¶ Intro / Opening
All right there everyone. It's podcast time, so welcome to another episode of Therapy Natters, the psychotherapy podcast series that you didn't know you needed to listen to, but you do. I'm Richard Nicholls, and as always, I have my co-host, Fiona Biddle with me here to help me along. Two psychotherapists on a mission. Does that sound right to you? Do you think of us as psychotherapists on a mission to share our stuff?
Yes, yes. It does feel like a mission, yeah, we want to do this, don't we? We want to get the things out of our head and out there for, for people to share.
stood in the town center and started doing this nobody would listen and I'd probably be arrested or moved along at least, because that's just preaching, isn't it? And people don't take kindly to that. They wanna choose what they absorb.
But it is great now that the, there is the podcast phenomenon. Anybody and everybody can use. And so it's nice that we can.
¶ Exploring the Impact of Modern Communication on Mental Health
And not just podcasts, but just the way that we communicate, the way, the way that we share information over the last probably 15 years has changed unmeasurably. It's, it's exploded. You watch a film or something that was from 2005 and the way people shared information, the way people chatted, what a meme was, was completely different to what it is now.
The idea of a meme in those days is just chatting in a working man's club or just sort of information that's passed around in the small community and now those communities have gotten huge. Now we've got a hashtag for every community. Hashtag mental health awareness, hashtag autism support. Or one that I was invited to share was Weird Pride, last month, which was quite nice cuz I thought Yeah, I'm a bit weird and it's good to be proud of that. I'll embrace my weirdness.
But 15, 20 years ago, we didn't know that everybody was a little bit weird, and those that were very weird had support that they weren't alone in their weirdness. So I think much as we complain about modern society and the changes and how fast things go and AI and all the frightening things that people don't understand and just bury their head under the duvet and try to cry themselves to sleep about. Actually, we are doing all right. I think
There is an awful lot that's good about the way that communication has changed. And I was just thinking as you were talking then just about communication within a family. My mother and her mother wrote each other a letter every week. So one wrote the letter on the Sunday, one wrote the letter on the Wednesday, and that's how they communicated their whole lives from when my mother left home. But then it moved on to the standard thing would be people would have a phone call once a week.
I remember my in-laws would phone every Sunday at six. But now of course we just have our WhatsApp conversations or Skype conversations or whatever they may be. Messenger. I've got some people on Messenger, some on Skype, some on WhatsApp. But I know, if I want to talk to my nieces, I go there. If I want to talk to my father, I go there. But they're all just immediate. And if you don't have the, the formality, and it also opens up to just talking about so much more.
So with my father, for example, every day we discuss wordle.
Huh.
That's the first thing. You know, each, each day one of us will start by saying line, whatever it is. And then other things flow from that. So it's opened up the possibility of sharing
Hmm.
more, hasn't it?
as talk therapists. The idea that we can talk more, that we can learn about each other, and by extension, learn about ourselves as well at the same time. This is wonderful for us. Sometimes I'll read a history article. There'll be some historian that's been interviewed or something like that, and the question keeps being popped up. It's a bit of lazy journalism, but they'll often ask the same question. If you could travel to any period in history to live, when would you live?
And even the historians will sit for a fraction of a moment and think Now, please. Because great as things were, when I look into the past and I'm interested in the past, I wanna be now where there's polio vaccines, and penicillin and erythromycin and all sorts of anti-inflammatories. And hey, I've got a bit of arthritis in my right hand. I dunno how that happened. Playing the guitar probably. And. I have to rub ibuprofen gel into it. If I go back even 50 years, couldn't do that.
So can I live in the now, please.
Yeah,
are all right. I mean, maybe 15 years maybe. No. Would I go back 15 years?
I was wondering about the seventies. There was some nice elements to the seventies, but then that was the decade I was Pardon?
Sorry that I, I was playing the whammy guitar
Oh, were you, I dunno what you were doing. But that's that sort of thing. Um. I dunno if you know this, but I have a time machine.
cool.
And I, I use it regularly and I did in the middle of the night last night cuz I was awake and I thought, I want to get back to sleep and it's a good thing to use to get back to sleep. But I went to some city and I never got to find out where it was because I fell asleep. But I was very aware that the streets were not paved. And it was, oh, this is not very nice. It's all muddy. But then I fell asleep.
