by Sheryl Paul
Let’s take the example of the man who hooks into the resistance and pushes his wife away. The man could think, “This feeling in my body means I don’t really love her,” thereby perpetuating the feeling, which quite likely originates in a fear-based place inside of him. If he believes that thought-story, his fear-wall will become fortified. If, on the other hand, he names the thought as a story and decides to challenge it or brush it aside, he’s taken one critical step toward unhooking from an anxious spiral. He can then choose his next action, which, without the lie in the way, will hopefully be a bit of softness toward his wife.
It’s the story he’s telling himself in that moment that determines what happens next and next and next. His freedom lies in that crucial moment between the stimulus and response. This is true anytime an anxiety story takes hold: the sooner you can recognize it as an intrusive or fear-based thought, the faster you can regain control and avoid slipping down the rabbit hole of anxiety.
Developing Discernment: Whatever You Water Will Grow
Once the choice-point is accessed, the loving inner parent who executes clear decisions and sets boundaries can decide which thoughts to explore, how to explore them, and which ones to brush aside. In other words, you want to accept the thought instead of shoving it behind a web of shame, but you don’t want to give it too much attention. Until they learn to work effectively with thoughts, most people tend to vacillate between two polarities: on the one hand, they avoid the thought and try to shut it down with shame, and on the other, they indulge the thought by seeking reassurance, Googling, and talking about it, and then discovering that thoughts feed on attention. The more you feed a negative thought, the bigger it gets, until it takes over your mind completely.
Whatever we water will grow.
This concept was illuminated for me one summer many years ago when I was determined to grow a beautiful, thriving garden. In spring, I packed away my excuses — not enough time; it’s impossible with a toddler underfoot — and proceeded, under the tutelage of my dear friend, to begin my seedlings in greenhouses beneath homemade lightboxes. My older son and I attended to the plantings faithfully each day and delighted as each little green sprout poked its head above ground. We watered them, transplanted them, and loved them. (Everest insisted on eating lunch beside them to make sure they felt loved.) And when it was finally time to transplant them outdoors, we did so with tender loving care. This would surely be the year when we picked peas and kale straight from our own backyard!
All proceeded well for several weeks. I found time to water and weed each day and, sure enough, the peas began to flourish. My soul soared as my son and I picked sweet peas every day and munched on them during my baby’s naps. Amid the fullness of my life, the fifteen minutes a day that I carved out to devote to the garden became a ritual that nourished me with pure joy. Nothing made me happier than walking down to the creek to fill up two watering cans, then slowly watering around the base of each plant.
And then the rains came. It rained torrents every day for weeks, and when I returned to my garden after a few days of absence, I never expected the sight that lay before me: a riot of weeds. Weeds tangling around the peas. Weeds threatening to choke the kale and cucumbers. Weeds cavorting with the beans. Weeds laughing in the pumpkin patch. My precise hand-watering had been overtaken by a few days of nature’s indiscriminate watering system.
You might be wondering what this has to do with thoughts and the healing process. I’ll tell you: When a negative thought pops into your head, you have a choice regarding how you want to respond to that thought. If you water it, it will grow, just like the unwanted weeds in my garden. The longer you water the thought, the bigger it will grow. And once the negative thought has grown to the size of a roadside California weed, you have to work very hard to dig it out by the roots. You have to get down on your hands and knees and pull. And if that doesn’t work, you get out the trowel or pitchfork and dig until the root breaks. It’s so much easier to nip the thought in the bud by learning how to work with it effectively, which in many cases means not giving it any water.
Each thought is a seed. You can’t control which seeds land in the garden of your mind; they arrive on the winds of life without permission or warning. For example, you could be happily spending the morning with your newborn baby when the thought arises, “What if I suddenly hurt him?” At that moment, you have a choice. You can water the thought with more fear-based thoughts like, “Oh, my goodness. I’ve had the thought that I’m going to hurt my baby. That must mean that deep down I don’t really love him. What if something takes over me and I harm him? What if I can’t control myself?” Then you’re off and running in a tizzy of new-mother anxiety. Or you can rein in the habitual fear response, access a rational part of your mind, and say, “Most new mothers have that thought at some point. I’m exhausted and overwhelmed, and I know I love my baby. I’m not going to pay this thought a moment’s more attention right now, but when I have some time, I will ask what the thought may be pointing to inside of me that needs attention.”
Similarly, I’ve worked with many new mothers who, while madly in love with their babies, have the thought “I hate you” pop into their heads. When we unpack the thought, what we find every time is that “I hate you” is a placeholder for “I hate this: I hate being so exhausted, overwhelmed, not knowing what I’m doing, alone.” Quite frequently, thoughts are not what they seem, and when we have access to the choice-point, we can decide which thoughts to brush aside and which are arrows and metaphors pointing to other messages or deeper needs.
