How to Release Obsessive Thoughts: Rumination, OCD, and Fear | Being Well Podcast

hey everyone welcome to being well I'm Forrest Hanson if you're new to the podcast thanks for listening today and if you've listened before welcome back I'm joined today as usual by Dr Rick Hansen Rick is a clinical psychologist the best-selling author of books like Buddha's brain and resilient which we wrote together and he's also my dad so Dad how are you doing today I'm really good for us and always always tickled pick to do this with you yeah very much the same I've been looking forward to today's episode for a little while because today we're going to be focusing on one of the questions that we get most frequently which is how a person can deal with intrusive or obsessive thoughts it's normal for thoughts to get stuck in our heads sometimes or for things to happen to us that we have a really hard time letting go of but when thoughts are negative persistent recurring and generally uncontrollable they can have a really huge impact on our quality of life and we've gotten a lot of questions from listeners outlining how they've been trying to deal with the same persistent thought for literally decades which highlights just how difficult these thought patterns can be to break so that's what we're going to be exploring today how we can break out of cycles of rumination and release obsessive thoughts so Dad I just used a word there rumination it's a bit of a technical word could we just start by explaining that to people who might not be familiar with it ruminating is when we keep getting carried away by the same negative train yeah inside our own minds and it could be uh focused on thoughts it could be going back over and over again to rehashing a conversation or revisiting some traumatic memory or period in your in your time or worrying about the same thing over and over with you know a combination of thoughts and feelings and Sensations so the kind of word comes from the ruminants who chew there could now they chew their cut productively to somehow extract nutrition you know from grass separating out the cellulose from the nutrients and so forth these are animals like cows for the record this is not like a a strange sect of people living it's an obscure part of the world just to clarify that's right I think they might even have cloven hoofs I don't know but anyway they chew there could and uh so it's sort of like the mental version the psychological version of chewing your cud with negative connotations so it's repetitive it's unproductive and it's negative it's really different from a passing daydream about a time you've had in the summer or by a mountain lake or looking forward to a vacation or productively you know worrying about something but driving to a conclusion that you're going to do or solving a problem in some way no rumination is invasive or repetitive and negative and it's not productive for me the feature of it that stands out the most is that you're not really generating anything new you're just thinking the same old thoughts over and over again and I can definitely think of um a lot of times in my life where I've just been stuck on a concept or stuck on something that happened to me that's often where these things come from we have experiences that are just really hard for us to Shake in different ways and then there's kind of this whole other category that we'll talk about in a second these very wild bizarre intrusive thoughts that can just appear in our minds for all sorts of different reasons so these are different things that might kind of pop up for people but if you're interested in learning more about rumination and working with these cycles of thoughts it turns out that Rick actually has a workshop on rubidation covered up it's going to be on April 22nd it's a one day live online Workshop I actually didn't know that you had this Workshop coming up when I planned this episode dad so it just kind of timed out for us and if you want to check that out or learn more about it you can visit rickhanson.net rumination to learn more and you can get 20 off with the coupon code being well 20 is there anything else you want to add dad or did I do that about right there Underneath It All um I moved it I am moved to talk about the fact briefly that we're really talking here about autonomy and freedom inside your own mind yeah love this so you can rest your attention on what is productive and useful for you and keep it there without getting distracted this way and that on the other side not getting your attention dragged against your will in effect you can do some kind of preoccupation that doesn't feel good it's not helpful and doesn't go anywhere and so to to feel inside your own mind you can stop the same show from playing over and over and over again on the stage of awareness yeah yeah really good which clears space that for the kind of shows that you really want to have unfolding in the theater of your own mind great setup um I would love to ask you a little bit more about the uh the thoughts that we have a little bit less control or a little bit less influence over before we get to opening up the freedom a little uh why do people get stuck on certain kinds of thoughts like we talk a lot on the show about psychological function what's the function that this rumination or Obsession process is serving it's a really great question so chimpanzees don't ruminate gorillas don't ruminate very very intelligent uh primates and and especially now dogs and cats don't ruminate uh they don't have the neurological capacity so one of the great developments neurologically arguably in the last couple three million years has been twofold number one are profoundly social brain and our capacities for relationships of various kinds and also our capacities to ruminate in effect our capacities to do what's called mental time travel to go into the future or the past and be kind of lost in internal mini movies that second capacity has lots of advantages it enables us to learn from our past and to make plans for our future on the other hand that fantastic equipment can get hijacked for problematic purposes specifically thoughts that are repetitive we get stuck with and they don't really help us so why do we do that part of the reason is that the rumination process is the defense against certain experiences when people go up into their heads as they were and start obsessing about something very often that's a way to avoid experiencing something even though they don't like obsessing in part obsessing functions to pull us into cognitions and away from Sensations and emotions which are scary and painful the other thing that happens is a kind of um habit that people can just fall into the habit of rumination the last one is very rooted in psychoanalysis and the notion of the defense in that people can ruminate about certain things or obsess about certain things to ward off certain experiences it's the idea that if you keep thinking the same thought that somehow magically that will prevent a disaster coming to your children so if you worry about your children's health that will somehow prevent your children from getting sick or your mom as long as she's worrying about being in a car accident that will prevent the accident from happening sure yeah or she's worrying about the plane crashing that will prevent the plane from crashing so you say to her stop worrying about the plane crashing you don't like that she goes no it might crash now I'm not not exactly she's a very rational bright person as we all know your mom it's combination Earth Mother and supercomputer so a good thing but but think about the function so we can get more into this but a certain kind of magical thinking can creep in to obsessive thinking so I'm going to Loosely split our obsessive thoughts into two different categories here the first would be annoying or repetitive thoughts and an extreme version of this could be a song being stuck into your head for months on end I've never had the months on that no don't say it but