Overcoming Unwated Intrusive Thoughts

by Sally M Winston

  Worried Voice:That’s what she can see. But I can see inside myself, and I can see my turmoil and impulses to sin.

  False Comfort:So maybe you should tell the priest about this. Maybe God can grant you forgiveness.

  Worried Voice:So even you believe I’m a bad person who needs forgiveness in God’s eyes!

  It’s fine to ask others for reassurance once in a while, and just about everyone does that. But if you make it a habit whenever doubts arise, the additional reassurance continues the ongoing cycle. Some people actually become reassurance junkies and experience a constant need to get comfort and reassurance from family, friends, and the Internet. Some typical interactions with others around trying to get reassurance are discussed in chapter 7.

  Prayer

  The idea the prayers can work backward is a particularly bewildering and distressing realization if you take stock in a loving, forgiving God. Prayer is usually one of the first ways to cope with upsetting feelings and happenings. And, at first, there is often a welcome sense of relief that your thoughts will be removed by God and that God’s good presence will look after you. You feel safer when you are connected to God.

  However, the feeling of relief and reassurance—even if it comes from the belief in a loving God—is still a way of pushing back against the thought. By asking for the thought to be removed, you are taking the thought seriously and thereby giving it more power than it deserves. This leads to additional entanglement, which always functions to increase the frequency and distress associated with these thoughts. So the prayer feels ineffectual, and there is a tendency to pray harder, to doubt that God is listening, or to think you are somehow beyond God’s forgiveness. Some people experience a crisis of faith when this strategy fails. But this is simply because this kind of supplication prayer continues the push-back effort and results in even more entanglement. It does not mean that you are forsaken. It is just how the mind works.

  Unwanted intrusive thoughts always feel that they are not you. Not that they are coming from outside of yourself, but rather that for some inexplicable reason, these thoughts pop up and keep running through your mind. Psychologists call these types of feelings ego alien or ego dystonic. To some degree, this is how they feel to everyone who has them.

  Let’s be clear here: It does not feel like someone is out to get you or that you are hearing voices from aliens. It is different from paranoia. Rather, it feels more like your thoughts reflect actions or feelings that seem so alien. Some people of faith wonder if they are temptations of Satan or voices of perverse spirits. Most religions have some way to describe these particular experiences that do not seem part of the normal flow of the mind. The content of your thought feels so unlike you—of the sort, Oh my God, would I really do such a horrible thing to an innocent child? that some people think that it must be some evil force taking over them. If this happens to you, you might then begin to worry that you are outside of God’s grace and feel even more upset that your prayer appears to be unanswered.

  Helpful Fact: Unwanted intrusive thoughts feel like they are not you.

  For this reason, ritualized prayer as a way of coping with unwanted intrusive thoughts tends to be counterproductive and is not recommended as a helpful approach.

  But please don’t take this as a suggestion that you should abandon your religious beliefs or your prayers. If you believe in a loving, providential God—or even if you just consider yourself a spiritual person—then by all means you are encouraged to stay with your usual prayers and worship. However, to ask for God’s forgiveness or to remind yourself that, for example, “God is good and loving and will take care of me” each time you have an intrusive thought (and hoping it will take the thought away) is actually engaging the thought, adding to entanglement and—despite some temporary relief—leading to further intrusive thoughts.

  When you do pray, ask God to help you to understand and believe in this book you have been led to, rather than ask for the thoughts to be taken away. He knows you have been struggling to be good. He wants you to take the leap of faith this book is advocating. Your thoughts are not a punishment, but they are indeed a challenge.

  Healthy Living

  A lot of people think that unwanted intrusive thoughts and other signs of anxiety or emotional distress come from stress, so they try to reduce stress in order to feel better. It’s common to double down on healthy behavior whenever we are feeling overwhelmed or out of control. We define healthy behavior as eating right, getting a reasonable amount of exercise, cutting down on alcohol and any other drugs, finding a sleep routine that works, and avoiding obvious forms of stress. Changing a job, breaking up an unhealthy relationship, and taking a vacation may reduce stress, but they will not lead to a lasting solution to the problem of unwanted intrusive thoughts.

  There are plenty of good reasons to eat right and get good exercise. In fact, it is clear that healthy eating and healthy exercise improve your mood and lower anxiety. But unfortunately, these activities alone won’t stop your unwanted intrusive thoughts.

  There is a relationship between stress and fatigue, on the one hand and unwanted intrusive thoughts on the other. Eating, exercising, and sleeping well, as well as avoiding drugs and reducing stress, may reduce the intensity and frequency of intrusions. Conversely, poor eating and sleeping, lack of exercise, drinking alcohol, and a highly stressful lifestyle tends to increase the intensity and frequency of unwanted intrusive thoughts. But—and here is the point we would like you to take away—healthy living will not cure unwanted intrusive thoughts, and unhealthy living will not cause them. While healthy living may temporarily reduce your sticky mind, it has no effect at all on the two other factors—paradoxical effort and entanglement—that function to keep your intrusive thoughts going.