PRACTICEIDENTIFY HOW YOU WATER YOUR THOUGHTS
Take a few minutes to identify which of the following ways you water your thoughts.
•Talking about the thoughts, or seeking reassurance
•Journaling about the thoughts (Journaling can be a powerful tool if used correctly, but if you’re journaling about the thoughts themselves, or any sneaky subsets of the primary thoughts, you will remain trapped in the thought.)
•Googling
•Thinking/ruminating/obsessing
•Researching
Now reflect on how you feel when you indulge in these reassurance-seeking tactics. Does your anxiety momentarily subside? Does it make your anxiety worse? Now pause and imagine — literally see yourself — not indulging in these tactics and instead simply observing the thought and asking yourself how you want to respond.
Symbols, Metaphors, and Dreams
Another key to working with thoughts and accessing the critical choice-point is learning how not to take every thought literally. One of the many problems of living in an image-based, superficial culture is that you learn to take everything at face value. You have a dream about having sex with someone other than your partner, and you latch on to the most obvious interpretation: you secretly want to have sex with someone else. Then you begin having anxiety about your marriage. You find yourself obsessively thinking about your ex, and you assume it means you still want to be with him or her, which leads to relationship anxiety. You bolt awake in the middle of the night from a nightmare that you have cancer, and you believe that you have cancer (despite the fact that you just received a clean bill of health at your last physical). Now you’re on the road to health anxiety. Your child screams at you, and you assume that he’s trying to control you or needs a lesson in manners and respect. These seem like reasonable enough interpretations, and they’re certainly supported by the mainstream culture, but there are other meanings at play.
By contrast, part of the reason that people respond to my work with a breath of relief is that I take very little at face value. True to the Jungian perspective, in which I’ve been trained, I understand sex dreams as symbols that you’re longing to unite with an underdeveloped part of you that the dream figure represents. I understand intrusive thoughts about an ex as an indicator that you’re needing closure with that person or that a part of you is represented by that person. I understand death dreams, especially in the form of ni
ghtmares, as metaphors that usually mean a part of us is ready to “die,” and a new part is ready to be born. And I understand the relentless screams of a five-year-old as a symptom that a primary need isn’t being met, and that he’s communicating this unmet need in the only way he knows how. These are just one possible interpretation of dreams, intrusive thoughts, doubt, and difficult behavior in kids. My point is that we should not interpret life by what we see on the surface. In fact, neuroscience has now proven what depth psychologists and mystics have intuited for centuries: the conscious mind runs the show, at best, only about 5 percent of the time (to paraphrase Bruce Lipton).
The gift that Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung brought to modern psychology is the awareness of the unconscious, which is everything that exists below conscious awareness. Feelings are not always what we think they are. Longings point to worlds upon worlds of inner needs. When we learn to interpret symptoms as metaphors that stand for deeper needs and longings, the kaleidoscopic, multidimensional, timeless world of the unconscious opens up to us. We become adept at digging deep and, ultimately, at taking full responsibility for our inner realms. Life becomes less simplistic but a lot more interesting and, perhaps paradoxically, less scary. For when we’re tapped into the underground river of the unconscious instead of living on the surface, we’re living life from the place of essence instead of image. We’re connected to what’s true and sustainable instead of what’s fleeting and ephemeral. We anchor into the collective unconscious of generations past and the invisible web that connects humanity. These moves that join us to essence, the ephemeral world, and the invisible strands of connection are some of the most powerful antidotes to anxiety. For this reason, the shift in mindset from the literal to the metaphoric is another key to transformation.
Because we’ve been conditioned since birth to think literally and take thoughts and physical symptoms at face value, it takes time to train our brains to think in terms of metaphor. But when we remember that the body speaks in metaphor and the unconscious loves to play on words in dreams and in symptoms, our minds awaken and anxiety dissipates. As I’ve been steeped in the world of the unconscious my entire life, this way of thinking is second nature for me. When a client says, “No matter how much I eat before bed, I’m always hungry,” I think, “What are you hungry for — nurturing, comfort, forgiveness?” A client says, “I’ve been having heartburn the last two weeks,” and I wonder, “What is burning in your heart?” A client says, “I had a dream that I died,” and I muse, “What part of you has died, and what new part is ready to be reborn?”
It’s not always appropriate to share these musings, but when I do and they hit home, there’s almost always an immediate eruption of a smile that indicates an aha moment, the kind that bypasses the mind and hits at the level of body. These moments indicate that we’ve hit on truth and are making inroads to healing. Anxiety has done its job; the unconscious has been made conscious, and the ball of healing is set in motion.
PRACTICEAN EXERCISE IN METAPHORS
Write down your top five anxiety-based thoughts, feelings, and physical symptoms, and open your mind to imagine what the metaphor might be. Notice how it feels when you think in terms of metaphor as opposed to taking the thoughts at face value.