I have those sorts of daydreams. I have a little Babel fish that goes in my ear as well, so I can understand people in old English and have these conversations and go back to an old pub that's around the corner and listen to people talk about their shoe making and their farming, and yeah, it's fun. But yeah, I'll never get all the way through the evening and just fall asleep.
Yeah, my, my time machine automatically translates from wherever it is. Yeah,
Perfect. Like a tardis. Fantastic.
¶ Conversation on Intrusive Thoughts and Imagination
And I think we all need to know just how busy our imaginations can be if we just let it, if we just let, it run amok, almost. Just go with the flow. Because we have these wonderfully creative tools in our head that if we didn't have, we wouldn't be that much different from our primate cousins halfway up a tree. We are different. And that evolutionary quirk that allows us to have an imagination and, and think about possibilities means we don't put our hand in a fire to wonder if it's hot.
We approach it and go, I'm not sure about that. Let me get close to it. Oh no, that's hot. And then we, we step back and. I was thinking about this this morning because of some questions that we'd had. I'll read them out. Shall I read the first one? You read the second on a similar sort of vein.
The first one was from Sonya from London, and she says, although it doesn't bother me, I'm interested in why when I'm waiting at the tube, I get the thought about pushing someone in front of the next train. Don't worry, I'm safe. It's only a thought and apparently I'm not alone. But why would it pop into our minds? Interesting question. Thank you, Sonya. That is a very common question actually. People talk about that in therapy a lot.
They do. And the second one is from Mike doesn't say where he is, but Mike uh, can you make an episode about intrusive thoughts? I had them when I was younger and hid them. It was so crippling. If younger people could get an understanding earlier and share their thoughts would be great. Keep up your wonderful work. Thank you, Mike.
Yes. Like we were saying, we can share stuff more nowadays, so we can have these conversations and say, oh, intrusive thoughts. Yes. Everybody has those to a certain degree, and nobody bats an eyelid. Somebody says, yeah, I If I pick up a baby, I have a, a thought about throwing it outta the window or drop kicking it. Does everybody else have that? And if you put that on social media, you'll get people that go yeah. Yeah. That's me. Or those that go, oh my god.
Yeah. I didn't realize you did that too. Yes, I did that. I've done that all my life and it's been, as Mike said, it's been crippling me. Is this a normal thing? Yeah. Intrusive thoughts are just part of thoughts, but it's what makes them intrusive. that's the key here. It's the, it's the fear. It's the emotion that they cause that makes them intrusive. Thoughts are just thoughts.
in the therapy room it's very common for people to have a confession as it were to some awful thought or another that they may have had and the help that they can get from realizing that it's normal and everybody does it is great. Because it is normal and everybody does it. You know, if you are in a, difficult situation with somebody, you might think, Ooh, it'd be better if they were dead, or it might be better if I was dead. Normal.
Hmm. Yeah, just cuz we have a, a thought about punching somebody in the face doesn't mean we're going to punch them in the face. We don't, well, most of us don't, anyway. We just think about it and if our thoughts really did influence our reality, then. anybody that had ever wronged us would've just immediately caught on fire because that's what we'd have wished for. No, they're just thoughts. They, they, they genuinely mean nothing, whether you're awake or whether you're asleep.
I've had clients over the years they've had troubling dreams because their dreams have frightened them because in that dream, they did unpleasant things. Maybe they sexually assaulted somebody. That's a common one that's the one that generates a lot of emotion in people that says, but I, but I dreamt it. Does that mean that's what, that's who I am, that's what I'm going to do.
No, and the fact that somebody brings that into therapy with all that guilt about the thought goes to show you are one of the good ones. That means you are not going to do it. And the thing about these negative thoughts that become so intrusive. The reason they're intrusive is because they generate an emotion. And that's just how the brain works. if you associate anything with an emotion, the brain learns, oh, I'm supposed to remember that. Am I? Okay will do.