  Other Counter-Productive Techniques

  Techniques for ridding yourself, bypassing, or avoiding unwanted intrusive thoughts are attempts at control. The problem is that attempts to control are prime examples of paradoxical effort and are guaranteed to increase entanglement. Trying to control the thoughts is entirely the wrong attitude. It ignores the fact that the thoughts are meaningless and harmless, and don’t require controlling. The attempt to control them reinforces the wrong message. It is an example of paradoxical effort: it works backward. It suggests urgency, importance, and danger, when none exists.

  You may be aware of the Serenity Prayer recited daily by people in twelve-step programs:

  God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the difference.

  In this case, what cannot be changed is the arrival of the unwanted thought—it just happens—and the first fear or initial jolt of emotion is what arrives with it. Our consistent message is that what can be changed is your reaction to that experience. That is what you are trying to do.

  It does take lots of courage to just let it happen and not react to the false alarms: you have to just let the thought be there and trust that it is okay to do that—even while you cannot be 100 percent absolutely certain.

  And this is why techniques, if applied with the wrong attitude, can actually make your discomfort increase, rather than the opposite. Don’t think of coping techniques as a form of nonchemical tranquilizers. Even if techniques enable you to temporarily lower your distress, they will not solve the problems of entanglement and paradoxical effort.

  Here is an illustration of how technique application can either be helpful or make things worse. Abdominal, slow, or diaphragmatic breathing that is undertaken with the goal of making anxiety or thoughts go away will not ultimately be helpful. In contrast, breathing slowly and naturally while you allow unwelcome thoughts to be there can indeed be helpful. If calming methods are applied without the intention of banishing thoughts—but simply to be okay while continuing to experience the thoughts—there is no need for the monitoring or checking to see what has happened to the thoughts.

  Popular Advice

  Follow
ing is a list of techniques recommended by popular magazines, friends, family, and even therapists. Well-intentioned people frequently suggest that such coping techniques are goals, and if you practice them diligently, you can learn to manage your anxiety. You will then have these tools at your fingertips and be able to use them successfully whenever the need arises. Unfortunately, they are all attempts to control your thoughts that end up backfiring. None of them, in fact, is ultimately helpful.

  The problem is that they stop working even though they may seem helpful at first, as you no doubt have already discovered. There is a very good reason why they stop working, and it is not your fault. These techniques convey the wrong attitude and send the wrong message. Coping is not the goal here. Coping does not provide lasting recovery because it fails to address an essential change of attitude. Our goal is much more enduring and profound than mere coping. We want you to reach the point where you do not care whether the thoughts come or not. We would like you to turn off the alarm system in reaction to these thoughts so your amygdala no longer needs to warn of danger. We want you to change your relationship with the thoughts so they no longer cause distress. This reduces dread and stickiness so ultimately the thoughts will cease to bother you at all.

  See if you can recognize one or more of these pieces of advice that you have tried and have not found helpful for very long.

  Try to relax by exerting more willpower. The suggestion here is to put in more effort, but unfortunately, what you resist persists, and you inadvertently produce paradoxical effort. It is impossible to force yourself to relax by using willpower.

  Stop worrying about it; you will make yourself sick. The implication here is that the worry is more dangerous than the thoughts. This is called meta-worry, and leads to more concerns, more anxiety, more stickiness, and more intrusive thoughts, not fewer.

  Everything will be okay; trust me; I promise. Clearly this is the voice of False Comfort, sometimes called empty reassurance. Your own Worried Voice will respond almost immediately with “Yes, but…”

  Calculate the probability of that happening. This is often called rational disputation or reasoning. Unfortunately, your fearful Worried Voice starts arguing because it does not matter how likely something might be; it only matters that it would be terrible if it actually happened. This increases entanglement through paradoxical effort.

  Don’t think about it; think about something else. Distraction is a direct invitation to the ironic process, an example of paradoxical effort we introduced in chapter 1. The effects of distraction are momentary, and you can become desperate, frustrated, disgusted, or fearful when the thoughts insist on returning.

  Think happy thoughts or affirmations. This is called suppression and has the same problem. The implication is that these thoughts are dangerous or that that they indicate bad things about you. This increases entanglement and makes the thoughts more sticky in the long run. It is the very opposite of the attitude of acceptance.

  Have more faith. Pray to have the thoughts removed. As we discussed earlier in this chapter, this kind of prayer can backfire in demoralizing and devastating ways.

  Stay positive; negative attracts negative. This is called magical thinking by psychologists and is an example of entanglement with thoughts. There is no evidence that thoughts affect actual facts in the world. They are thoughts. Try thinking yourself into a sudden death. Or, try using your thoughts to push over a bookcase. Nothing happens. And the effort to think only positive thoughts is a form of paradoxical effort that results in more negative ones.

