This Darkness Is Not That Darkness

How a forgotten ancestor of CBT helped a World War II veteran stop confusing present fears with past trauma

In a recent article, I told the story of how a forgotten form of psychotherapy from the Second World War was used by military psychiatrist Douglas M. Kelley to treat American soldiers suffering from combat stress, now called PTSD. (Link at the bottom of this page.) This short follow-up article focuses on how you can apply the same ideas today for self-improvement. It explains, in practical terms, the key techniques that we can learn from this old-school approach to trauma, developed in the field during the campaign in the South Pacific. It will show you how to train the nervous system to distinguish your present reality from distressing memories.

Rami Malek portrayed Douglas M. Kelley in the movie Nuremberg (2025)

A World War II veteran returned home from the South Pacific afraid of the dark.

This was no childish fear. His nervous system had come to associate darkness with the frequent threat of enemy fire, at dead of night, in the South Pacific jungles. He’d watched his friends die right before his eyes. Now, back in civilian life, his brain remained constantly on alert for sudden movements. Even in the safety of Denver, Colorado, his body still reacted as if darkness meant danger, and for a while he was afraid just to step outside in the evenings.

The method that helped him was surprisingly simple. He forced himself to go out for long walks at night, down side streets, while continually reminding himself that the darkness he now encountered was not identical with the darkness he had experienced while serving the Pacific War.

In other words:

This darkness is not that darkness.

Darkness (here and now, 1946, in Denver) ≠ darkness (back there and then, 1942-1945, in the South Pacific jungles)

That phrase captures one of the most useful ideas in a forgotten precursor of modern cognitive therapy known as General Semantics. Alfred Korzybski, its founder, is now mostly remembered, if at all, for the saying: “The map is not the territory.” Our words and mental images are like maps. They may be useful. Some maps are more accurate than others. But a map is just a map. It is never completely identical with the reality it represents.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Our nervous system often deals in generalizations. Not “this darkness right now is dangerous” but merely “darkness means danger.” Emotional problems often arise, or are made worse, when we fail to make clear distinctions.

This person is not that person.

This place is not that place.

This darkness is not that darkness.

Have you ever noticed that maps refer to themselves? Right there printed on the page there are instructions on how it should be interpreted. There’s usually a key, or “legend”, that tells you what the symbols mean, and a scale used to convert the distances. In fact, one of the most important pieces of information you’ll find printed on any map is the date on which it was published. If you’re using a map dated 1976 in the year 2026, you may get quite lost, and feel confused and disorientated, if the landscape and paths have changed significantly. Once you notice the date written on the page, though, you will realize that it could still contain useful information but may no longer correspond with the real terrain.

Language and thought have the same ability to refer to themselves. We can talk about our speech, and think about our thinking. We do it all the time. Get into the habit of making a mental note to remind yourself that your mental map has certain limitations. That’s the psychological equivalent of adding a key to a printed map.

Rather than saying “I hate the dark”, slow down and spell it out more accurately: “I did hate the dark back there and then, in 1946, in the jungle, but this darkness, tonight in Denver, is not identical with that darkness.” It might seem a little pedantic at first but with practice, you can train your nervous system to understand that these are two different situations. A thought or memory that’s undated can be as misleading as a map that’s undated. At first glance, you may feel like this is stating the obvious, and you already know that this darkness is not that darkness, etc. However, knowing it intellectually and responding to it emotionally are two different things. It takes practice to make this stick at an emotional level.

WWII Rational Therapy

The psychiatrist who pioneered this wartime application of General Semantics was Dr. Douglas M. Kelley. He is better known today as the chief psychiatrist responsible for assessing the Nazi high command before the Nuremberg trials, portrayed by Rami Malek in the 2025 film Nuremberg. However, before Nuremberg, Kelley served as Chief Consultant in Clinical Psychology for the European Theatre of Operations during the Second World War.

In that role, he oversaw the training of “hundreds of battalion-aid surgeons”. Together, they provided psychotherapy, both remedial and preventative, to over seven thousand US soldiers. Many of whom were suffering from what was then called “war neurosis,” “battle fatigue,” or “combat stress.” In retrospect, many of these cases resemble what we would call posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), although the modern diagnostic term did not exist at that time. These men were often suffering from severe anxiety, hypervigilance, intrusive memories, and extreme nervous reactions to reminders of traumatic combat experiences.