I have definitely had the like week and a half version and that is no fear worm right earworm yeah the total ear worm and then the second category I'm this is a big broad category I'm just going to call it thoughts that make us feel bad so these are thoughts that lead to a negative emotion or we feel bad just because we had the thought and a common subcategory of this sometimes they're labeled disturbing thoughts and this could include everything from a weird horrific image that appears in your mind maybe something that you saw in the past or something that happened to you or even just a pure feature of your imagination where it's just like creating it from Whole cloth to inappropriate sexual fantasies are a really common version of this just to name it to whatever else and many of the intrusive or obsessive thoughts that people want to rid themselves up are a combination of both of these things they're this persistent repetitive preoccupation with a past event that also makes the person feel bad is probably the most common version of this um and typically thoughts that are in that kind of annoying category we can talk about things to do about them a little bit maybe but we're mostly gonna focus on the second category because that's where the emotional content is right it's hard to distract ourselves away from dealing with thoughts that are based on on underlying experiences or emotional content that's unresolved in some way I move you know I move to say the dumb thing I routinely say which is oh my gosh you'd be an incredible therapist but actually I think you have found an even better Niche for yourself so that's being a professional amateur which I'm perfectly happy with well amateur is one who loves you know what they're doing oh wow wow way to flip that around on me dad that was great I love that yeah I love the fact too the forest that embedded in what you're saying is this broad teaching that a lot of the stuff that bugs us and harms us is well intended at some level in the basement of the architecture of our nervous system it's well intended It's A coping response it has a function it's trying to serve that function the problem is it's it's it's there are costs with how it's doing it in their better ways so by understanding these mechanisms as you point out and understanding what they're trying to accomplish that then is the first step toward getting more regulation over them and learning how to accomplish the same good purpose but in a less costly and better better kind of way that's a real broad principle isn't it in being well the topic of our podcast yeah totally and so one of the things that the brain is trying to do when it's ruminating is it's trying to problem solve in some kind of way this is one possibility another one as you just named a little bit earlier is It's A coping strategy and as we go through life we have to figure out what to do about different kinds of situations right and this problem solving is occurring in the background of the brain all the time it's one of its most important capabilities but when we're faced with a situation that doesn't really have a figure-out-able solution the how of solving it isn't obvious to us right or it might not exist at all and the Brain can become really fixated on it like replaying it over over analyzing every aspect of it trying to figure out oh if I just did this thing a little bit differently and we just can't let it go and so we think that we are doing something about the problem the fear the anxiety that we have when in reality we're not doing anything about it we're just activating ourselves over and over about it and one of the interesting things about this particularly with something like OCD is that the soothing Behavior that's associated with the intrusive thought doesn't actually make things better for the person like the compulsion that they have doesn't lead to any lasting relief and that's why there's a difference between disordered OCD and somebody may be like you Dad who you like to joke refer to yourself as having a couple of the genes for OCD you just like a nice neat space you you want things to be tidy and organized yeah Scandinavian yeah yeah but if you keep things relatively tidy and organized you feel better you're like I'm good yeah I don't keep straight in the Shelf because it's straight for somebody with disordered OCD the compulsion doesn't actually lead to relief and that's something that's really interesting about this whole thing one thing I I want to kind of call out I guess is the difference between active rumination in the foreground of awareness but I just kind of want to name something else which is it's as if in the background there is a certain view of yourself a certain belief about yourself the past other people or the future those four major categories it's not exactly rumination but I think some of the things that we're talking about are actually going to be pretty useful in terms of clearing those baked in negative views of yourself that keep happening they keep casting a long Shadow they keep being broadcast inside your own mind I think you're totally right a lot of broad application of this and we're mostly going to focus kind of from here on out on what I'll call the subclinical range of intrusive or obsessive thoughts we've done some episodes on OCD in the past but that is a specific problem I'm not a clinician yeah you are not necessarily an expert in OCD specifically or something like that and there might still be some things here that we talk about that are useful for that clinical level but I just want to offer that as some context if somebody walked into the office to work with you and they LED with hey Rick you know I just have this really bizarre thought that has been stuck in my mind for the past six months where I've been replaying this past event over and over and over again and I just can't let go of it what can I do where would you start with them well I'd start initially with being interested and supportive and normalizing it and trying to do a therapist too early on other Healthcare professionals you're doing an intake right and you're kind of trying to get a read on is this someone who seems fine but is bleeding out on the floor you know you're kind of trying to get a read on what's actually going on but then and fundamentally I'm interested in what's the experience that the um rumination is functionally you know designed to prevent maybe the rumination promotes a behavior like cleanliness activities or maybe the rumination is a kind of magical thinking that as long as I think this I won't get cancer for example or I won't be punished by God because a lot of rumination for a lot of people has a religious rooting to it that can be really interesting to explore but basically it's designed to prevent an experience so okay so what's being held at Bay by the rumination and then how can I help the person be present with tolerate that experience so that they don't need so then they get to a kind of completion on it very often ruminations about you could say non-experienced experience stuff that's pushed down ward off disowned kept it pay and a lot of the journey is about softening including Landing tolerating and learning that it's okay to do those things partly if you think too what is the the nature of rumination tends to be quite verbal internal verbal activity so it's pulling people into that subset of the psyche that relatively small portion actually of the vast estate of your own being and well what's that about and sometimes too that's part of the function that as long as I'm ruminating I'm happily out of touch because uh I don't want to be in touch with my feelings so rumination isn't technically dissociation but it has a dissociate of a function because it disassociates people from the visceral world of their own bodily experience their feelings their Sensations and so on so we actually haven't done this very much on the podcast and I'm kind of springing this on you a little bit dad but I think it might be fun for me to paint