  Cut out sugar and caffeine, try this tea, and exercise it away. As we discussed earlier, it is not true that unwanted intrusive thoughts are caused by stress and that lifestyle changes will take them away. They are stress-sensitive, but not due to stress. Reduction in stress can reduce some aspects of stickiness but has no effect on entanglement or paradoxical effort.

  Dump the boyfriend or the job, take a vacation, and don’t watch the news. This is a formula for avoidance, which is absolutely the most effective fuel for keeping unwanted intrusive thoughts fired up and active. It makes two mistakes. The first is the implication that unwanted intrusive thoughts are meaningful messages, even if they seem inconsistent with what you believe. This is an example of entanglement. So if your unwanted thoughts are negative statements about your beloved boyfriend, then this technique implies you should respect the message and get rid of him and you will have no peace until you do. Or if you are having intrusive doubts about your mental health and otherwise feel okay, it implies that you should treat yourself as if you were emotionally fragile and get rid of anything disturbing in your life. The second mistake is two-fold: first, the idea that having intrusive thoughts means you are falling apart and second, that a big life change or stress reduction will fix the problem. Avoidance solves nothing.

  Snap this rubber band every time you think it. This technique was once called thought-stopping and was actually recommended by therapists before a full understanding of unwanted intrusive thoughts was developed. It is a form of punishment and results in a sore wrist and increased frequency of thoughts. It gives the incorrect message that thoughts should be avoided, an attitude that increases both paradoxical effort and entanglement.

  Practice meditation and yoga, and the thoughts will go away. Meditation and yoga can both be helpful in reducing the tendency to have a sticky mind and to get entangled with thoughts, but if they are done with the intention of banishing or conquering thoughts instead of relating to them differently, they will not be helpful.

  Techniques can be applied in active or fighting ways that produce desperation, frustration, and fear, and make the thoughts stickier, increase entanglement, and become prime examples of paradoxical effort. Or they can be applied in passive ways, which reinforce the fact that the thoughts do not constitute a danger, do not need to be fought, have no special significance, and will go away on their own once they are left alone.

  The best perspective is one that is not at all obvious. Instead of battling with the problem, you can try to willingly and intentionally go toward uncertainty and distress. When you do not recoil from your own thoughts, they lose their power. When you face the dragon, he turns out to be made of fluff.

  By now you should have quite an understanding of unwanted intrusive thoughts and why so many of your best-effort attempts to get rid of them have been unsuccessful. A comprehensive list of the varieties of intrusions has allowed you to identify your own kinds of thoughts, and you have learned how your brain works to automatically trigger your alarm response when it encounters sensitized thoughts, sensations, and memories. You have the information to bust the nine myths that contribute to stuck thoughts. And we have demonstrated how unwanted intrusive thoughts get stuck precisely because they are not you and feel inconsistent with your beliefs and values. You have come to understand that the worst part of every intrusive thought is not the thought itself, but your internal commentary that follows. Reducing the commentary will reduce your distress. We explained how the three factors of sticky mind, paradoxical effort, and entanglement all work to keep these unwanted intruders alive.

  So now is the time to apply what you have learned and continue with your progress toward recovery. Your goal is nothing less than being done with these intruders and keeping them from making your life so miserable. The challenge is twofold: The first is to learn the proper attitude to adopt each time an unwanted intrusive thought pops in your mind. The second is to retrain your brain so your newly learned attitudes become your habitual, or default, reaction. Your goal is to allow these threatening thoughts to become less and less important so your relationship to the content of these thoughts changes profoundly. The aim is not just to manage the anxiety and distress each time it arises, but to actually overcome the apprehension that unwanted intrusive thoughts could ever torture you again. In the next chapter, you are going to create new circuitry in your brain that reacts in a fundamentally different way to these intrusions. Let’s conti
nue our work together to turn your disturbing unwanted intrusive thoughts into things of the past.

  Chapter 7

  How to Handle Thoughts When They Happen

  This chapter is about developing a way to reduce your distress from unwanted intrusive thoughts, whether they are in response to a recent trigger or they just seem to pop up out of the blue. Your attitude toward these thoughts makes all the difference, and the attitude that works is called acceptance. This chapter defines what acceptance means—and what it doesn’t mean—and provides specific steps for achieving it.

  First, we present the six steps for best coping with each intrusive thought as it occurs. This provides a detailed outline to guide your own response to these intruders. Next, we present the three most common classes of reactions that get in the way of successfully following these guidelines. Then, we present a variety of illustrative stories, or metaphors, that demonstrate the therapeutic attitude of acceptance.

  As we have discussed, the distress over intrusions and the struggle with them tends to make them stronger and stickier over time. Yet, under most circumstances, repeating things gets boring, and we get used to them and stop paying attention. So why don’t you just get used to these kinds of thoughts? We have all been taught that if you face your fears, they will go away and that exposure is what helps. If you are afraid of elevators, get on them over and over again, and you will get over your fear of them. If you are afraid of public speaking, take a course in which you learn to do it every week. So why doesn’t this work with unwanted thoughts? Surely you are getting plenty of exposure already.