The Metaphor of Intrusive Thoughts
Thoughts require different kinds of attention depending on their frequency and their message. Sometimes a dark or strange thought enters your mind, and you can brush it aside with a quick, normalizing statement (like the earlier example of the mother and her baby). If you do this enough times, and the thought isn’t an emissary for anxiety designed to bring a message through the metaphor of an intrusive thought, the thought will wither and die.
However, quite often, intrusive thoughts are indeed messengers bearing tremendous gifts, and the work is to see the thought as a metaphor, then unpack it to arrive at the gem at the center. In all of my courses, I teach the tool of using a wheel to decipher a thought: drawing a circle at the center of a piece of paper, writing the thought in the middle, then drawing several lines coming out of it like the rays of the sun. At the end of each line, you’ll write the real wound, feeling, or belief that needs attention — what the intrusive thought is pointing to.
For example, one of the most common intrusive thoughts that lands people at my virtual doorstep is, “I’m not attracted enough to my partner.” Taken literally (especially in our image-based culture, which places irresistible physical attraction at the top of the nonnegotiable qualities-I-must-have-in-a-partner list), most people’s response to that thought would be, “Then you should leave.” However, having worked with thousands of people who have been able to move beyond the habitual response of reading the thought at face value and have instead found the courage to hear it as a messenger — and remained in their healthy, loving relationships — I know that this thought is a metaphor. Figure 2, Not-Attracted-to-Partner Wheel, comes from a client who was hit full-force with the attraction spike during her third trimester of pregnancy. It represents what breaking this thought apart looks like and decodes its messages.
Keep in mind that these wheels will look different for everyone. For many people, the metaphor embedded inside of “I’m not attracted to you” is “I’m not attracted to me” or “I’m not attracted to life.” Both could point to old or current wounds around adequacy and self-worth or areas in life where you’ve lost juice. When you can train yourself to see intrusive thoughts as metaphors and strap on your headlight of curiosity, the places that need attention inside your inner world will be revealed.
FIGURE 2. NOT-ATTRACTED-TO-PARTNER WHEEL
FIGURE 3. UNDERSTANDING THE ROOT CAUSES OF INTRUSIVE THOUGHTS
I’ll share another example of a client who was struggling with an intrusive thought about her work for many years. The client had worked in corporate America for fifteen years at a job in which she excelled and that helped her achieve financial success and stability. However, after the birth of her kids, she longed for a change that would give her more autonomy and flexibility. She left her job and quickly established her own business. At first, she thrived, but quite soon she started to notice a niggling doubt: “Is this really my life’s work? Is this new job my calling? Shouldn’t I be doing something more meaningful? I must be settling.” These thoughts sent her on a wild goose chase for many months as she was 100 percent convinced that the thoughts were coming from her “truth.” As long as she believed the thoughts, she couldn’t challenge them. But believing the thoughts brought her more and more suffering. It was time to break free.
In one defining session, I said to her, “For the fifteen years that you were at your corporate job did you ever have this thought?”
“Not once.”
“So here you were at a job that you knew wasn’t your calling, yet this intrusive thought that you’re settling never came up once.”
“That’s right.”
“What does that tell you?”
“That it’s not about my career. It’s something that lives inside of me that I would take with me no matter what career I’m in.”
“That’s right.”
“But why didn’t it come up in that other job?”
“Because you were focused on relationships at that time. And the job gave you enough stability to quell the ego, which thrives on the illusions of stability, like a consistent paycheck, meeting externally defined goals, getting praise from managers. All the things that corporate life offers.”
“Yes. So really I just swapped one intrusive thought for another one. I swapped focusing on relationships for focusing on work.”
“That’s exactly right. And now it’s time to tend to what’s embedded inside the intrusive thought. What is needed? What pain are you avoiding by focusing on the thought?”
“My core issues around inadequacy and unworthiness. The need for a definite identity.”
“Yes, exactly. And also, I suspect, the need to move toward your fundamental groundlessness.”
Living with Uncertainty: The Call of Intrusive Thoughts
Most mainstream methods of addressing anxiety and intrusive thoughts lead to the Whac-A-Mole game I referred to earlier: once you resolve one question and find enough certainty to move on, if you don’t address the root causes of the intrusive thoughts, you’ll quickly find yourself trying to bang the mole of a different obsession down the hole. And then you’ll find yourself tumbling down into the anxiety rabbit hole, hell-bent on finding the definitive answer to your next soul-shaking question.
It’s not that you need to give attention to the thought itself and try to resolve the question. In fact, you can’t resolve the question, because these are fundamentally unanswerable questions. There’s not a blood test you can take to determine if you’re 100 percent straight or gay, if you love your partner “enough,” or if you’re living in the “right” city. Either you dip down into the place of self-trust and self-knowledge so that you can answer these questions to a satisfactory degree, and/or you start to cultivate a relationship with uncertainty. And that’s when you find the gift that lives in the center of intrusive thoughts.