a scenario for you just to make this real and you can then sort of let me know what goes on your mind as a clinician after you you hear the setup how does that sound yeah great fantastic so maybe they say something to you along the lines of and I'm trying to think of a good maybe a good example of this hair okay I think I actually have two if we have enough time we'll do both of them I want to start with one that that might seem a little odd because there's a classic one here about oh you know I'm just really keep on going over the same old conversation that I just had with somebody or I had 10 years ago with a person I just can't get rid of it we'll talk about that maybe a little bit but I want to start with one that might seem a little odd but I've certainly experienced versions of this let's say that the person comes into your office and they say something like this to you you know I I feel like I'm a pretty mentally healthy person I'm doing okay in my life but every night when I lie down to go to sleep I have a hard time sleeping and I have a hard time sleeping because these weird thoughts just start appearing in my head and they're always kind of the same thoughts and they'll take slightly different forms maybe I'll think that there's somebody in the closet spying on me and so I have this fear of the side of the room that the closet is on and sometimes I'll even have to get up and open the door to the closet and look around and I'm always just like petrified before I do it but I just have to do it to be able to go to sleep or maybe I'll be just terrified that tomorrow I'm gonna wake up and I'm gonna see like a dead body on the floor or I'm gonna turn to my partner and they're not going to be breathing and I'm just and it I just have these horrific thoughts and I just can't get over them especially when I was younger I I would have some versions of that kind of thing I've had the version of that also when I was younger particularly like the monster under the bed that was a big one for me when I was a kid yeah well first off obviously compassion there's suffering in it you know on intake as it were I'd be wanting to understand what's going on here altogether meds are always worth checking out because meds can have odd mental side effects you didn't know about your grandfather my dad the only panic attack he had in his life was right after a medication change for example yeah you know obviously just we were allowed just rule it out but you know one in 100 hey maybe there's something to think about there so that and you also wonder about trauma uh in a person's General how well glued together their psychological structure is because it's in the gap between the tiles and the Mosaic and the psyche that stuff can just Bubble Up and some people are not well glued together so you're trying to read that and also wondering about is the imagery that's coming now a disguised form or a modify wide form of something that actually happened to them that was significant maybe when they were really young or maybe they misunderstood something but you know what's going on here so let's suppose though now we kind of cleared out those rule outs it's not a it's not a physiological issue this is a fairly well glued together you know normal range kind of functioning and so forth uh no trauma history it's just it's coming up this is popping up yeah totally My overall understanding and this kind of goes to um teaching from Carl Jung is that the images of the archetypes archetypal images very potent images are expressions of the instincts you know in the sense that we humans who seem so cultured and civilized and whatnot we are Savage animals basically uh with this thin veneer of civilization just kind of layered on the raw Primal you know 200 million years of mammalian Evolution and another 400 years of evolution before that is multi-celled creatures the amazing thing is not that we're you know the bad things happen the amazing thing is that we're as well behaved as we usually are stuff can bubble up really bubble up so one thing with people I try to convey is that it's it's normal to I'm going to use the technical term here to have weird [ __ ] arise [Music] totally totally and I just it's kind of butt in here for a second yeah this was really one of the things that I was thinking about and we'll get back to like the case study in a second but that I was thinking about when we were just setting up for this episode in general everyone thinks weird thoughts yeah there's there's no we all think or not we all but like most people tend to think I am the only person who has thoughts that's weird you see that happen all the time when when I talk to like therapists and one of the things they say over and over again is like yeah people come in and they always think that they're the only person who has ever had this problem yeah and I've sobbed eight other people today who had that same problem yeah you know it's just these are human problem kind of things um and so one of the big early stage antidotes for this sort of stuff is a sense of common Humanity yeah and just a feeling of like look this is a normal experience I'm probably going to be okay we can work through this people have developed good treatments for things yeah that doesn't mean that they will necessarily work for me but hey we're gonna give it the good old College try here and things will probably get better over time and that itself is like such a great starting point and such a better starting point than feeling a alone and isolated and defeated around the experience wonderfully said Forest really really true so so let's say that's first of all the first thing normalizing a second thing is to assess reality testing in general again that's a technical term reality testing to what extent is this person grounded in actual material reality in which there really are not monsters under beds or is this a person who's really has a kind of a slippery relationship with real reality I call it sometimes a periscope relationship really they're sort of living in the depths but every so often they pop up their Periscope to to you know to engage in object of reality that kind of person has started to work with because there's this kind of a slippery sense of what's actually real and what's not real and sometimes that has to do with the trauma history sometimes you work with that I think it's also really important to respect neurodiversity neurological diversity and cultural diversity and you know consensus reality for a western secular scientific materialist who in my case happens to believe in God is like as I'd mean that but in any case that's not necessarily normal for a person who comes from a different culture so respecting those differences I think it's truly important and then what to do about it what I find helpful is to acknowledge the presence of the image and to even just name it to note it oh or the feeling oh fear of monster or creepy image or worried about dead body and just name it the naming itself gives you some breathing room from it it engages more rational parts of your brain that's good and then don't feed it that's a really important thing it's the idea that that arose and I'm I'm not going to go back there again then sometimes what that means is to deliberately distract yourself to move your body to shift to read a book to think about a happy movie it's just to move away from it to not dwell on it and to exercise some will and to watch parts of you that are my friend Daniel Ellenberg calls trader parts that sometimes keep wanting you to go back to it and you have to decide no I don't want to go back to it now to be able to do that I know I'm giving kind of a top-down approach but there's a place for exercising top-down will inside your own mind that you just say no I'm just not going to feed it I'm not going to go there I'm not going to give a credibility I'm not going to believe it and I'm going to make myself think about other stuff there's a place for that another strategy and you can do both of them is to