Dealing With Negative Thoughts: Understanding Your Inner Dialogue

Hello and welcome to another episode of Words With My Soul.

Do you choose what thoughts you think are you in control of your thoughts do you know which thoughts to have and which thoughts to avoid can you choose if you're answering honestly the answer is going to be no we don't choose what thoughts we think we have something pop into our head and we acknowledge it attach to it give it an emotion or a feeling and then make a decision about how to act on that thought Sometimes we can have what is commonly referred to as intrusive thoughts,

where a thought disturbs us by the actual fact that has popped into our head. We believe that we shouldn't be having these kinds of thoughts at all. It might be thoughts of doing something terrible to a loved one or a stranger. Thoughts of breaking out of our character and doing something spontaneous and irrational. And when we have these thoughts, it's easy to judge ourselves and think, wow, well, I must be a terrible person to be having these kinds of thoughts.

Only someone sick and twisted would have these thoughts like this. So most people conceal these kinds of thoughts. They don't share them with others and they don't speak them out loud. They just have them and choose to pretend like they don't exist. And this creates a sort of monster under the bed in our own identity because we know we are capable of having these thoughts, yet we are shocked by those parts of ourselves.

Shocked by the very fact that that thought can even enter our mind but no matter how hard we try to avoid it we know that deep down we have these thoughts and we are capable of thinking about atrocious things things that make us feel sick to our stomach and a lot of the time we don't want to believe that we are somebody who would have those kind of thoughts so we try to avoid having them we try to control them and stop them so we end up setting up this subconscious process that

is judging our thoughts is ranking them and saying this is a good thought and you're allowed to have this thought and this thought over here this is a bad thought and you're not allowed to have this the problem with this is that aside from the fact that we are a imperfect judge that we have biases and we don't always know what is good and bad so we end up with a lot of thoughts that are sort of gray we don't know which category

to put them into we have extreme bad and things that we deem extreme good but we also have every single thing in between and the more we try to fight it we actually end up just putting more emphasis on those thoughts and. Because by trying to stop something, by trying to control it, you must attach to it.

And for those thoughts that we deem are horrible or that we shouldn't be having, when we try to control our minds and stop ourselves from having these thoughts, we are actually looking out for them. We're waiting for them. And when they happen, we have a quite visceral. Emotional reaction to these.

We feel it because we have condemned these thoughts to live in the shadows and dwell in the darkness that allows them to control an aspect of ourselves it reinforces that idea of the monster under the bed and these dark parts of ourselves that we don't understand or we don't like instead of thoughts just being thoughts they become something to fear something to be anxious about and as we get older that darkness grows the unknown grows as we tend to kind

of shovel things under the carpet the mess under the carpet is growing just because we choose not to look at it that doesn't mean that the pile is not getting bigger and part of the healing journey is to shine a light on those things to pull away the carpet and reveal our cards to have our truth be told and to accept those parts of ourselves that we stuff down and pretend doesn't exist parts of ourselves that we ignore and neglect the more parts of yourself

that you bury the more you're going to believe things like you're not lovable or that you're not worthy of acceptance or that you're a monster or you're a terrible person you end up throwing out all these wild accusations about yourself based on judgments you're making on thoughts that you are not in control of.

So how do we make our peace with this monster under the bed? What do we do about these negative thoughts and feelings that we have that.

You know we've judged as wrong we know in ourselves that it's not good to be having these kind of thoughts and we can't act on them or these feelings you know maybe feelings of resentment or anger or hatred but most of the time these thoughts are not even an accurate indication of what you really want to do they are simply an expression of a need that you have that is screaming to be heard that has to find some way of shocking you in order to present it to yourself it may

be the fact that you have an argument with someone that you love and you think about striking them and you think oh my god i would never do that i can't believe i even thought about that what a terrible person i am i must be the worst person in the world for even thinking about this but the thought presented itself not because you truly want to hurt this other person or because you have malicious intent but because it's telling you that you are desperate to be understood and you're.

Not feeling understood or heard or maybe you don't feel respected and you're looking for a way to enforce those boundaries and that initial thought even though it was shocking to you might be an indicator of something positive something that you actually need to take action on or some part of yourself that has a need that isn't being met the feeling might be boredom or wanting attention and the intrusive thought might say let's do something really.