And the next time that thought comes in, there's more emotion. Oh my God, I had that thought again. And the brain goes, oh yeah, that's that thing we need to hardwire in. Okay, we'll make sure, we'll make sure we keep thinking about that. We'll make sure we keep remembering that.
All because we stood on the Tube Station platform and, and thought about pushing somebody in front of it and it's because it generates the emotion that it sticks, but it's because you are not going to do it, that it generates the emotion. A bit like how we don't need to test whether anchovy and strawberry jam flavored crisps would be nice. We can have the thought and go, okay, do I need to make some to test. No, we don't.
Because we've got enough of an imagination to go that wouldn't work and, and my brain is telling me that wouldn't work, so I'm not gonna go and make those things. And it's because we've got that imagination to look and daydream and wonder. That makes us a, a very smart species. But we can catastrophize our thoughts and go up on a thousand different branches, and in one of those branches, we harm somebody. Or harm ourselves.
All it shows us is that we have a good imagination and that separates us, like I say from other bipeds,
Nobody that I can think of ever complains about having nice, intrusive thoughts. It's the, it's the shock value almost of the intrusive thought that creates the emotion, which is likely to be somewhere along the lines of fear or guilt or shame. And it's that, that makes it stick, isn't it? It's, the, oh my God, what have I just? What have I just? Why do I think that? But if you do have a thought about anchovy and strawberry jam flavored crisps, that's not going to produce fear, guilt, or shame.
So it would just go away again.
Mm-hmm.
one
¶ Conversation on Intrusive Thoughts and How to Cope with Them
thing that I encourage people who have this issue to do is to come up with other things like your crisp example. And just, just to come up with as many alternatives, other silly things that they can think of to almost sort of bury the, negative ones in a pile of other silly thoughts.
So if somebody's standing on the Tube platform and they get that intrusive thought of pushing somebody that's standing next to them in front of the train First of all, recognize your brain is doing its job. Thank you brain. You've got a good brain with an imagination. That's how we can catch our food in our ancient past. And then change that thought into something else.
So yes, there's a person standing there, I could push them in front of it or they could turn into a jellyfish and they sort of slide across the platform and disappear through that door, or they turn into a balloon and they float away. Anything can happen in your imagination or as a phrase, goes in an old TV program from a children's program. Anything can happen in a made-up story. Which was from an old Canadian program called, I think it was Pinky Dinky Do. Think the show was called.
The Early two Thousands. Pinky Dinky Do that was it. Anything can happen in a made up story. Wonderful catchphrase.
that's a really good, really good phrase. I mean, yes. I was thinking standing there on the platform, you could think, well, I could just do a cartwheel. instead of pushing that person in front of the tube, I could go down on one knee and propose to them. you know, this, this,
Anything can happen in a made up
anything can happen in a made up story. And, you know, make the, make the alternatives silly and it can just help you see that the brain just does these things. Just does these wonderings.
Neuroscience has a a, a phrase. What fires together. Wires together. You'll hear neuroscientists say that phrase a lot, but what they mean is that every piece of neurological activity in the brain. If you fire them off enough times, that signal that they use just gets stronger, gets more efficient. So it uses less energy to create the electrical signal because it's been myelinated. Gets covered in a dielectric material called myelin that runs along the synapse, I think.
If you keep on firing it, eventually all those neurons do get wired together, so you begin to associate a thought with a feeling. Overriding that takes a bit of patience and a bit of time, but it starts, I think, with acceptance. I have to accept that this is, this is just what's happening to me right now. This is a thought that's popped into my head. And these are feelings within my body as a, as an automatic reaction for fight or flight, which is good.
We're supposed to feel those things Cuz this is about rehearsal. If you don't have an emotional reaction to the idea of dropkicking a baby out of a window, then there's something wrong with you. You're supposed to have an emotional reaction to that. And if you do your brain says,
¶ Exploring Intrusive Thoughts and Emotional Reactions
okay, now I know that that's something that is horrible then. Won't do that. But if then it becomes, I am a dangerous person, then the emotion just gets ramped up. It's, it's a hundred times stronger than it was. And that means that signal is gonna get stronger, it's gonna get more vicious, and the emotion it brings in is gonna be even stronger as the years go on. And like Mike said, he had this in his childhood and it was crippling.