ask yourself what is the feeling that that image or thought brings up so okay there could you know the monster under the bed the closet the dead body in the morning what's the feeling that if that if that did happen that I would feel and then can you allow yourself to feel it can you allow yourself to imagine the terror you would experience and to make room for for that possibility because when you make room for that possibility a kind of settling occurs in your in your psyche a kind of it's as if the image is trying to help you process something and so when you open to the possibility you can you can complete around it you you move to a kind of completion of the Gestalt it's called the whole pattern you allow the whole pattern to complete but yeah there would be Terror and then you try to help yourself be okay with that if it happened you don't want it to happen you're not trying to make it happen but it would it would be tolerable you'd still be here after the terror passes through to speak to that maybe a little personally here give a personal example of this um just a version of this and this for me was more when I was a an old teenager it was when I was kind of like 16-ish 17-ish years old I used to be quite Afraid of the Dark As you probably remembered dad um and very much a there's a monster under my bad kind of person and somewhere in there and I forgot exactly how old I was when I started to do this and I think this was based on a conversation that we had where you said something kind of along these lines to me uh you said it in a more more kid-friendly way however however you put it at the time but it was basically like well Forest you know would you what would happen if this thing happened like and I would be like oh well the monster would get me and you said something to the effect of like well what how can you work with that how would you feel what would that do and for me it became a whole piece with death then yeah where literally almost every night for a good three to six months when I was a late teenager I essentially had like a peace with death wow process before I went to bed almost every night I had to be like well you know if I don't wake up that would be a real bummer and I would miss out on all these great experiences that I hope to have in the rest of my life but hey I was dead for 13 and a half billion years and I didn't feel a darn thing and so you know I'd probably be okay so and and that was what got me over the hump and after I did that practice for a long enough period of time something happened like you said the Gestalt completed the process was was good and and that's not to say I never have these preoccupations still to this day if I wake up at three in the morning and go to the restroom one out of every 100 times I have a weird sort of like oh there's somebody else in the house but I would describe it as like a normal range sort of experience as a was to a morbid preoccupation if that makes sense and isn't it interesting I mean is your dad I didn't know this full detail yeah yeah I am glad that I was willing to kind of go there and not you know kid you about it because yeah the ultimate thing is to be at peace with whatever yeah it's funny there's actually a famous story I'll share it I think it's relevant uh so a major teacher in the Buddhist tradition that people like Jack cornfield and Sharon Salzburg and others are situated in named ajan cha we've talked about ajan cha incredibly simple direct person in the Thai Forest tradition living in the forest who um was you know deeply wise when he was a younger monk in his practices he was very afraid of spirits so he went to the Grave area Eternal ground and he closed his eyes and he started to meditate and he described one particular experience in which he did that and he began to hear the sound of a being approaching him and in that context it's like you can just imagine the you know what was flooding his mind and he I think described his mind as his absolutely Terror stricken but he kept his eyes closed because that was his practice it was to keep being with the breath no matter what happened staying in the present being open to everything and the sounds got closer the steps came closer the terror was rising and he just stayed with it at some point and then the sound started to you know there were no more sounds anymore and like he still didn't know he kept his eyes closed but he was so given over to it that he became he had an Enlightenment experience essentially on the on the heels of this in which he just had completely given over to it he fully allowed it and he was like completely surrendered and and free fundamentally in his relationship to it it is really interesting how often the freedom is found in just like an acceptance of of the fear of the thought if that makes sense well I'll tell a story here much like you I had a lot of fears as a kid when I as a young fellow started taking psychedelics I would routinely have the experience of looking at a blank surface like the top of the ceiling in my dorm room back at UCLA and uh I always start seeing this devouring mouth very intense blood saliva and I would just snap out of the experience whoa this went on routinely in psychedelic trips I would just look at something blank in this imagery would start coming to me finally probably four or five years after I started started digging psychedelics and now I'm in my early 20s maybe a few years later probably I'm in the desert I'm in Joshua Tree National Park monument then you know LSD roaring through my system and I started looking at um a bush and in the desert most of the bushes have thorns to protect the water inside the bush Okay so I started looking at this bush and every Thorn became a face that was devouring and in this case instead of pulling myself out of the experience I opened into it and in that release into yet I realized that what I was seeing outside me was that which I'd suppressed inside me we tend to suppress what is the opposite of our surface presentation I had suppressed a kind of vicious not scientific or rational that were then being represented outside me and in that realization that came with the surrender I completed a Gestalt of including these aspects that I a rational you know masculine socialized scientifically oriented kind of person had pushed away and in that was a tremendous release so I've never had imagery like that again and basically I haven't really had any nightmares since well that's really interesting dad and you're you're moving me to to something that I've been thinking about a lot recently which is a a general point on dealing with obsessive thoughts or just difficult experiences even more broadly with that where if you look at if you look at the research and you look at the literature and if you look at all the different strategies there are for recovering from painful experiences of different kinds and this could include obsessive or intrusive thoughts traumatic experiences whatever or just growing and healing broadly as a person you'll see this really interesting theme pop up over and over again which is a balance of closeness and distance they're close enough to do something about it but you're not so close that you become overwhelmed by it so let's use an example here we talk about creating a coherent Narrative of childhood a lot on the podcast and this is a process and it's been an extremely useful one for me where somebody goes through and explores in a very detailed way what happened to them why it happened to them what was going on in the broader field of events and you create a kind of story about it that helps us make sense of what happened in the Here and Now that's a lot of closeness that is not denying what happened that's not pushing it away that's not going full dissociation about it that is a lot of closeness but you're doing it from a 500 foot View and that reminds me of a process that I I spoke with Jason Cantor on the podcast and about dealing with his PTSD experiences having to do with being deployed in Iraq