Beyond obeying and struggling

Lots of people I support each week struggle, in one way or another, with difficult thoughts.

They don’t often describe the problem that way. They call it perfectionism, self-judgement, spiralling anxiety or imposter syndrome.

But each of those is built on a particular set of thoughts, a narrative around what should or shouldn’t be happening.

We fuel these thoughts in two ways¹:

1. We obey. When we obey, we are fused and identified with the thought, taking it as truth.

2. We struggle. We fight the thoughts and associated feelings. We try to push them away. And if they keep coming back, we dissociate from them through distraction or numbing.

For example, if you have the thought “I’m not good enough”, you might take it at face value and then not apply for a job. This is obeying. Or perhaps you have the same thought but then spend hours ruminating and trying to disprove it. This is struggling.

These strategies make sense, in their own way. These are my thoughts, right? Why would I doubt them? And control of material things has granted us so much of our lives, and so we instinctively extend the idea of material control to our own thoughts.

We believe we should be able to control and rewrite ourselves; to manipulate difficult feelings and replace negative thoughts. This is one of the core myths of self-help.

But can you remove memories? Can you stop yourself from feeling sad? Can you turn off thinking, for 2 minutes?

When I tell people about these two approaches, they struggle to imagine a third way. Often, they retreat to more subtle forms of the two ideas, whether resignation (another form of obeying) or dreaming of a state where the discomfort doesn’t arise at all (a more refined struggle against what is.)

But suppose, instead, that you cultivate the ability to hear the thought as a thought. That you listen without necessarily believing, just as you would when listening to others. You don’t fight the thought, but neither do you buy into its worldview.

The technical term for this is defusion. It’s best exemplified through noting practice, a common meditation technique. In this practice, when anxious thoughts come up, you note “anxiety” and return to being present. When you’re distracted, you note “distraction” and return to being present.

Over time, you cultivate a non-judgemental attitude to these thoughts. You stop providing the friction that sparks the fire.

You realise that obeying and struggling are different means to the same end: keeping a thought large in consciousness. Because whether we obey or fight, we grant a thought salience. We give it greater authority and presence in our lives.

But the more we can listen without obeying or fighting, the more space we create. Suddenly, the thoughts aren’t so big. They’re just fleeting words, offering their messages, before fading away. You remain.