You Are Not Your Thoughts

They are more like a radio playing in your head

In 2014, I was sitting on my therapist’s couch, nervous, my sweaty thighs sticking to the leather. My therapist, Lisa, was wearing studded jeans and a leather top. If I hadn’t liked her so much I’d have envied her. “Do you think I’m a good person?” I asked.

It had been 94 days since my last drink, and as the haze was lifting I was finally starting to see my past more clearly. Which was a good thing, minus the fact that I was now haunted by all the mistakes I had made before I got sober.

For most of my life I’d had an obsession with being good… a good girl (yes, I know, what a cliché). The problem with being good or bad is that it’s black or white. You are good or bad. There’s not much room for anything in between. So whenever I didn’t feel I was good, I panicked and spiraled as though the ground had been falling out from under me.

Any thought I had that I considered “bad” — even automatic thoughts I had no control over — I quickly interpreted to mean that I was a bad person. Whenever someone cut me off in traffic and I imagined rear-ending them, I thought, I am a terrible person. I was obsessed with my thoughts — controlling them, managing them, changing them.

Everyone’s brain does this. It serves up images and urges you’d never act on and never asked for — the urge to laugh at exactly the wrong moment, the cruel thing you’d never say out loud. Most of them mean nothing. You didn’t choose them any more than you chose a hiccup. A thought you didn’t choose can’t be a verdict on who you are.

But a thought you hate can be particularly sticky. So you argue with it. You try to reason it away or replace it with a better one. You get into a power struggle with it. But the harder you fight, the more stuck you feel. It’s kind of like a finger trap, and the way out is the same: stop fighting, which creates enough space that you can take a step back and allow it to be.

So the next time you have an unwanted thought pop into your brain, try this. If you’re spiraling at 2 a.m. because someone didn’t respond to your text, thinking, “They must hate me,” I want you to add five words to the front of it: I’m having the thought that they hate me. I know this seems so small that it probably won’t do anything. But we’re not expecting you to stop believing that thought. Or believe that they love you. All we want is to create a little bit of space, so that you can recognize that it is a thought that you are having.

Think of it as a radio you didn’t know was on. When you can’t tell the sound from the background noise, the thought just plays as fact — they hate me. When you name it as a thought, you recognize that it’s a song on the radio. You don’t have to turn it off, and you might not be able to. But once you recognize it’s just a radio station playing, it loses a bit of its power over you.

Therapists call this “cognitive defusion.” I teach some version of it to nearly everyone who sits across from me, and I use it on myself often. From beside the thought, you can finally ask a better question: not whether the thought is true, but whether it’s helping. You stop collecting evidence on both sides and instead wonder if this is a helpful thought. (Most of the time it isn’t.)

Now when I wonder if I am a bad or good person, I don’t pull the car over to argue with the radio station. I let it play and keep driving. Some days it’s annoying and too loud, but I don’t have to listen or act on it.