and one of the processes that he went through with his clinician that he's talked about really openly is how I believe that he essentially recorded the story of this particular event that was just stuck in his mind and he recorded it like on a you know on his phone or however he recorded the audio for it and he would and his homework was essentially to listen to that recording every single night until he got bored with that that's again that's a lot of closeness you are really engaged with the thing but you have a feeling of Separation you're doing it through this recording through this tape that's being played back for you over and over again and I just think that you see this all the time in in therapy and psychology and it's really interesting to me where we generally don't get better by pushing away or pushing down our bad thoughts and feelings like the bad parts of ourselves whatever that word means we get we get better by getting close enough to the thing to do something about it but not so close to it that we can't do anything about it um what do you think about that well I think you're you're your application of the notion from relationships of optimal distance or that integration yeah your application of that to this Forest is brilliant and original well thank you what's fantastic and it's a general principle I think a lot of clinical work is this two-step dance you step in you step back you step in you step back you step further in then you step back you know and this is that fundamental process and then the question becomes so here's back to you what do you think helps people do that what has helped you do that yourself to find that optimal balance of closeness and distance right from difficult material great question I I think there are a lot of things that people can do here what I what I first think about are a bunch of practices to remove the emotional Sting from something so it's not as overwhelming and and my strategy for that typically has been like pretty cognitive because I'm a pretty I'm a thinking guy so for me it's actually really helpful to do stuff like clarifying the function of a thought and returning to the why what's the purpose that this thought is trying to serve what's my dreaded experience and just kind of thinking about it and that's sort of top-down way can give me enough emotional distance that I can work with that um and that gets to one of the big recommendations that people often give for dealing with intrusive or obsessive thoughts which is journaling around them just writing the thought down in a very detailed way uh the whole story of the thought everything that's going on in the mental movie of the thought while it's happening and this can help somebody get some perspective around it it can also help them identifying like cues or triggers that they might have um you know if you notice day after day that you only think about the thought after you go to a certain place or after you interact with a certain kind of person Ah that's a pretty interesting hit um and this detailed writing can help us separate ourselves from the emotions associated with thought and get that kind of 500 foot view second frankly I think a degree of distress tolerance and developing that in a in a thoughtful way I mean we wrote a book titled resilient that's just an important capacity to have a lot of people misunderstand distress tolerance it's been really misused uh as a way to frankly like take advantage of people and be exploitative to tell them oh you just need to develop more distress tolerance around this thing but when used properly it's a really important capability to be able to be with something that's uncomfortable and to not get totally blown out around it another practice for me has been various mindfulness practices which can be a kind of acceptance practice like can I breathe through something can I develop the capacity for untangling my my egoic self I guess from a particular thought stream so I'm not as wrapped up in it those are all things that have been really helpful for me is there anything that's been been helpful for you maybe that I that I haven't said or maybe if you just want to reinforce any of that professionally I've I see people do it it works and I do it myself and it's great that you're doing it um and I I think there's something interesting here that's ironic to free ourselves ourselves of the of an obsession sometimes it's helpful to go into the obsession yeah yeah totally and it's counterintuitive yeah yeah and versions of that which go back to my own you know human potential Workshop history is when you dramatize it and you even deliberately exaggerated and intensify it so for example just play it out maybe there's a particular set of obsessive thoughts you you put yourself in a room no one's gonna call the police if you do it and then you just start really saying out loud loudly you exaggerate you even make them a little ridiculous you take them one step further uh you imagine that there is a part of you because often these particular obsessions relate to parts um they are the obsession of a part so then if you own that part of you you're bringing it into the Ambit the Ambit of your own influence and so you could pretend to be that part which is like a preacher or a scientific but nasty critic or something or a evil Disney movie character creepy creepy kind of creature Gollum you know like that right so these are all interesting and it goes back to this kind of saying Maxim really from the human potential days the one of the fastest ways to get off a position is to fully get on it because Paradox you know you then you kind of help yeah to complete yeah to just reinforce what you're saying here Dad there's a very common strategy called thought suppression that people try to do when they have these intrusive or obsessive thoughts and it's exactly what it sounds like you're just trying to push it down you feel the thought pop into your head and you go no no no no no I'm gonna I'm gonna shove that down whatever it is I'm doing and then often accompanying that is a lot of self-criticism and self-blame uh because often the content of these thoughts the person is you know finds them shameful you mentioned something a little bit earlier in the conversation about some of these thoughts having like a religious context or religious route to them um things that the person is ashamed about that they're thinking or that they think it's inappropriate for them to be thinking those are all thoughts that we might try to shove down one of the most consistent findings in the research literature is that thought suppression just doesn't work and if anything it tends to make things a lot worse and um there are other sorts of thought control strategies that are based on distraction which is something you were mentioning earlier that tends to be a lot more effective than suppression for starters but even more effective than that most of the time is thought acceptance which is exactly what you're talking about Dad it's going into the thought to get through the thought yeah um and that's what tends to help people out long term I would add maybe two things here to what we're saying that are that are kind of structural one is by the very nature of obsession or compulsion they tend to go together um we're being hijacked by something very particular so our attention is getting glued to some stimulus object we're becoming stimulus bound structurally one of the things you can do there you are you're worried about you're having an obsessive thought about a monster in the closet let's say or you're caught up in a ruminating com you know about an app conversation you had with somebody some episode over and over again right structurally one thing that helps is to widen your view be aware of the room as a hole that you're in not just the closet yeah be aware of the house be aware of the houses nearby be aware of the land the city the sky you know be aware of the whole of your life anything that structurally tends to move you out into the