What To Do With An Intrusive Thought

A piece about intrusive thoughts and some ideas for how to reframe them, diffuse their intensity, understand them in new ways, and even turn them into insights.

To me, an intrusive thought is any thought that interrupts what you want to be doing with reasons why you shouldn’t be doing it, reasons that make you feel bad about yourself.

Throughout my life, I’ve dealt with a lot of intrusive thoughts, but because of this, I’ve been able to come up with some techniques to re-frame them, diffuse their intensity, understand them in new ways, and even turn them into insights.

So though I don’t expect what worked for me will work for everyone, I thought I’d share, just in case it’s useful.

From my experience, the best place to begin reframing an intrusive thought is to try and understand where it came from.

Is it an unresolved upset or trauma from my past? A reaction to a recent upsetting encounter? Something from a screen that upset me?

To help me understand where my intrusive thoughts come from, I like to imagine that in my mind is a sea of associations, a borderless place where every experience that's ever impacted me gets stored.

But for those of us who’ve had a lot of upsetting experiences, we can have seas of associations that are pretty toxic.

And without the skills to make sense of this toxic stuff, it’s easy to make the toxic stuff mean something negative about who we are.

And this toxic stuff that we misinterpret as part of who we are, can interrupt our moments of joy and meaningful connections, by giving us the impression that we don’t deserve joy or meaningful connections.

I spend a lot of time wondering what we can do about our internal seas of associations so that what emerges from it won’t hold us back from living the kind of lives we want to live.

We could try to get rid of all the toxic stuff in our seas of associations. But the problem with that, is just like cleaning an actual ocean, we’d also have to change the hearts and behavior of every person we cross paths with so they won’t be inclined to throw their trash in. And that’s not very realistic.

We could be on guard, like an air traffic controller, all day long, taking inventory of all that unpleasantness so it won’t sneak past and cause more confusion and hurt.

But the problem with this is we’d wind up focusing on all the stuff we don’t like. Plus this compulsion would take a lot of time and energy away from the things we could really be enjoying and growing from.

We could try to avoid all our triggers and refuse to leave our houses. But then we’d miss out on all the wonderful things life has to offer…

Perhaps a more realistic practice would be to develop a healthier relationship to our sea of associations, by taking a look at what’s actually in there.

If you’re going to examine your sea of associations, though, it’s very important, in my opinion, to be prepared.

And from my personal experience, being prepared means having a strong foundation, like an anchor. Something to ground me as I stand at the edge of my sea of associations, so I don't get pulled in by all that toxic stuff.

To me, an anchor is made up of what I choose to stand for, what my values are.

It’s helpful for me to think of my values like lenses.

If I’m having trouble seeing in the world, I go to the eye doctor to find which prescription helps me to see the world more clearly.

But if I want to see clearly into my sea of associations, I need to choose what prescription works for me, based on what meaning I’d like to make about myself and the world. That meaning is what I call my values.

In addition to my values, I think we also need a context, an intention for why we’re venturing into our sea of associations.

Some choices might be:
To understand my sea of associations as if I were a scientist.
Or an explorer.
Or a storyteller.

For myself, I chose as my anchor:
To be a contribution to myself and others, and to have compassion for myself and others.

And I chose for my context: To be a storyteller, to tell the story of my experiences based on my own perspective, not anyone else’s.

For many of us, creating our values and context might seem like a weird thing to do. And I think that’s probably because not many of us have ever been asked what’s meaningful to us, or what we’d like to stand for in our lives.

But I think it’s important to establish these things, because if I go venturing into my sea of associations without an anchor and a context, what will happen if I hook a negative thought?

Without an anchor or a context, I’ll be much more likely to make a negative thought or impression mean something negative about myself. I might think it’s a sign, or evidence that all my suspicions about myself and others are true.

And I think this is precisely why so many of us wind up metaphorically drowning in our intrusive thoughts. Because without an anchor and a context, intrusive thoughts can hijack our attention. And it can feel like we’re losing ourselves, like we’re being dragged out into the abyss against our will.