This was more than a decade before Albert Ellis developed Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT), the earliest form of modern cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT). Psychoanalysis still dominated psychiatry at that time but during the Second World War it proved of little or no use in the theatre of operations. Soldiers needed brief therapy, taking less than a dozen sessions, and consisting of direct advice, rather than hundreds of hours of dream analysis and other such indirect methods. Even better would be preventative psychological training, delivered in groups, which could build emotional resilience. They needed something practical: a way of understanding what was happening to them and regaining their capacity to function under the extreme stress of combat.

Kelley and others therefore adopted shorter-term, more psychoeducational methods. Kelley was particularly interested in the principles of General Semantics, which he believed had practical value both for prevention and treatment. Korzybski himself, incidentally, had served during the First World War, in the Russian army, and still walked with a cane, due to the injuries he sustained in combat. When he first arrived in America, after the war, it took him months to get used to sleeping at night without the sound of constant artillery fire in the background. He understood, from personal experience, that the nervous system can continue responding to old dangers long after they have passed.

One of his most important observations was that the original fear reaction is often less damaging than what he called second-order reactions: fear of fear, nervousness about nervousness, worry about worry. This remains a central point in modern anxiety treatment. Panic about anxiety can intensify anxiety. The belief that normal traumatic reactions mean we are “broken” can make them much worse.

General Semantics was not psychotherapy in the narrow sense. It was intended as a general training in sanity, scientific thinking, and orientation to reality. Yet it had obvious therapeutic implications. It taught people to become more conscious of the way they abstract, label, generalize, and identify one thing with another. In everyday language, it trained people to ask: Am I reacting to the facts before me, or to my map of those facts? Am I reacting to reality or my way of thinking about reality?

The Map Is Not the Territory

Korzybski distinguished between what he called “intensional” and “extensional” thinking. The terminology may be unfamiliar, but the basic idea is simple. Intensional thinking is dominated by words and their verbal definitions. Extensional thinking is oriented toward concrete observable facts. The intensional meaning of the word “dog” is “a carnivorous mammal closely related to the gray wolf that has long been domesticated as a pet”, etc. The extensional meaning, by contrast, consists in all the dogs to which it refers, and can be indicated by actually pointing at some examples.

Photo by Anoir Chafik on Unsplash

Suppose I say, “Dogs are dangerous.” That may be based on some real experience, but as a statement it is too crude. Which dogs? Under what conditions? Dangerous in what way? The dog in front of me now is not identical with the dog that bit me several years ago. If I forget that distinction, I may react to the label “dog”, to an abstract idea of “dogs are dangerous”, rather than to the real individual dog before me now.

General Semantics called this the principle of non-identity. No two things are completely identical. Even the “same” thing changes over time. A person today is not identical with that person yesterday. A situation now is not identical with a situation then. Anxiety and anger often blur those distinctions.

The Stoics would have recognized this problem immediately. Epictetus told his students that we are disturbed not by events themselves but by our opinions about them. He also taught them to pause when troubled by an impression and say something like: “You are just an impression, and not the thing you claim to represent.” The Stoics called this withholding assent. Modern therapists call similar processes cognitive distancing or cognitive defusion.

General Semantics offers another route to the same basic discipline. Do not immediately fuse with the first appearance of things. Do not assume the label captures the whole reality. Do not confuse the map with the territory.

How Veterans Used General Semantics

The veteran whose report I’m discussing had served in four South Pacific campaigns. He returned home tense, anxious, and constantly alert. He did not learn General Semantics from Kelley directly, but from classes taught by Professor Elwood Murray at the University of Denver. Korzybski later published the veteran’s report, with comments, because it provided such a vivid illustration of the method.

His fear of darkness was one example. He overcame it, at least in part, by walking at night while reminding himself that the darkness around him in Denver was not identical with the darkness of combat.

He also feared crowds. Eventually, he realized that slight movements among people downtown were being confused, by his nervous system, with movements in trees and bushes that might have signalled enemy danger in the jungle. So he deliberately exposed himself to crowds while practising this distinction. These movements, in Denver, were not those movements, in South pacific island jungles.

He reacted to war newsreels in cinemas as if the battle were happening again. So he forced himself to remain in his seat and remind himself that he was looking at black-and-white pictures on a screen, not actual combat. The image was not the event. The map was not the territory.