hole be aware of your mind as a whole yeah okay there's this flashing red light that you're ruminating about what else is happening in your mind their Body Sensations that are neutral or positive there are other knowledges there anytime you go out into the hole you widen your view that tends to D power defuel um the obsession then the other it's a little more technical but wow it's right up there with surrender to the worst that can happen because it just it really gets at the fundamentals and this is where you with growing inside recognize that the experience the thoughts maybe the images maybe the emotions you start deconstructing them you use the technical methods found in early Buddhism discussed it with vipassana where you start recognizing that that experience is made of parts you start disentangling it there's a body sensation element there's a thought element in the thoughts are different thoughts an almost different perspectives from different parts of yourself embedded in that kind of cascade of thought and you start teasing it apart and in the teasing apart it becomes increasingly impersonal and it it becomes increasingly just something that's happening it's unpleasant it's unfortunate it's just happening it's just unfolding it you're not implicated in it you're not the owner of it you're it's just there and you start recognizing it's emptiness it is empty of solidity it is empty of absolute existence it is therefore increasingly empty of influence it is a the experience as an experience because all experiences have the same nature is is cloud-like um fluid like gas like rather than brick-like and that can really it's deep it's a deep practice um but that right there can just give you a kind of radical freedom in the middle of even if it continues to happen that image is occurring that image is empty it's existing empty and what's cool about this as you know if you've been listening to the podcast for a little while is that this practice that you're describing dad is based itself on distinct regions of and functions of the brain like how you're talking about expanding your view or opening that's right moving more into an aloe Centric is the word for it processing stream as opposed to an egocentric processing stream right even these things where you're talking about seeing them is just made up as of parts and parts of parts of parts that have something to do with you but a lot of it has nothing to do with you that's not a very egocentric worldview that's more of an allo-centric worldview and even when you're talking about taking in the room as a whole you know Rising lifting your eyes up to the Horizon a line or above it this can activate kind of different parts of the brain um because a lot of obsessive and particularly ruminatory function in the brain is based on the default mode which we've talked about a million times on the podcast it's what the brain defaults to it's right there in the name when it's not doing anything else it's when we're daydreaming or ruminating or whatever else is going on for us um and so one of the practices that comes up over and over again in the recommendations here is something we talk about on the podcast all the time it's meditation it's mindfulness practice it's things that where you're deliberately focusing your attention so you're waking up another part of the brain alongside the default mode or not letting yourself get kind of uh I think that Dr Rady when we talk to him about ADHD he talked about it as being like a vacuum cleaner the default mode vacuum cleaner just sucking you back into it over and over again no you're applying some deliberate attention in all of these practices and and just the the the practice of using the tension itself can be really valuable here really true and it's great to you know maybe just to finish the problem with Obsession and compulsion it's in the word even compulsion is we feel uh that we're helpless in the face of it it has us enthrall right it has Us in its grip and what you and I have been exploring is ways we can have agency yeah ways we can have a kind of freedom and an opportunity and we're not helpless we're not defeated we're not immobilized so Dad do you have another five minutes maybe yeah for sure because way back when I'm checking my recording time uh 40 minutes ago or whatever I said hey I'm gonna give you two case studies and then I only ever gave you one so here's what I would love to do and again we haven't really done this on the podcast before but I like this idea as it's covered to be at the moment I'm gonna paint you a very common picture of maybe the most common thing that people tend to obsess or ruminate about which is a past interaction that we had that went a little bit sideways for us and what I would love you to do if you're up for it if you think you can is to give sort of a three to five bullet point list of what the person could do or what you would do with them maybe drawing on all the various things that we talked about today so we're going to kind of tie it all together here how does that sound sounds great and I I do want to mention that this idea of doing what I call Demos demonstrations on particular real things is great and in the rumination Workshop we're going to do four demos with oh awesome yeah we're gonna have volunteers who are willing to give their bodies up for science for real and uh on ruminative worry resentments regrets which often involve remorse and guilt and a background sense of not being good enough so it's pretty cool actually they're going to do this kind of thing there okay all right well I don't know which one of those categories this case study is gonna fall into maybe you could take me or maybe it's a fifth one who knows oh it's a little bit around regret probably yeah yeah I think it's a little bit around regret so here's the the thing I'm just making this up off the top but I think that's a very classic one and I've certainly had ones like this for myself in the past uh person comes in says maybe it's something you've worked with for a while maybe it's brand new so something to be effective you know Rick I just keep on thinking about this interaction that I had with fill in the blank a family member a friend a romantic partner past romantic partner um it happened a long time ago it happened you know four or five years ago and I just keep on chewing on it I I think about exactly what I said I replay the conversation over and over again these days I keep on thinking about how things might have turned out differently if I just said something a little bit different to them I feel like I'm still living the consequences of this in a weird way in my life in the here and now I have a lot of preoccupation about it it pops up in my mind on a monthly basis at least if not more frequently than that and I just want to let it go so you're asking for some go-to's so I'll just go through them one um really as best you can open to all of the feelings because probably what's happened in part is that there's some unexperienced experience there's some feelings kept at Bay or you just haven't fully gotten in touch with maybe there's a deeper layer that this particular episode connects with maybe it went awry with your uh romantic partner at the time and then that links to things going awry when you first started dating in junior high school or something and then that relates to being cast out and misunderstood and rejected when you were in preschool yeah there's a bigger theme or pattern here that it's accessing yeah yeah so it's it's uncovering and releasing fully that's how it thinks you really feel it and maybe the way you feel is you really feel your regret because maybe in the mix of it all what they did and what you did there's the part that you did and you know you maybe were a little mean or you were a little too stoned or you um you know just lost your temper and we're on and set up kind of a nasty thing that two times out of three might have not led to a breakup a big one I think that here is feeling misunderstood feeling