Our first message is that you are not alone. There are millions of people who have thoughts just like yours. Good people have awful thoughts. Violent thoughts come from gentle people. Crazy thoughts occur for people who are not the least bit crazy. You are not the only one who experiences repeating thoughts that just won’t leave your mind.
Our best guesstimate is that there are upwards of 6 million people in the United States alone who, at some point in their lives, suffer from unwanted intrusive thoughts. The silence, fear, and shame surrounding the issue increase the suffering and isolation of many good people. You bear your burdens in isolation, not knowing that there are many others just like you.
Our second message is that you are very brave. You are brave to pick up this book and read this far. More than anything—because you think these thoughts might mean something important and could be dangerous—you work to keep these thoughts out of your mind. And we are sure that you have tried everything to do just that. So buying this book and reading about the subject is an act of courage.
Struggling the way you have, you have probably discovered a very frustrating and important truth. Trying to keep thoughts out of your mind doesn’t work for you. It doesn’t work for anybody.
And so we start with another basic truth: If you continue to do what you’ve always done, you are going to get what you’ve always got (Forsythe and Eifert 2007). In other words, if you want a different outcome, you will have to try a different method. We would like you to start with the realization that there is nothing wrong with you, but there is something quite wrong with your method.
Remember that knowledge is power, and the more you know about unwanted intrusive thoughts, the better you will be able to free yourself from the misery they bring.
The answer is learning an entirely new relationship to thoughts, which is being neither scared nor ashamed of them.
Just about everyone has intrusive thoughts.
Helpful Fact: Observing and letting go of your commentary will go a long way toward gaining some relief from your intrusive thoughts.
Thoughts stick because of the energy you expend to fight them.
Thoughts about chairs and fruit salad and trees don’t stick because they are neutral thoughts. Neutral thoughts are not fought because no one cares about them—so they don’t stick.
So the content of unwanted intrusive thoughts is the opposite of what you want to be thinking about. It is the opposite of your values, the opposite of your wishes, and the opposite of your character. It is the opposite of you.
Most of your distress is caused not by what you think or feel, but how you feel about and react to what you think or feel.
Just because you can think some thoughts on purpose doesn’t mean that you are in control of them. You can’t make your thoughts go away at will. You can focus your attention on certain thoughts, but that doesn’t mean you have the capacity to make them go away.
The fact is that everyone has passing weird, aggressive, or crazy thoughts. If every thought spoke to underlying character, then 90 percent of people would be weird, aggressive, or crazy. That is because about 90 percent of people acknowledge having intrusive thoughts that they characterize as weird, aggressive, frightening, or crazy. And think about some of the horror movies and TV shows that are so popular these days. Perhaps you are unable to watch them because they trigger too much fear. But remember that these awful, weird, aggressive, and crazy scenarios are thought up by normal, creative people. They are simply writing scripts that other people will want to watch.
Thoughts do not change probabilities in the real world. Thoughts do not move objects, nor can they hurt people. Additionally, thoughts are not aspects of your unconscious that might become uncaged and leap up and take control if you don’t remain vigilant.
Fact: Once again, thoughts do not change probabilities in the real world. While worrying about someone might make you feel like you are doing something to protect him or her, in reality you are only training your brain to reinforce a cycle of ongoing worry. Remember that feelings are not facts. Feeling that you need to stay engaged by constantly thinking about someone is falling for the false alarms of anxiety.
Fact: The fact is that no one is entirely free of weird, repugnant, and disturbing passing thoughts. This means that just about everyone you know, including your friends, your work colleagues, your teachers, and your doctors have also experienced intrusive thoughts.
In truth, all minds are chock full of junk thoughts not worth taking seriously. If we wander into junk thoughts and they are not granted meaning, they just pass on by.
Remember that anxiety loves ignorance, and the more facts you know about stuck thoughts, the better equipped you will be to deal with them.
We know that the brain learns as a result of experiences. Fearful experiences are remembered and stored in particularly vivid ways. When fearful pathways are triggered frequently, they become automatic. (Neurologists like to say, “Nerves that fire together, wire together.”) Just as we associate two things together, like “up and down” and “left and right,” a well-worn pathway in the brain associates two things that follow each other, and they become connected (what psychologists call “conditioned”). If a thought is followed by an anxious experience, the pathway from thought to fear gets established. When this happens repeatedly, your brain becomes conditioned to react anxiously and automatically to that thought. This sets up the conditions for unwanted intrusive thoughts to take hold.
The good news, however, is that scientists have recently learned that it is far easier for your brain to learn new pathways than previously thought and that new reactions can overtake old ones. In other words, don’t believe the adage that you can’t teach old dogs new tricks! The age of the dog is irrelevant— any brain can learn. Getting over unwanted intrusive thoughts involves creating new pathways that are not fearful.
People with unwanted intrusive thoughts have an amygdala that has learned to become afraid (i.e., clang the danger-warning bell) of certain thoughts. You were not born with a fear of these thoughts, and there is no objective reason to be afraid of them, but your amygdala has been conditioned to react when they appear in your mind. And, in our complicated world, there are a host of situations that aren’t objectively dangerous, but can seem or feel dangerous. If your amygdala sets off the alarm in response to a harmless thought, you get a false alarm of danger: the bell clangs, you get an instant whoosh of fear, and it is very easy to think that there is real danger. The result is that thoughts feel dangerous, you try to fight them, and—of course!—they become stuck.
We want to emphasize two points here. Number one is that first fear is unstoppable because it comes about before your conscious will has a chance to intervene. Willpower has nothing to do with it because it is triggered before willpower has a chance to intervene. The second point is that first fear goes away quickly when you realize you are in no danger.
Helpful Fact: Your Wise Mind knows that feeling anxious is not the same as being in danger.
Helpful Fact: Less is more when coping with unwanted intrusive thoughts.
Helpful Fact: Neither thoughts nor feelings are facts.
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.
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.
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.
Helpful Fact: Certainty is a feeling and not a fact.
Wise Mind: Accept and allow means leave them alone. Let them do whatever they do. Just observe.
解决问题的唯一方法是解决问题
If the content of each intrusive thought is meaningless, you might be wondering why we ask you to think those particular thoughts. It is because your attitude and sensitivity toward these thoughts are what you are aiming to change. There is no better way to do that than to face precisely the worst thoughts you can come up with. If you avoid the thoughts that trigger you the most, you give them even more power. If you compromise and invoke anything less than the real thing, you are forgetting that thoughts—any thoughts—are just thoughts.
In other words, it is your inability to tolerate your unwanted intrusive thoughts that keeps them going.
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