And I, I, I dunno how old he is, but it sounds like he's had this issue a, a long time, and it's only recently that he's recognized, oh, this is just what human brains do and I'm safe. Oh, now you tell me. And yeah, we do need to know if you have these thoughts, your brain is just doing its job. It's what it's supposed to do. 100% let it, but we want to get to a point where we can allow the thoughts just to come through us and then out again. Oh! It's just a thought.
And the feeling it brings in is, Ugh, I don't like that. And it just goes. Most people when they have those thoughts of pushing somebody in front of a train or drop kicking a baby out of a window, there is an emotional reaction. But it's so slight that they don't really notice it. It's just a thought, and the reaction in their body is almost unnoticeable, but the brain still learns. That's something I don't want to do. So they don't do it. For those with intrusive thoughts.
That feeling, which started with. Oh, that's an intrusive thought and that's it. Becomes, I'm a dangerous person. I'm a horrible person. I'm a bad person. And then it lowers their self-esteem and round and round it goes until it gets stronger and stronger and stronger until they come to therapy and go, I think I'm going crazy. The relief on people's face when they come to therapy and they talk about these things and they hear us say That's quite normal.
I understand people say this to me all the time, and it's only the safe people that say it. Really? And they're disclosing something they've had in them for 30 years and they go, Really, this is, this is normal? And then they wish they had a time machine that can go back and come to therapy 20 years earlier and talk about it. And I'm sorry that you didn't, if that's you, and now you need to know that if you have an emotional reaction to horrible things, you are one of the good ones.
I remember talking to the writer and comedian Robin Ince about this once we had a chat exactly about this cuz he had some intrusive thoughts and he came on my podcast to talk about it. Because on his up routines. This is something that he would bring in. And in a room of 500 people, he'd say. Hands up those who have thoughts about dropkicking babies through a window, and you'd look out to see how many people would put their hand up. And people did. And he'd go, oh, okay.
And it started off with just a fairly tame, intrusive thought. And then the next week he'd do the same routine. He'd have to ramp it up and up and up and up Cause he wanted to have a joke that said, Oh, just me then. But he couldn't. He couldn't get to the point where it was just him. Because there was always, no matter what he said, no matter how vile, there was always somebody in the audience to put their hand up and went, yep. He's like, ah, where? Where do I have to go for it to be just me?
Spoiler. You can't. You absolutely can't because there's always gonna be somebody within your vicinity that has exactly the same thoughts. And you are the safe ones. If I want somebody to babysit a baby for me, I want it to be somebody who gets really quite upset at the idea of drop kicking it through a window. I wanna give it to the ones that go, but what? But what if I hurt it? Well, I'm hoping you won't here, but what if I do? Hmm?
I'm gonna trust you cuz you really have an emotional reaction about hurting babies here. Have my baby. The one that goes Yeah, I, I'll have it. I don't care. No. Can I give it to your brother please?
I was thinking the two particular areas where I've heard this mentioned. One is sexual thoughts you mentioned about possible sexual assaults in the dream, but they, there could be all sorts of inappropriate sexual thoughts that people might have. Which go along with this idea. I remember one client I had long time ago who'd had a, a thought.
And one of these thoughts we've been talking about all episode but a sexual thought about a, a small child and it so, so freaked this person out that she had to come for therapy. But it could be all sorts of things. And then when you were saying about the dreams, that just reminded me do you know the quote from John Benjamin where he said, try everything once except incest and Morris dancing?
Oh, I imagine wiring them together
well, if it's, it makes it amusing, doesn't it? I guess that's point. But it's quite a good Example of if, if somebody said, oh, try incest, you're likely to have a A or, or you get that thought yourself, you're likely to have that strong emotional, oh my God, what did I just think? But if they, if you said, try Morris dancing, you're likely to just go up to no thanks and it's not gonna have the strong emotional connection, which is why the juxtaposition does make it quite amusing.