like maybe what you said wasn't really that problematic but it landed in a really problematic way on the other person that's one where I see people really preoccupy themselves with yeah that's really great so I'll go there so first feel the feelings and you know surface them scour them really release them second take maximum reasonable responsibility you don't get free until you take responsibility but you don't get free if you overdo it right so it's it's a combination of closeness and distance that you talked about in terms of your responsibility you really step into your responsibility fully but there's a boundary to it and then for me it's really quite helpful to make a distinction between stuff that's worthy of remorse really and stuff that was just you just didn't know you didn't come into it with ill will you weren't evil in some way you know you weren't reckless in some way but something happened that didn't go well well now for the future you will learn from that experience you're going to put in skillful correction you are responsible for what you said this distinction right there is really really useful so you you do that part I and this goes to the one of the best parts of the book we wrote together for us well in the last chapter on forgiveness because this is the next Generation that's in related to forgiveness so you you really do that part so that's second what's your responsibility and then third it's just really helpful to see everything involved in a you know it you know going wide the bird's eye view the big picture view uh the 10 000 foot view all the causes and conditions their history your history the other factors in the mix you de-personalize it then you see all of it I find that these three you know the feelings the responsibility and the wide inclusive View really important and then you can move to a release you know and that part then is the fourth part where you really get on your own side about releasing you you try to help yourself disentangle there's a lot of early Dharma about disentangling you know because we get caught up in nods right so we want to disentangle and we want to disengage uh and for me there's often sometimes you get a full release just by doing the first three things you get disentangled often you need to be a little willful about it you need to remind yourself look I've really felt the feelings I could rehash them I could make myself feel those feelings again and they feel bad so why would I do that I'm not resisting the feelings I have fully open to them and allowed them to flow through me and there's no point in revisiting the episode because I'll just feel bad again and then also I can see all these things including my efforts to make amends to repair to clean it up I've done all that I can you know and then there's a place where you go sweetie you're talking to yourself here you can turn a corner yeah if you're reminded of that event you may feel things you may wish it had turned out differently um you can turn a corner I mean it's really interesting for us to claim guilt and innocent side by side guilty for this innocent about that both true and it's weird Your Capacity to claim responsibility with or without appropriate guilt because some responsibility is just a matter of skillfulness but to claim that responsibility enables you to claim innocence and a lot of people um they're they're stuck you know why they're stuck because they're in the the messy middle they've insufficiently claimed responsibility and they've also insufficiently given themselves the benediction of Innocence I think that's a really wonderful point to add it's very very well said and I I think this is one of another one of those topics that we could kind of just keep going on yeah um and maybe hey there's going to be space for another episode down the line I'm sure on rumination obsessive thinking uh you've already laid a bunch of breadcrumbs here inside of this episode things that we kind of talked about for 15 seconds and then moved on to something else um to kind of just close with wrapping up something that we named throughout the conversation all of these experiences are normal experiences and the pain for a lot of people around intrusive thoughts tends to fall into one of two categories either the thought itself is distressing would the picture we painted earlier with the monster in the closet waking up next to the dead partner these are disturbing thoughts just on their own the second category are thoughts that we have that make us feel bad about ourselves and our final case study is kind of a little bit more tinged that way it's really hard to work with thoughts like that if we have a conception of them as unique to us because we are a uniquely bad person this is sometimes referred to as negative grandiosity things are happening to us because we are just that bad of a person essentially and it's really hard to get better if you have that framework about yourself and one of the best ways to feel a little bit better about yourself as a person is to do good things in the world and it's a little reductive it's a little simplistic there are a lot of people who do really great things in the world who still think of themselves as not a very great person but I can say from personal experience that my my self-concept has improved as the quality of my behavior has also improved and it's gotten easier and easier for me to give myself some Freedom about things that happened in the past as I feel like increasingly in the present I've behaved in an upstanding way and so this can fall into one of two categories maybe you're already doing a lot of great stuff and it's appropriate for you to give yourself a little bit more like positive Kudos about it or hey if if you feel like you've got a a deficit of behavior in the past where you you look at earnestly and you're in that responsibility taking process and you're like wow yeah I really did screw this up well what can you do in the present that makes you feel a little bit better about yourself makes you feel a little bit more capable a little bit more giving a little bit more loving to other people um because over time you know that can really do a lot and it's more of an external way of addressing these issues that we've talked about today which has been mostly about the internal process but I just wanted to name that here at the end as something that has certainly been very helpful for me oh thank you and my post Crypt is just to say that so much of our obsessions and compulsions are a way of managing fears of contamination and catastrophe yeah totally and therefore just even thinking back on the example of being scared of the monster in the closet uh one thing that I've still is it's like open out into Refuge what you know what is your refuge and maybe your Refuge is a sense of your life as a whole as basically okay or you you you have a sense of a kind of um maybe you come from a faith tradition and you just kind of give it up to God or you just open out you rest in in something that for you is important or enduring or um for me it's in part for example opening out into just you know awareness and you know the ground of all uh so you know whatever that is you know or just knowing that you have mostly good intentions that Refuge what can you take refuge in right it gives you relief from you can turn away from the obsession and turn into and turn toward uh that those things that are a refuge for you I had a great time today talking with Rick about obsessive thoughts obsessive thinking rumination and what we can do generally to be more free inside of our own minds because that was a real theme that ran through the conversation as a whole we don't want to be a prisoner to what's going on inside of our cognition or what's boiling up from the basement inside of us and there are various real steps that people can take to improve their experience of their interior and there's this broad theme in Psychology mental health personal growth in general about balancing closeness and distance