Guilt can be associated with an enormous range of intrusive thoughts. Harming or self-harming intrusions can bring guilt in the form of What kind of person am I that I would even have such a thought? You can feel unholy or sinful after having blasphemous thoughts. When asking others for reassurance in situations like this, you also run the risk of piling on additional guilt for upsetting or frightening them. You also may seek reassurance that having those bad thoughts does not reflect on your character, which reinforces the voice of False Comfort. Remember that your goal is to silence False Comfort.
Here is a typical internal commentary or dialogue, where someone with unwanted intrusive thoughts is debating with himself.
Worried Voice:Wise Mind keeps saying it is okay to think these thoughts, but I believe that “lusting in your heart” is just as bad as actually doing it.
False Comfort:Worried Voice, you don’t even go to church; what is all this moralizing? I asked my priest, and he said everybody thinks bad thoughts; you should just ask for forgiveness, and you will be forgiven.
Wise Mind:Slow down. I see no need to ask for forgiveness. That applies only when you have actually willfully done something bad, a situation where you had a choice and chose poorly. We are not responsible for things that happen when there is no choice or control. It is simply not true that we can control what pops into our mind. We can control what we choose to do, but not the automatic thoughts that just show up.
And here is how seeking external reassurance goes. You can see how similar it is to the internal dialogue that just cranks up the volume of Worried Voice and is not helpful.
Self:I just had a terrible sexual thought about my niece. And she is so innocent and sweet.
Friend:You know you would never do anything. Everyone has bad thoughts.
Self:Not as bad as these.
Friend:You need to distract yourself. Just think of something else.
Self:I try, but I can’t.
Friend:Ask God to take the thoughts away and forgive you.
Self:He is not listening to my prayers.
Friend:Of course He is.
Self:What if I am beyond redemption?
Here is a typical exchange that happens when someone has just had an unwanted intrusive thought.
Sam:I had these thoughts about the woman who works next to me. I feel terrible.
John:From time to time everyone has sexy thoughts about other people. Even Jimmy Carter “lusted in his heart.” Forget about it, it’s nothing.
Sam:But suppose I actually do something? My wife would be so hurt, and she’d probably divorce me.
John:Whoa! Buddy. You are just talking about sexy thoughts. Now you are imagining a divorce! You’re fine. Just leave it alone. Or enjoy it. Don’t worry about it.
Sam:So you think I shouldn’t feel guilty?
John:You sure are making a big deal out of this. Maybe you should feel just a little guilty.
Sam:I feel terrible.
John:What’s got into you? I thought we were going to watch the game.
Sam:Well, I just need to know I am not a bad person.
John:I already told you! Would you just stop this?
Here is another:
Kate:I think I may have postpartum depression. I keep having a really scary thought. Everyone does, right?
Janet:Lots of women have a hard time. You are not getting much sleep you know.
Kate:Yes, but I keep thinking I might hurt my baby. It is horrible.
Janet:You mean drop him accidentally? Or he might slip in the bathtub?
Kate:I am scared to say this out loud. But no, more like on purpose.
Janet:You should tell your doctor.
Kate:I am afraid she will lock me up.
Janet:She can give you an antidepressant. It can help.
Kate:Do you think I might be like that woman who was in the news?
Janet:I can babysit for you if you need some relief.
Kate:So you think this is serious too, don’t you?
Looking for reassurance when you feel guilty might make you feel somewhat better in the short term, but it adds to your suffering when you realize that it sometimes upsets or frightens others and ultimately strengthens Worried Voice. Much better is to practice noticing that feelings associated with your thoughts will go away on their own if you just leave them alone.
Doubt
Every time you have an unwanted intrusive thought, you want to know for sure that there is no danger and the intrusion will safely pass. Trying to abolish all doubts and eradicate uncertainty is a significant impediment to reaching an attitude of acceptance. Everyone wants to be absolutely sure that not struggling with the thought is a safe thing to do and that there is no danger in labeling it as a thought, as opposed to an impulse. You want to be certain that the thought is 100 percent not a reflection on your character and that absolutely you will not go crazy or lose control. This is a natural wish. Unfortunately, it is not one that can be satisfied.
The fight for certainty is a major factor in keeping your unwanted intrusive thoughts so intense. And, if you think about it, where else do you demand absolute certainty? Do you put your car up on a lift and have a skilled mechanic check the brakes, steering, and transmission every time you go for a spin? Do you stay off sidewalks because cars sometimes lose control and run over pedestrians? Do you insist that someone taste your food before you eat? Do you ask your kids if they still love you every hour? Of course not!
The problem is that unwanted intrusive thoughts feel so threatening. That is because anxious thinking takes over, and the thought—as abhorrent as it might be—seems to have a high probability of occurring. And, you might think, even if the probability is fairly low, the consequences of killing someone or throwing a child out the window are so enormous and horrendous that the thought feels threatening and dangerous.