So there's the sexual thoughts one. The other is prejudices because in the modern world it is so socially dangerous to say the wrong thing. Any prejudicial sense. You know, there was somebody, it was on a, I always talk about court tv. One of the one of the lawyers used A non PC word for somebody who was disabled then just said, Oh, I, I'm not supposed to use that word. Oh God, I'm, I'm old, sorry. And I thought, Hmm, that's not exactly good. But it was in the, you know, spur of the moment.
but any of the, anything on race, disability sexuality, all sorts of things, if a thought comes into the mind that is prejudicial on one of those areas or any of those areas, any area really that can have the same effect on the, on the self of, oh my God, what did I just think?
Yeah, does this make me a bad person? If somebody's self-esteem is high enough, then they would probably brush that off and they'd be okay in apologizing. If somebody said, I, I, I was really quite upset when you used that word. I'd like to think most people would go, yeah, sorry about that. It's, I'm just old. Like that guy says, oh, I'm, I'm, I'm just old. Sorry about that. I've got a lot to learn. If somebody's self-esteem is low, one of two things tends to happen, doesn't it?
They either double down on their opinion, cuz it's not really their opinion, they're just desperate to try and prove themselves good that they repeat what they did before to prove to themselves
¶ Exploring Prejudice and Automatic Negative Reactions: A Conversation on Self-Esteem and Learning from Our Thoughts
it was the right thing to do. I'm not a bad person. And that's just denial, isn't it? Or they go, yeah, I'm a bad person, and they, and they hide away and call themselves a piece of crap and I can never go there again.
If it's just a thought though, not something that is expressed, then it's interesting to look at what that is actually saying to you. Was it just an automatic thought or is there something to look at and learn from? Well, there's nothing to look at and learn from about that thought of pushing somebody in front of a train.
But if you were to have an automatic negative reaction to somebody who you meet because of the color of their skin or their sexuality or their disability status, whatever it might be. If you have that, then that would be something to look at. But also to recognize that just like everybody has strange thoughts, we all have our prejudices.
This is just part of being human to have these sorts of thoughts, but it's what you do with them. It's the meaning behind it. And if that can tell you something about yourself, what your fears are, what your worries are. Learn from that. The problems happen when we don't learn from it or we learn the wrong thing. If we learn that we should be fearful of migrants. That's this, that's a common thing at the minute, I think, to try and get votes.
our current government is desperately trying to get hold of a, a demographic by making them fearful about things that don't exist, because fear is a greater emotion than anything else. If you try and give somebody a list of all the benefits of immigration into the, into the UK, for example, and this is the same everywhere, there'll be some emotion to it that goes, Hmm, that's interesting. But if you try and give somebody some fear. That's huge.
They'll feel that far greater than they'll feel anything else. So that's what swings our opinions. Negativity sells. You put something negative on the front page of a newspaper, you're gonna get people to buy it. And in an age where newspapers are going further and further downhill in sales, they're only gonna ramp up all these fearful things. If we don't examine our thoughts and go, well, where did that come from? Why did I feel that? Why did I think that?
Well, think about it, talk about it, wonder about it. Meditate on it, ponder on it. Take it to therapy. Chat to your mate in the pub. Have these sorts of conversations to go, where did all that come from? And be open-minded.
The open-minded is important. A nice phrase on that though have an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out. but It just, it just reminded me the, there is a danger of collusion with
¶ Exploring the Role of Fear in Intrusive Thoughts
the sorts of thing if you're chatting with your mate down the pub. Just that sort of stereotypical idea, cuz it's too, it's very easy to collude. and everybody sort of jump on the bandwagon of, oh, this is terrible. I had a taxi driver the other day who was berating the state of the country in terms of immigration. This taxi driver was an immigrant himself.
I didn't challenge anything cuz he was actually, he was a lovely guy and he offered to help me get where I needed to get to during race week for nothing, which was exceptionally kind of him. But it was the particular thing which I found interesting was he was talking about the expense of immigrants. You know, the government is spending, and then he was giving figures on illegal immigrants every week.
And what he, he had completely missed the point that when you spend money, that money is going into the economy. So if they're spending, I don't know, a hundred quid on paying for food for an immigrant family that a hundred pounds is going to the people who are providing the food. It's not, you know, the money isn't just going down the drain. So that was just a little, a little point, but it's the thinking things through when it comes to any of these sorts of prejudices.