Of course our thoughts and associations are not doing this on purpose. They're not ‘alive’ any more than a song we might hear on the radio.

They’re just dragging our focus into the current and out to sea, the same way a strong current drags any weightless object. If a little leaf is not anchored to a branch, into the sea it goes.

But without an anchor, we take this current personally.

We may imagine we’ve got an enemy within.

But rest assured, there’s no enemy within.

It’s just the radio station of every song we’ve ever heard hooking our attention, and we’re making it mean something about who we are.

Without an anchor, if we feel guilty about something, we’re likely to hook an association that gives us evidence for why we should feel guilty.

But if we’re anchored by the weight of our values and our context, we can understand that when we hook unpleasant stuff in our sea of associations and then make it mean something negative about who we are, it’s really no different than going fishing and pulling out a piece of garbage and thinking the ocean chose to personally hook trash on our line because that’s what we deserve.

When we’re grounded by our anchor, we know better than to make associations mean anything about ourselves.

We recognize that our associations are out of our control.

Maybe they have come from the news, or from a video game, or from someone who shamed us for making a mistake in the past, or from a conversation we overheard, or something we inherited from our grandmother. Who knows.

When we examine our sea of associations from a context of curiosity, we can see clearly that there are both desirable and undesirable ingredients in both our internal seas and in the seas of the world, and that this is the natural consequence of everyone’s behavior acting and reacting at once, often without many skills to understand or communicate what’s going on.

Do these ingredients from our seas impact us? Yes. Have they impacted others? Yes. Is it crappy when people don’t realize that their ingredients are toxic to us? Yes.

But with our foundation in place, we can recognize that we create more problems for ourselves when we continue hooking and rehooking the same toxic ingredients that are out of our control and thinking we’re going to be able to change them.

I don’t know about you, but my whole life, I fixated on the ingredients in my sea of associations. Not only have I not wanted them polluting my seas. But I didn’t want anyone else to know they were there.

Sometimes I’d be enjoying a moment and then some toxic thing would emerge from my internal seas and I’d leave the enjoyable moment and wonder, “Why did I just feel bad about myself? There must be something wrong with me. But what? I must be an awful person. But why? Why am I feeling guilty? Ashamed? They just gave me a compliment, but I’m sure that really, they’re probably just feeling badly for me.”

And I’d ruin the moment by fixating on this negativity.

Or maybe to avoid the negativity, I’d redirect my attention by picking at my skin or grinding my teeth, so that pain would keep me from drowning in my own toxic sea of associations.

This is what I call destructive coping, and it can become an addiction. Because it’s easy to mistake pain as an anchor. Pain can ground a person to a moment so they don’t get swept away in the abyss of their sea of associations. But pain is destructive. It hurts.

But I think the main reason so many of us use destructive coping mechanisms as anchors is simply because we don’t have access to any constructive coping mechanisms.

If a person doesn't have anything empowering to focus on, they will cope using whatever they can find to focus on—whether it’s hurting themselves, or abstaining from certain foods to protect themselves from ingesting other people’s toxicity, or washing their hands a million times to keep themselves free of other’s toxic germs, or engaging in reckless behavior...

Anything to keep our attention from getting swept away and into the abyss of our toxic seas of associations.

But when we discover our values, we are able to discover something constructive of our own choosing to focus on. Something based on our own interests, that can create the kind of future for ourselves that we’d want to live in.

I remember once meeting a retired pilot who ran this Bed & Breakfast I stayed at.

We were all eating breakfast together and I asked him, “So, what do you do when you’ve got a plane full of people and you start thinking about 30 thousand feet in new imaginative ways and start cosmically freaking out?”

Thankfully, instead of rolling his eyes at my question, he looked at me very seriously and said, “We have a protocol for that.”

“You do?”

“Uh huh. If this should happen, we have a list we take out. It lists the names of all the machine parts we use and what they do. And one person reads the name of the part and the person who’s lost control of their focus states what the part is for. And we do this until the person returns back to the moment they're in, at the control panel, in charge of their focus.”

And I remember thinking how powerful that was.