False Comfort:Wise Mind, I need to find some better way to reassure Worried Voice that the thoughts don’t matter, but it keeps asking the same question over and over no matter what I say.
Wise Mind:The problem is thinking Worried Voice is reassurable. What-ifs will always come up. Worried Voice has to learn to tolerate that it can’t have a 100 percent guarantee. None of us really have certainty about anything.
False Comfort:But when I don’t reassure Worried Voice, it gets worse, and it also gets angry at me.
Wise Mind:Tell Worried Voice that you love it, but if you keep reassuring it, it will never learn how to live with uncertainty, and that is something we all have to learn how to do.
Seeking external reassurance is yet another step in the unhelpful fight for certainty. Once again, people seek external reassurance to quell their doubts. Frequently their friends and family provide additional false comfort, just to keep their loved one comfortable in the moment or to get them to stop asking for reassurance. It does not work past a few moments of relief. This kind of exchange is not helpful.
Self:Tell me you are sure that the plane will not crash while you are on it. I keep worrying over and over about it, and it feels like a premonition.
Family member:Don’t be silly. I promise I will be fine. I will call you when I get there.
Self:But you can’t really be sure. Please don’t go. I am getting a message here.
Family member:Planes are safe.
Self:Okay, but you have to call me as soon as you land. I’ll be worrying about you the whole time.
Sometimes you get so involved with the need for reassurance that you become addicted to that need. These are the reassurance junkies that we mentioned in chapter 6. If you see yourself as a reassurance junkie, try this approach: Give yourself a weekly “ration” of reassurances (Robbins 2013). Act as if reassurance were very, very expensive, and your budget is tight. Use it only when it seems absolutely necessary. It can be your first step in breaking the reassurance habit.
This is very different from the ordinary sorts of reassurance and encouragement that people ask for
, and receive, in the course of their daily lives. Real reassurance happens just once, it works, and the issue is closed. It is not an answer to an unanswerable question or an empty promise.
The Gun Test: Finding Your Own Wise Mind
Because doubts inevitably accompany every step of the six steps, we would like you to explicitly call up your own Wise Mind. Wise Mind is often drowned out by the noise of your other two entangled and struggling voices. Here is one avenue for contacting that part of you that really knows what is going on—the one that bought this book and has kept reading, the one who knows the unwanted thoughts are not the real you, the unflappable one who knows not to grant more meaning to a thought than it deserves. This thought experiment was inspired by Grayson (2003).
Imagine that you have suddenly been placed in a do-or-die situation. There is a gun to your head, ready to fire, and you get only one guess to answer the question. You cannot know for certain—all you get is your best guess. If you are right, you live; if you are wrong, you die. Do nothing and you die as well. There are no maybes, no hedging, and no time to think about it anymore, nor to ask anyone else. This is it. You get one guess. Now answer the questions:
Is this just an unwanted intrusive thought or a meaningful message?
Should I apply the steps and allow the thought to be there?
Should I turn myself in to the police or the mental hospital, or can I safely let this thought alone?
Is it my best guess that this will pass if I don’t get entangled and don’t let False Comfort get involved?
Should I allow myself to be hijacked by this junk?
If the imaginary stakes are do-or-die, your own Wise Mind will step forward. It might be 51 percent versus 49 percent in terms of certainty, but a part of you really does know what to guess. Most say that they know these thoughts are meaningless intrusions, but aren’t 100 percent sure—and they wish that they could be certain. The gun test forces them to make that choice.
Urgency
As we have discussed, a feeling of urgency accompanies every unwanted intrusive thought. Giving in to that sense of urgency takes you in a direction that is contrary to the therapeutic attitude of acceptance. We know that each intrusion seems to indicate an emergency (or an emergency in the making), and you need to do something about it immediately. But this is a false alarm. When you get bluffed, or tricked, by this false alarm, you will spend your energy trying to turn off the alarm and encounter the effects of paradoxical effort, inadvertently increasing entanglement. Urgency makes you feel that issues need to be addressed now, not later. It makes it hard to pause before labeling, to float above the fray, to accept and allow, and to let time pass. In fact, a feeling of urgency works counter to every essential step for coping with unwanted intrusive thoughts. There is a relationship between being bothered by uncertainty and the feeling of urgency. If something is unclear or uncertain, there is an urgent desire to clear it up now.
Family and friends can start to believe that you are in an emergency too and reinforce the idea that you have to do something now if you seek help from them. They come up with all the things False Comfort has already tried.
Self:I am being bombarded. I don’t know if I can hold out any longer. I can’t stand these crazy thoughts; I am going to lose my mind. I have to do something now.
Friend:Maybe you should take Xanax and lie down for a while.
Self:I don’t want to get addicted, and anyway the thoughts just come back.
Friend:Maybe you should pray for inner peace. I will hold your hand. I will stay with you until you feel better.
Self:Do you think I need to go to the hospital?
Friend:I will take you if you can’t calm down, but I am sure you will be okay.
Self:I can’t make up my mind whether I should go. I feel like I’m missing my chance. Tell me again why you are sure I will be okay?