And you, you're quite right that that fear is a primary driver of these sorts of things.
A couple of million years ago if our brain learned that there's a, there's a shortcut to learning and, and how to avoid being eaten by tigers and lions and all the different things that might have been around us back in those days. and we can mentally rehearse because of some experience. Maybe I should be careful at that bush because something doesn't feel right about that bush. Yeah, because the wind is blowing in one direction, but the leaves are moving in another.
It's cuz there's something in the bush. Now, we didn't know that back then. We just go, something doesn't feel right. So we're very gently approaching the bush and if we just go storming straight into it to go what's inside this bush, we're gonna get eaten by whatever's in there waiting for us to come by. And if our brain then learns, I need to think about the things that are out there that are dangerous, then we become a more successful species.
We just get to have just one extra child, cuz we lived in extra five years or whatever. That becomes the dominant species. Natural selection. It's natural selection to have fears and because of that and our ability to be able to wonder to mentally rehearse stuff, you put those together and we've got a recipe for the potential for intrusive thoughts to occur. Anybody that's listening that has intrusive thoughts. You are human. There's nothing odd or dangerous about you. It's completely normal.
You are safe and you know you are safe. I've met people who are scared to have knives in their house because they're scared of what they might do. And so, so we, we talk about that in therapy. What is it about it that brings up the fear? it's because I, I might do something dangerous.
That made me think of a particular example of, of the idea that quite a lot of people have when they're up, up somewhere high of, oh, I could jump. And that is exceptionally normal I've heard it many a time. People who have a fear of heights. They're fine, except that they think, oh, but I could jump,
The brain is just doing its job. Yeah. That's exactly what the brain is for. It's doing its job to perfection. Accept it. Understand. that's where it starts. To me, everything starts with understanding.
yeah. Awareness.
episodes. Awareness. Yeah. Understand that this is normal. Accept that this is just a thought that comes into your head. And allow it to move on, cuz the thought stops. We don't have the same thought 24 hours a day, seven days a week for our entire life. The thoughts go. What people ask, I guess is how can they go sooner? And like you say, use your imagination for you. Instead of against you.
so you can overwrite them. or you can do things like, imagine that your thoughts are little clouds floating through the sky. Or you can have little thought bubbles like in a cartoon and you can prick them with a pin so that they burst or fire a pop gun at them so that they go bump, pop, pop or ping. Whatever you want. Those sorts of things can be good, or you can see them as being like on a conveyor belt that they just go continually through your mind
ultimately. Yes. That, that's a great skill. Once somebody's got that, the thoughts can just come and they go and they'll just watch them. Just watch them go, oh, I noticed I had a thought there. And then it goes, Hmm, and move on. Without judgment. Without judgment.
If anybody remembers the generation game when they had the conveyor belt of prizes at the
It's a cuddly toy and a lampshade.
the first thing you said was the cuddly toy.
Yep.
yeah, so there was a little window. So you saw each prize for a moment,
It was a memory game, wasn't it? I'm just trying to
Yes. And you won the ones that you remembered. But there was always a cuddly toy that's the one that's sticking.
Mm-hmm.
That's the memory that's sticking, but there's all these things and a continual stream, and there's the one in the window at the moment,
And they always remembered the cuddly toy. Because every time the cuddly toy went past, the audience would go, Hey, it's the cuddly toy. So they'd remember that that cuddly toy had gone past. So it locked it into their mind. And if they wanted the cuddly toy, That'll be the first thing that they said, or the one that generated the most desire, I guess, because there was something really special that went past. The ones that generate the emotions, they're the things that we remember.
Makes absolute sense. So a bit of a bit of psychoeducation today, boys, girls, and everybody in between. Hope you found that useful, and thank you very much to Sonya and Mike for writing in with your topic suggestion. I suppose we'd better leave them to it to go and practice all these things,
things up. To go and think. Yes.
Well, as always, we'll be back next week. If you need anything from us, send us in some topic ideas or some questions. Link is in the show notes. There's a form on a website. Fill it in. Send us a question or a topic idea and we'll do our best to uh, squeeze it into these, these podcast episodes. Have a super week, everybody. Speak to you next time. Bye.
Bye.