Stop Fighting Unwanted Thoughts |
Thoughts interpret our physiology and are driven by it. Stress physiology creates unpleasant thoughts.
Modern self-help processess are ineffective because they keep the body attentive to threat.
By calming down and nurturing safety physiology, your body heals on its own.
Quit fighting your thoughts; instead, nurture joy. Like the caterpillar, you will wonderfully emerge.
The harder you fight your unwanted thoughts, the louder they get. Neuroscience shows us alternatives. Let your body do what it knows how to do – heal.
Journalist Benoit Denizet-Lewis1 recently ended a New York Times essay on self-transformation with a cartoon: a butterfly peering down at a caterpillar, dispensing advice with the easy authority of someone who has only recently sprouted wings. "The thing is," the butterfly says, "you have to really want to change."
The joke, as Denizet-Lewis points out, is obvious. The caterpillar's transformation has nothing to do with wanting. It becomes what it becomes. Another way to put it is that your body knows how to heal if you can learn to get out of the way.
After more than three decades as a spine surgeon, I have watched this same paradox destroy people's chances of getting better. Not because they didn't try hard enough — but because they tried too hard, in exactly the wrong direction.
Most people I see with chronic mental and physical pain are fighters. They are not passive; they analyze their thoughts, suppress the worst ones, read every book, and try every modality. They do everything the self-improvement industry tells them to do—and they get worse.
During the darkest phase of my personal ordeal with pain, I was an “epiphany addict”, on a relentless search for an answer. Only after I was completely broken to the point of suicide did I let go, and I began to heal. You don’t have to endure such a level of suffering to transform, and I have witnessed hundreds of patients experience deep healing, with much less angst.
There is no mystery to it; a........