Does anyone else find themselves plagued by persistent thoughts? I feel like I ought to be able to control them, but I cannot force them away. Usually I can only get the thought out of my head when I discuss it in therapy, but I'd love to get a little more control on it myself. These can really get me spiralling downward. Mostly these thought echo the abusive words I heard as a child.
hi,
I find that 'replacing' an unpleasant or obessive thought by substituting a different one is easier than simply 'willing' the bad thought not to happen (btw, this 'substitution' is a CBT approach). I think it works, because most of us can only hold one thought in our minds, at a time.
This does take some work and when you're not up to that, a less aggressive approach towards regaining control over your thought processes is to try to make better use of 'quiet' time. That's where if you've nothing to distract yourself, unwanted thoughts may be prone to resurface. When this was a problem for me, I'd find a distraction such as working on crossword puzzles, or doing freestyle Lego projects, or jigsaw puzzles, would hold my attention well enough and I'd not lapse into dwelling on unpleasant / dark thoughts. And just having an hour's break here or there was helpful, as 24/7 of even a mild annoyance can be incredibly tiresome and wear oneself down.
If you're able to practice this sort of routine (some of us might need meds to get our moods to this point of having that level of focus), by actively suppressing 'bad' thoughts, I think soon enough you may become skilled at doing this earlier and earlier as the 'bad' thought keeps trying to re-appear. I found I was managing this even before the first 'word' of an ugly phrase or sentence of a dark character would be able to repeat itself in my mind, as I came to know which thought was on the verge of starting up.
This may sound like a lot of work, but (at least for me) there's a big pay-off that was hinted at early in the game. The process becomes: (a) reflexive, pretty soon you barely think about doing it, and, eventually, (b) fully automatic, as you're no longer even aware that you're doing it. When I first started trying this, I noticed some small results in my mood and thought processes within a few hours. Since nothing else I'd done had been affecting the downward spiral I'd been coping with, I was confident this could be a winning technique for me. After a few days, I had no doubt about it. This method's become one of my best coping tools for modifying my moods over the past four years, and has allowed me to consciously starve dark thoughts so they'd not destroy my mood.
I think what's at work internally within our brains, is that by reflexively stopping the thought before we allow it to run through our mind, we're "starving" the thought pattern on a 'chemical' level as the 'rut' that the thought had earlier dug into our brains, starts to soften and become misshapen / less 'hard-wired'. In the continuing absence of reinforcement (so long as the thought's not allowed to fully repeat itself and revive, too often), eventually the thought pattern withers and dies, being completely replaced by new material.
I'm not familiar with EMDR, but from what little I've read about it, I think the principle involved there is to speed up this dissolving of thought habits: by aggressively overlaying a 'distraction' on top of the traumatic thoughts, the original dark thought becomes diluted / less pure, and so becomes easier to confront and deal with. An analogy might be of a car stuck in the mud and spinning it's wheels in a deepening rut: EMDR tosses in some sticks and dirt [notable stimulation to interrupt an unrelenting process, that serves to distract] while reliving the dark thought, which gives the tires (our minds) something to 'grip' and helps pull us out of that rut.
Don
