for some of us today like every day we'll mean another case of immersing ourselves from the moment we wake up in a by now very familiar set of painful thoughts we will dwell once again on how awful we look and more particularly on how our nose is repulsively proportioned relative to the rest of our face we will think once again of a website we inadvertently visited 12 years ago and how the police might be preparing to close in on and arrest us we will think once again of how several of our neighbors especially the people
upstairs might be colluding to ruin and disgrace or we will think once again of something we said to a colleague which we fear they misconstrued and which may well lead them to seek disciplinary action against us at any moment these thoughts May ostensibly be about a variety of topics but beneath the surface they have two key features in common they are about something appalling we feel we are or have done or there about something appalling we fear that others are about to do to us we are the victims of one of the cruelest and most
remorseless of all mental afflictions obsessive thinking crucially obsessive thinking is not despite the linguistic proximity to be confused with thinking per se it certainly looks on the surface as though the obsessive thinker is thinking a lot all they might be drawing up dense charts and jutting down intricate matters in a notebook they might want to leave a party early or Escape family life in order to go to their room to think they might have become near World experts in plastic surgery or police surveillance techniques or an area of employment law they would be able to
tell you everything about tracking devices post-operative skin treatments and the minute-by-minute developments in a specific aspect of the media agenda the citation may be extreme but we may still want to resist calling any of this thinking as obsessive thinkers we're not making progress through anything of note we're not advancing through a dilemma we're not clearing up a priority we are thinking in order not to think by which is meant we are using one kind of thought to ward off another we are employing obsessive thinking as a defense against thinking more laterally and emotionally about who
we are and what's happened to us against knowing ourselves properly to try to break the agonizing Loops in our minds we might try to ask ourselves a deceptively simple sounding question if we could not think about our chosen topic if we were to be debarred from returning to our favored theme what might we think about what other thoughts might lie behind or to the side of our entrenched ritualized preoccupations our minds are unlikely to yield a neat answer but we can Hazard a generalization if we could not think about our obsessive topic we would most
likely need in one way or another to feel intensely overwhelmingly sad lonely desperate or bereft behind the monomaniacal thoughts about cameras or data packets or legal process or social media There is almost always an extremely frightened isolated unloved child who long ago could not bear to inhabit their own experience obsessive patterns of thinking have gripped themselves remorselessly to the walls of the Mind in order to prevent a tragic reencounter with an early highly vulnerable and hurt version of oneself in a bid for Relief we should Dare for once to risk not returning to our usual
themes and instead while conceding that this is what we might be doing to stop running we should pause where we are and leave our secondary thoughts time to count catch up with us we should put down our fixations and let the waves of our background grief and fear wash over us however tightly we've Associated our problems with our favored topic of scrutiny there's almost certainly long been something bigger older and more tragic that we've been unable to look at that we were perhaps maltreated by a caregiver that our parents chronically preferred a sibling to us
that a father humiliated us repeatedly to overcome his shame at his own sexual abuse we have at an unconscious level made a desperate choice to think ill of ourselves or to worry about plots against us in order to impose a degree of logic on an otherwise impossibly confounding early experience of neglect or betrayal to an indigestible experience of untrustworthiness to a failure of love our minds May gradually have an opportunity to grow less consumed by obsessive thoughts the more we can interpret our preoccupations as symptoms of other concerns we are in flight from the more
we can give up our feelings of persecution and guilt in favor of a sadder slower older truth about ourselves that we were very badly let down indeed
