As you read this, don’t think about a white bear. Stop! Seriously, don’t think about it.
You might as well admit it: You need help.
Genius Tester #10: Time Travel
Look at this clock:
How would the hands look if the following were done?
The clock was sent back in time five minutes.
The clock itself stopped in time.
The clock was sent five minutes ahead in time.
Here are two strategies you might try. First, increase your cognitive load: Concentrate on everything around you except the bear. This is like having a picnic and concentrating on the food, the weather, your company, and the sounds of birds to the exclusion of the fast-approaching polar bear.
Or you can try picking one thing to concentrate on instead of the bear. Dr. Daniel M. Wegner, a leading researcher in the field of thought suppression, has asked subjects to think about a red Volkswagen. At the picnic, this is like parking the Volkswagen so that it blocks your view of the bear.
Unfortunately, neither method works. They’re only temporary fixes, allowing you to put aside distressing thoughts until you can later deal with them (it’s unclear if using a blue Volkswagen or perhaps a Buick might be more successful).
And deal with them you must. The bear will not be stopped by active ignoring or by blocking. It’s coming to your picnic whether you like it or not. In fact, suppressing this thought only increases its power (David Carradine on the show Kung Fu: “To suppress a truth is to give it force beyond endurance”). This is called the rebound effect—people who suppress unwanted thoughts end up having the thought more frequently than people who deal with the unwanted thought as it occurs. Also, we tend to link our suppression mechanisms with the unwanted thought—now, forevermore, when you picnic or see red Volkswagens, you’ll expect the arrival of the damned bear.
This is a vicious cycle: The bear pokes through your blanket of suppression, prompting you to focus more energy on suppression, and soon you find yourself scrubbing the bathroom tile grout at three in the morning, trying to cleanse your mind of ursine thoughts. This is obsessive-compulsive disorder—your attempts at further suppression become all-consuming in a process similar to a methamphetamine user needing ever increasing amounts of the drug to achieve the same effect.
Let’s say it again, simply: suppression doesn’t work.
So give up. Think about the bear. No kidding, take a couple seconds. There, doesn’t that feel better? Now you can picnic in peace (albeit with the bear sitting on your checkered tablecloth eating chicken salad).
But what if the bear (this unwanted thought) were so heinous that thinking about it posed a major risk to your being? What if the bear, if allowed to your picnic, would eat you whole?
This is a different beast entirely, one over which you have no conscious control. The only answer here is repression, when your subconscious takes over to save you from egregious psychic harm. Your mind’s powers of repression can stuff that bear into a cage so dark and so deep within your psyche that you might never remember having seen it at all. This is what Oprah did with her memories of child abuse.
But just because the thought itself is unable to poke through a repression blanket doesn’t mean that it’s gone completely. Somewhere, deep inside you, the bear lives. You now own the damn bear. And you have to feed it.
Symptoms of repression can be many and far-reaching, ranging from thought and behavior quirks to physical pain. And remember—the source of these symptoms is now hidden beneath layers and layers of heavy blankets. Enter many thousands of dollars of psychotherapy.
The moral of this bear story is, if at all possible, to deal with bears at your picnic—you’d rather get a couple scratches right away while shooing the bear from your blanket than end up caging the bear inside yourself long-term.
Zen Mind
Tanzan and Ekido met a lovely girl who was unable to cross a muddy road.
“Come on, girl,” said Tanzan at once. Lifting her in his arms, he carried her over the mud.
Ekido did not speak again until that night when they reached a lodging temple. “We monks don’t go near females,” he told Tanzan, “especially not young and lovely ones. It is dangerous. Why did you do that?”
“I left the girl there,” said Tanzan. “Are you still carrying her?”