He heard fire-engine sirens and felt an urge to drop to the ground. So he visited a fire station and examined the sirens. He looked at them as they were now: part of civilian emergency vehicles, not air-raid warnings in a combat zone. These sirens were not those sirens.

He developed a strong aversion to rice because of a horrific memory involving a dead enemy soldier whose bag of rice had been torn open. So he ate rice again, while reminding himself that the rice on his plate was not identical with the rice he saw on that man’s corpse.

He disliked dogs because of what he had seen stray dogs devouring human corpses during the war. So he forced himself to pet dogs in America while remembering that these animals were not identical with the dogs he had seen on the islands.

The recurring method was simple enough but not easy. He repeatedly entered situations that triggered anxiety or aversion, and while doing so he trained himself to discriminate more accurately between present reality and traumatic memory. Modern therapists might describe this as a combination of exposure, reappraisal, and inhibitory learning. General Semantics described it as developing a more extensional orientation toward facts.

Hit the Semantic Pause Button

One of the most interesting parts of the report concerns anger. The veteran became irritated when civilians made what he regarded as silly remarks about the war. At first, he responded with cutting comments. Later, he became sullen and withdrawn. Eventually, though, he learned to use silence as a way of delaying his reaction and evaluating the situation more objectively.

This is a small but important point. A pause can become a form of training. Instead of immediately assenting to the first angry impression, he used the gap to consider the situation more carefully. Perhaps these civilians were not malicious. Perhaps they simply lacked the experience required to understand what war had been like. Perhaps his label “silly” captured something, but not the whole story.

This relates to another General Semantics concept: non-allness. No statement says everything. No label captures the whole person. No description exhausts the facts. When we are anxious or angry, however, we often behave as if our first description were complete.

He is selfish.

They are ignorant.

This is unbearable.

Nobody understands.

Everything is ruined.

These judgments may contain some truth, but they are usually incomplete. They leave things out selectively. And what they leave out may be precisely what we need to notice if we want to respond wisely.

That is especially relevant to anger. Anger often identifies a person with a single action, or a present disagreement with a whole history of injury. This person becomes that person. This remark becomes every insult. This inconvenience becomes intolerable disrespect. General Semantics, like Stoicism, asks us to slow down and inspect the impression before we endorse it.

Do This Simple Exercise

The practical lesson can be stated quite simply. When you notice anxiety or anger arising, especially when the reaction seems stronger than usual, slow down, pause, pay attention to what’s happening, and ask yourself:

• How am I labelling or evaluating this situation right now?

• How is this situation different from similar ones in the past?

• How might I be falling into the trap of selective thinking — is it the whole story?

• Would everyone else evaluate this situation in exactly the same way?

Focus on differences rather than similarities. You can then formulate the distinction in plain language:

• The thought is not the fact.

• The present is not the past.

• I am not the person I was in the past.

• This darkness is not that darkness.

This is not an effort to suppress emotion. The veteran in our story did not recover by telling himself he wasn’t allowed to feel afraid. He recovered by repeatedly confronting the things he feared and patiently training himself to perceive them as accurately as possible. His feelings were not denied but rather vague and imprecise habits of thinking were corrected and his emotions followed.

His example remains interesting historically. It shows that, before CBT even existed, military psychiatrists were already experimenting, on a large scale, with methods that look strikingly cognitive and behavioural. They were teaching individuals to face feared situations, distinguish appearance from reality, and challenge the overgeneralizations that keep their anxiety and anger alive.

Not the Same Person

According to the report, after several months the veteran’s family and associates noticed a marked improvement. He felt more confident, his physical tension had diminished, and he seemed more at ease. This is just a personal anecdote, of course, not a clinical trial. But it does illustrate a principle that appears again and again in ancient philosophy and modern psychotherapy.

• We suffer when our impressions become identified with reality.

• We suffer when our old maps are mistaken for the current terrain.

• We suffer when our words lead to sweeping generalizations.

The Stoics trained themselves to pause before assenting to their impressions. Korzybski taught people to introduce a “semantic pause” and remind themselves that the map is not the terrain. Modern therapy often teaches us to notice that thoughts are not facts. These are not identical doctrines, but they point in a very similar direction.

Many problems arise from when fear and anger blur the difference between past and present. The reaction is real, but not the whole story. The resemblance is real, but it is not identity.

And sometimes the most therapeutic thing we can say to ourselves is also the simplest:

This darkness is not that darkness.

Read the original in-depth article below…