If we lose focus, and start panicking, we can reorient ourselves by looking around and focusing on the parts of our lives that we’re most committed to, that will take us where we’ve deliberately chosen to go.

And for the sake of this conversation, our parts can be our values and our context.

My values are: To be a contribution to myself and others, and to have compassion for myself and others.

And my context is: To look at my sea of associations as a storyteller.

And in this man’s case, his context would have been being a pilot.

By identifying our parts, we can return to being at the control panel of our focus instead of letting our associations drag our attention all over the place and into the abyss.

I think for many of us, it can be challenging to focus our attention. Even with our anchors and our contexts in place.

And I think this is because so many of us have been told what to do so many times throughout our lives, that we have become compliant.

And for those of us who have been compliant for so long, we’ve never learned the skill of focusing our attention in order to pursue our own opportunities, based on our own interests and what’s important to us.

We’ve had our attentions focused for us, perhaps by a screen, or by authoritative people in order for us to meet their expectations, to gain their approval.

Or, perhaps our attentions have been hijacked by companies trying to sell us things, based on their assumptions of what they think we lack and what we need more of.

So when we’re standing at the edge of our own sea of associations, how can we expect to suddenly know how to direct our own attention when we’ve rarely had an opportunity to strengthen the muscle of our own focus and attention?

When we’re at the edge of our sea of associations, and something disempowering pops up, we might assume, like everything else in our lives, that it’s also asking for our attention, and if we’re used to being compliant, we may give it our attention.

It takes practice to get used to being at the control panel of our attention. You might not even feel qualified to do the job. But you are!

Be patient with yourself. The goal isn't to be perfect. It’s to accept that we humans are complicated. The boundaries of where we end and where the world begins is not so easy to draw.

Just as there’s wars and peace in the world, so it is in our seas of associations.

But I personally believe that there’s enough space for everything to exist in peace, and to me, the first step to peace within myself is by accepting my sea of associations just as it is.

Because once you accept yourself and your sea of associations just as it is, then you free up some of your time and energy to go out and start discovering new healthier experiences that are aligned with your values. And before you know it, you will have begun stocking your seas with healthier associations.

Turn your body into a punishment-free zone. Because really, there’s no need to punish yourself for anything. You are amazing. A living, breathing miracle, filled with all sorts of possibilities.

Start seeing yourself as remarkable.

You can even say something to yourself like, “Wow, I am associatively brilliant! I pick up patterns like a pro! And now that I’ve got a more empowering context, I can use my associative skills creatively rather than destructively.”

And if you do have intrusive thoughts, remember:
You get to decide what meaning you give them.

Maybe something like, “Wow, I’m really good at checking. Maybe I could put that to creative use! I could make sure everyone in the neighborhood remembers to check their fire alarms.”

There’s always a way to turn destructive into constructive when you’re at the control panel of your focus.

I’d like to end this piece with a couple exercises, that I hope might help you practice focusing your attention:


Tell yourself you’re going to get a dollar for every red thing you see. And I bet you'll suddenly start to notice a lot of red things.

We do this all the time. But in real life, the currency isn’t in dollars. It’s in evidence.

We search out angry faces and get paid in evidence when we find them and we tell ourselves that we were right—that people are angry with us all the time.

Or we search out judgmental faces and get paid in evidence when we find them, and we tell ourselves that we were right—that people don’t want us around, because we’re unlovable.

Notice how what we focus on is really quite literally what we see.

The thing is, the red things were always there. We just weren’t focusing on them. But when we do focus on the red, we stop noticing the blue things and the purple things.

This exercise in intention is a good reminder that you really do have a choice for what you’d like to focus on. We just have to choose what it is we want to focus on, so that our focus is aligned with our values, with what’s most meaningful to us.

Here’s another exercise to help strengthen our focus and attention:

Draw a small circle on your hand. Then write on a piece of paper what that circle stands for: Your values and your context.

Every time you make a choice, you will see the circle, and it will remind you of your foundation, of your anchor. That you get to be the person you want to be, and that you get to decide what meaning you’ll give to all your associations.

Thank you for listening, and I hope you have an extraordinary day.

-JLK