I Can't Tell What My Attitudes and Motives Are?

We've established from other articles that the way for a person to search their heart to identify and surrender selfish parts of themselves to God, is to use the motives and attitudes. These are the "thoughts and intents of the heart" the Bible speaks of (Hebrews 4:12)

As they compare their attitudes and motives with the scriptures, the Bible, with it's pinpoint precision, defines and differentiates between right attitudes and wrong ones, and the Holy Spirit enlightens the understanding, so the person can grasp these differences, and see clearly which of their attitudes are in alignment with God and which ones are outliers that go outside of the will and character of God.

What About People With Mental Conditions That Impact Their Ability to Access These Parts of Their Brain?
But a number of different health conditions cause dysfunction of parts of the brain involved in self-referential processing. When this happens, a person can lose touch with those parts of themselves. In psychotic disorders, the brain connectivity can be altered so that the person believes their own thoughts are coming from an external source like a radio or a demon. In depression a person can become so shut down and disconnected from themselves that they don't know what their desires or attitudes are.

In Narcissistic Personality Disorder the person can have huge gaps in self-awareness, where they can abuse others and not be able to register that they are abusive. It's like a blindness of the brain. They may be able to search their thoughts and attitudes about some things, but be blind concerning others.

In borderline personality disorder a person's brain and mood can become so volatile from inflammation and mood swings it is run by primitive, involuntary impulses, and access to deeper thoughts involved in the will and attitudes are temporarily shut down. The person is explosive or out-of-control like a young child, and the frontal lobe where the desires and attitudes are isn't even in an operational mode at all.

This same person, when not having episodes of emotional dysregulation, and what is called "splitting", regains their ability to reason, and can search their thoughts and attitudes again.

Someone with an anxiety disorder may have intrusive thoughts dominate their mind, and seem to have lost access to thoughts involved in the will and attitude. Or sometimes these thoughts pop up sporadically, but it's hard to differentiate between the involuntary racing thoughts which are set in operation by primitive parts of the brain, and the grounded, moral thoughts involving the will of the person which the prefrontal cortex governs. They may have a mixed bag of primitive thoughts and higher thoughts involved in the attitudes and motives.

If You Find Yourself in One of These Situations, What Do You Do?
If you find yourself in one of these situations, what are you to do? How can you know who you truly are, what you believe, and what your inner attitudes and motives are, so that you can make important moral choices like choosing to surrender attitudes of doubt or jealousy to Christ so you can walk with Him through the process of sanctification?

I wrestled with this question myself for years. After coming out of psychosis in 2016, I found myself in a state that is very common for those with psychotic disorders: out of psychosis and able to understand basic right and wrong, and basic reality, but still having some residual symptoms that made me not feel as connected to myself as a healthy person is, and mild cognitive distortions that made me have mild distortions in how I understood the world and the Word of God.

I couldn't see everything perfectly. It was like having blurry vision concerning certain aspects, but being able to see some things with clarity, whereas before I had been blind.

I began to ask the question "How do I know I can see "straight" enough to choose Christ and surrender my life to Him; how will I ever know when I reach this point?" Because my brain is the tool of perception I use to determine my level of sanity, how could I really ever know -- for sure -- that I was reading the Bible accurately?

If Understanding of Right and Wrong is Present, Then Even if It Feels Like You Still Can't Surrender to God, You Actually Can

I came to realize from my studying of the scriptures that there's only one criteria for choosing Christ. It's having the ability to repent of sin. So you must be able to know what sin and righteousness are, and understand how they are different from one another, and then you can place faith in a Savior and turn from your sins.

While a person in a mentally compromised state may have gaps in their perception, and a number of symptoms that make it seem like they can't choose God, if they can understand basic right and wrong, and have a grasp of morality, they can still choose to surrender their lives to God.

Why is this? Because the part of the brain involved in understanding right and wrong is the part we also use to make choices. It's where the will and agency of a person reside.

Ask Yourself What Right and Wrong Are
Ask yourself what right and wrong are. If your answer is that blue is wrong and red is right, you're probably in psychosis. If your answer is that sharp things are wrong and curved "safe" things are right, you're also probably in psychosis. If your answer is "right and wrong are the same thing; you just haven't been able to see this new truth until now", this is another psychotic answer. If your answer is "wrong is a checklist of things to avoid and right is a checklist of things we are supposed to do", you have either lost moral perception of you may have never come in contact with the Bible truth about morality. It can sometimes be an ignorance problem.

If you can see the inherent wrongness in wrong, and the inherent rightness in right, and how they are diametrically opposed, then you can surrender your life to Christ. You have to be able to see that selfish principles actuate a person who does wrong, and loving principles actuate a person who does right.

There can be some gaps in moral understanding, and there can be gaps in knowledge. Many Christians don't know the Sabbath is a moral issue, and this is from a lack of knowledge. But they know the other commandments are moral issues. They have a gap in knowledge but can still choose to surrender their lives to God.

There can also be problems in self-referential processing too.

But if basic right and wrong can't be discerned, and the person thinks jagged things are evil and curved things are good, or they really believe good and evil do not exist at all and it's all arbitrary, then they have lost moral understanding and they can't currently surrender to Christ and be saved. Whatever choice they made when they had moral understanding is where they will stay.

It's extremely important to treat their brain and body, to bring them back into an understanding of right and wrong if possible, especially if the person was an unbeliever.

An Example of Lost Moral Judgment
When my aunt was in psychosis, she would go down to the zoo and preach the gospel to the animals, hoping to convert them. You can see that she could not tell right from wrong, because she was completely unable to understand what sin is, and that animals cannot sin because they are not made in God's image and do not have reasoning ability.

She was in a state where she could not repent of sin and believe in Christ. She needed to be brought out of psychosis before she would be able to understand Jesus as her Savior, and make a choice for Him.

The Answer
So the Answer is that even if self-referential processing errors are being made by the brain, as long as these aren't so severe that the person can't tell the difference between basic right and wrong, they can still surrender to Christ in a general sense, and will have some perception of their wrongs that need to be surrendered to Him, even if there are gaps and blind spots.

How to Treat Self-Referential Processing Problems
Ginkgo biloba really helped me with these symptoms. It reconnected parts of my brain and my sense of self which hadn't been connected in years, by restoring blood flow, neuronal signaling, rebuilding neurons, and getting adequate neurotransmitters to the deeper areas of the brain that had been closed off by chronic inflammation.