Shocking let's push a baby into a road or throw this guy off a building but the actual message behind it is I'm looking for someone to notice me and care about what I do and who I am but as soon as you begin to give weight to these thoughts and believe that they make up some core aspect of your identity like oh I'm a murderer deep down or I'm secretly a terrible person the more they actually take place and start to grow roots you have to imagine your thoughts as this

busy highway of constant things and at any moment in time you can pluck one of the cars off of the motorway you can take a look at it and go oh this is my favorite car or my favorite color or i don't like this car you can make all kinds of judgments you may even take that car for a test drive take that thought and run with it and see what feelings come up or see if it causes other thoughts and go down the rabbit hole but that is your choice you are choosing which thoughts

to latch on to which thoughts deserve your attention you are the one bringing those thoughts to life without your attachment without your judgment without your feelings they are just thoughts They just exist. They are only as important to us as we make them.

And the reason this is so important is because a lot of what we feel, a lot of how we judge ourselves comes from these thoughts. You know, we're not...

Pulling these feelings out of nowhere we have a thought and then another thought and that makes us feel something and then that causes another thought and we begin to spiral one bad thought can often metastasize into something much larger and much more malicious something that is self deprecating and erodes our sense of self-worth we can have one thought that makes us believe that we're no good that we're terrible that we're bad people that we are not worthy of

love and this is happening not because we had the thought it's happening because we chose to attach to the thought and provide a judgment or a feeling this all sounds quite obvious it sounds like simple facts but when we look at applying this it's actually quite a hard principle to apply because we're not always feeling like we're in control of what thoughts we attach to and what thoughts we don't you know we may just have a thought and then we get this pit in our stomach it

may be like i've done things like action sports or adrenaline things and you know i can be very confident in what i need to do like when i was doing gymnastics i would be doing something like a round off backflip and i would know the exact procedural method of doing that i know what i expect from my body I know the technique I just need to follow the steps but then during the.

Execution something happens I have a thought midway through and he goes you can't do this or what if you fall or what if you break your neck and that thought can completely throw me off before I was doing the move I might have had a hundred thoughts saying I can do this you know you've got this you know what you're doing I know you can do this I know that you're capable of it but then one thought completely erodes it it's because I attach to it all of those other thoughts all of the positive

thoughts had no real emotional or physical connection they were just thoughts but this one bad thought caused my muscles to seize and my body to tighten and it caused me to go into a sense of panic. And all of that is because I attached to the thought. The thought didn't do anything to me. The thought has no power and no control. But because I latched onto the thought, because I gave it power and I gave it control, it was able to prevent me from doing something I knew how to do.

This is why so many people talk about the necessity and the benefit of meditation. Because it separates you from your thoughts and you realize once you have sat with your thoughts that you are not your thoughts you are something different from your thoughts that you exist as a sort of backseat passenger in your mind and you decide how you feel about these thoughts but you don't control the thoughts themselves things just pop into your head and you can argue where.

They come from whether it's influence you might have seen something in a film or had an experience or viewed something when you were a child that maybe you shouldn't have or lots of different reasons why you may have the thoughts that you have but you're not really in control of which thoughts you have you know you don't wake up and say i'm going to have this thought today instead you realize you are something other than your thoughts you are more than

your thoughts there you are something outside of the mere thoughts in your head there is something extra to you and with this realization those thoughts have less power because initially before meditating or before coming to this realization you may believe that your thoughts are you when in actual fact they are not you they are part of you they come from some collation of information that you have had over the course of your life but they are not you you are something other and outside

of that process and you learn that instead of attaching to these thoughts you can choose to just watch them.

You know a bad thought comes into your head and you just chuckle and watch it go past but even with this practice getting yourself to integrate this idea that you are not your thoughts and to not react to your thoughts immediately or to try to separate yourself from your thoughts so that you could simultaneously have bad thoughts but not feel bad whereas most of the time people will say oh I'm having a few sad thoughts I must be sad and then begin to feel sad and then begin to add more credence

of it and think about sad memories or think about sad things that might happen suddenly they have spun themselves into this full-blown state of I'm sad and if you do this for long enough then not only are you sad for a moment you're a person who is sad it becomes part of your identity. That is how one little thought, one seed of doubt or shame or anxiety can metastasize and begin to take over.

If you let it, if you give it the reins, if you give it enough control and power, that thought which is just a thought can become something much more. But we are ultimately in control. We decide whether a thought is good and bad. We decide whether we take action or not because a thought is just a thought and we are the ones who decide whether it's more than that or not.

Thank you for listening.