we're balancing the closeness and distance we have toward other people retaining our own autonomy while also being intimate with them in various ways and we're balancing the closeness and distance that we have to our own thoughts our own interior and if you look at the practices for recovery for things like PTSD or dealing with an obsessive thought or changing the behavior in general you'll see this big theme where we want to get close enough to it that we can do something about it but not so close to it that we become overwhelmed by it or a prisoner to it and this process inherently is somewhat confrontational we're not just pushing the thought away we're not just pushing it down we are pulling it towards us deliberately engaging with it but we're at choice about that engagement we're not a prisoner to the process anymore we are taking control of it in some way so with that as context returning to the very beginning of the episode we started by talking about rumination and rumination is the habit of obsessive thinking it occurs when you just can't move on from something uh a thought an idea an event that happened to you it's just replaying itself over and over and over again in your mind and one of the key characteristics of rumination is that you're not advancing with the thought it's not really changing in meaningful ways you're not actually coming up with any new ideas about how to deal with the thing you're just stuck in the pattern many of the things that happen inside of our psyche and rumination is certainly one of them have a purpose that's tied to them you know they're happening for a reason they're not just happening based on a on a malfunction of our brain although that can certainly happen too and there are different kinds of thoughts that somebody could be ruminating about in those different thoughts might have different reasons that they're bouncing around in there but we can oversimplify a little bit and group them into different categories one common reason that people ruminate is that it functions as a form of self-soothing so they think that they're doing something about a problem because they're thinking about it over and over and over again and this can even take the form of kind of magical thinking which is something that Rick talked about during the conversation where somebody thinks that by worrying about getting into a car accident they are preventing a car accident from happening another common reason that people ruminate is is as a sort of dysfunction of the problem-solving capacity of the brain one of the most powerful abilities that we have and this operates in the background largely unseen most of the time is to solve different kinds of problems if you need to balance holding multiple pans as you're cooking or moving one Implement while opening a drawer your brain is doing problem solving it's figuring out how to perform all of these different tasks simultaneously and this function of the brain is so powerful and so sophisticated that we normally don't even notice it when it's occurring but sometimes it can become dysfunctional particularly when we're faced with a challenge or a situation or a problem that doesn't have a real solution for it right we had this painful experience in the past we can't really do anything about it in the here and now but uh it's still causing us a lot of discomfort and the Brain can get a little dysfunctional in trying to still solve a problem that can't really be solved another very kind common source for obsessive thoughts or rumination is unprocessed emotional experiences and this is what we spent a lot of the conversation talking about it's really normal to have emotional content tied to our previous experiences that we just haven't fully chewed on yet and this moved us into a a kind of role play session where I gave these two different scenarios of obsessive thoughts that somebody might be dealing with the first one a kind of bizarre intrusive thought having to do with uh fearing that there's a monster in the closet or that you might wake up one day and find your spouse or partner dead beside you in bed these sort of bizarre scenarios that people might have and then the second one which we talked about at the end of the episode a very common situation where somebody is just still chewing on this thing that happened to them a long time ago and they just haven't been able to come to resolution around it and again many of the practices that we suggested here came back to that idea of balancing closeness and distance for example I talked about journaling one of the common recommendations that people will give for dealing with intrusive thoughts is journaling about them in a really detailed way writing down when you had the thought what happened to you around the time that the thought occurred then writing out The Narrative of the thought in excruciating detail thinking about any things that might have happened that could have cued you into the thought writing down your Associated emotions doing so honestly and doing it without a lot of judgment if you can avoid it and this can help us do something that Rick talked about a lot which is finding some separation seeing the thought as this thing that is happening to us rather than this thing that we are because thoughts in general as Rick said have this kind of cloud-like or insubstantial nature to them and we can see them that way we can relate to them that way we can take the egocentrism out of it a little bit and try to see the situation a little more holistically and we can do the same thing with the events that happened to us and our ruminations or obsessions about them we can get a greater sense of perspective we can try to see the whole rather than the part we can take full responsibility for our missteps our problems are issues while also giving ourselves appropriate credit for the ways in which we really did try harder we are really trying to make things better and one of the things that Rick said at the end that I thought was really great was how he said that a lot of people are stuck in the messy middle they haven't fully taken responsibility on the one hand and they haven't fully given themselves credit on the other hand and so they're just stuck in the in-between of those two things and it's a two-part process you have to do both you have to take responsibility and hey it's really helpful to give yourself some credit along the way if you enjoyed today's episode a quick reminder that Rick has an upcoming workshop on rumination that's on April 22nd it's a one day live online Workshop where you'll learn how to identify rumination when it comes up and get out of negative Cycles in your head compassionately and effectively and you can visit rickhanson.net slash rumination to learn more and get 20 off with coupon code being well 20. so that's it for today's episode if you've been enjoying the podcast I would really appreciate it if you would subscribe to it wherever you're listening to it now on if you are listening to the podcast and not watching it and you would prefer to watch it well you can find me on YouTube at Forrest Hanson and if you'd like to support the podcast in other ways you can find us on patreon it's patreon.com beingwell podcast and for just a couple dollars a month you can support the show and get a bunch of bonuses in return until next time thanks for listening and I'll talk to you soon questions [Music]

Channel: Forrest Hanson

Views: 49,122

Keywords: Mental Health, Personal Growth, Self-Help, Psychology, Forrest, Forrest Hanson, Being Well, Being Well Podcast, Rick Hanson, Resilient, rumination, obsessive thoughts, obsessive thinking, get rid of obsession, deal with rumination, How to Get That Thing Out of Your Head, Releasing Obsessive Thoughts, intrusive thoughts, OCD, obsessive-compulsive disorder, thought loops, overthinking, reality testing, Ajahn Chah, naming thoughts, thought suppression, how do I stop thinking

Id: CvUE56WzxJU

Length: 67min 46sec (4066 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 17 2023