The most helpful response to the feeling of urgency is to slow down, float above the fray, and practice letting time pass.
Some Helpful Metaphors
Don’t feel discouraged if you find it hard to grasp the shift in attitude that underlies the six steps. Here are some stories and metaphors to help illustrate different aspects of this attitude shift. Applying the steps is not so much a set of rules of what to do but reminders of how to be. The steps are counterintuitive—in other words, they seem at first to be the opposite of the commonsense way of handling unwanted intrusive thoughts. These stories illustrate how doing the opposite of the commonsense way is what actually works (Stoddard, Afari, and Hayes 2014).
The Intruder at the Party
Imagine you are giving a party that is very important to you, and you have invited friends, family, and coworkers—people you really care about. You have gone all-out on the food, including some very expensive shrimp. Everyone seems to be enjoying themselves. Suddenly you notice a scruffy guy you do not recognize. He is at the buffet and is helping himself to shrimp. You politely ask him to leave, but he simply ignores you. You have a choice now. You can confront him, call the police, have him thrown out of the party, and then stand by the door to make sure he does not return. This will immediately make a commotion, interrupt the enjoyment of others, and brand your party the “one when the police came.” Or you can allow him to take some shrimp, just ignore him, and go about enjoying the party. Interestingly, no one else seems to mind this intruder as much as you.
This illustrates how labeling and allowing (the opposite of fighting) changes perspective. Pay attention to what really matters. Steps one and two of the six steps to reduce distress over a thought require that you get the situation labeled correctly. When you label and understand that this scruffy guy is “just taking shrimp,” it allows you to realize that you have the option of not doing anything. There is no danger—although perhaps some irritation—and that option might be preferable to making a huge fuss and spoiling your party. In a similar manner, when you label a thought—no matter how repugnant—as “just a thought,” you give yourself the option of safely choosing to leave it alone. You are bigger than a thought, any thought, and it requires no control. You can then move toward the attitude of acceptance embodied in step 3.
Whack-a-Mole
Imagine that you are at an amusement park and spot the Whack-a-Mole game. There is a huge stuffed panda bear you would like to win. You put down your money and stand alert for the start bell. You pick up your mallet and discover, just as the clanging starts, that the mallet is tied down by a six-inch cord, and there is no way to reach any of the moles as they pop up and down. Your score is clearly going to be zero. You have a choice now. You can get angry, feel cheated, be embarrassed, fight to tear your mallet off the cord—or you can laugh at the absurdity of the whole situation.
Initial reactions here might be frustration, anger, embarrassment, or even anxiety. But by letting go and accepting, you can make something that seemed important (getting the panda bear) feel trivial and even funny. This is an illustration of step 3, accepting and allowing.
Don’t Dignify the Question
The president is having a press conference. Suddenly someone jumps up and shouts, “Is it true that you are having an affair with your personal secretary?” He has a few options now. He can protest loudly, “Do not be ridiculous!” and the papers will read, “President denies affair with secretary.” Or he can have the reporter thrown out: “President ejects reporter who asks about his affair with secretary.” Or he can look straight at the reporter, make it clear he heard the question, and then pivot to “Next question please.” He can refuse to dignify the question with a response (Papantonio 2013).
This illustrates that there are some no-win situations in which any engagement will result in additional entanglement. An unwanted intrusive thought is one of those situations. No matter how obviously it seems to call for argument, rejection, or reaction, getting involved is not advised. Unwanted intrusive thoughts do not deserve the dignity of a response. This is another way to understand the meani
ng of acceptance in step 3.
The Waterfall
You are sitting comfortably and peacefully on a lawn chair on a ledge behind a waterfall. You can feel a little light spray, but you are perfectly safe. As you watch the water cascading in front of you, you can see some debris from upstream, and something goes by that looks like it might be valuable. But you know if you reach for it, you will have to forgo the pleasure of this experience, strain yourself to catch it, and it might not be of any worth at all. You might even lose your footing. So you just watch it go by.
This illustrates that the natural flow of the mind has debris that may sometimes feel important, but is not worth examining. In these cases, letting it go by is the best strategy. Not every thought we think is important or worth retrieving. Floating behind the waterfall and just observing is a way of understanding step 4, float and feel.
Mud on the Windshield
You are driving on a country road with large puddles from a recent rain, and you are running late for an appointment. A splat of mud lands on your windshield, and there is a disgusting dead bug in the middle of it. You have a choice now. You could put on the old windshield wiper, but it will just spread mud and bug parts all over the windshield. You can stop by the side of the road, get a rag, and spend time cleaning it off—and be even later for your appointment. Or you can just keep driving. You realize that you have a safe view of the road through and around the dirt, even though the mess is somewhat irritating. So you continue to drive. As the sun hits the windshield, it dries the mud, the wind flicks it off, and your windshield is almost clean by the time you arrive.
Overcoming Unwated Intrusive Thoughts Page 13