Sometimes the pathological critic seems relentless. Undeterred by your attempts at accurate thinking, the critic piles it on. One attacking thought follows another in the process called chaining, as discussed in chapter 2. And each of these linked thoughts has a theme—your flaws and failures. After even a few minutes of chaining, the pain starts. Your mood and self-esteem plummet.
These are the times when rebutting the critic doesn’t seem enough. The thoughts come at you with a speed and believability that overwhelm your resolve to resist them. But there is a way to meet and overcome this challenge. It’s called defusion. Developed as a core process in acceptance and commitment therapy (Hayes, Strosahl, and Wilson 2013), defusion is a strategy to gain distance and perspective in the face of ruminative thoughts. Instead of “fusing” with self-attacking cognitions, you can use defusion to help you observe and then let go of the most upsetting mental chatter.
You will learn to watch your mind as if it were a popcorn machine, spouting thought after thought. Then you’ll learn to label, let go, and distance from self-judgments, taking them less seriously as they parade across your mental screen. Instead of being your thoughts (“I’m stupid,” or “I’m boring”), you can learn merely to have a thought (“I’m having a thought that I’m stupid,” or “I’m having a thought that I’m boring”). Notice the difference: “I’m stupid” leaves no room for doubt, and fuses your identity with being intellectually inferior. “I’m having the thought that I’m stupid” is merely an idea, not reality. Your core self and the idea of stupidity remain separate.
You have 60,000 thoughts a day. They are products of your mind—not terribly important, not necessarily true. You can learn, through defusion techniques, to just let them pass and drift away. These thoughts are nothing more than well-worn neural pathways, and the techniques you’ll learn in this chapter will help you stop buying into all those old putdowns and judgments.
Defusion begins with observing your mind. There are two ways to learn this—a simple exercise called the white room meditation can help you watch your mind and see what it does. Mindful focusing can also allow you to observe mental processes. You can download the audio version of each of these meditation exercises at http://www.newharbinger.com/33933.
White Room Meditation
Imagine that you’re in a room that is entirely white—walls, floor, and ceiling. On your left is an open doorway; on your right is another open doorway. Now imagine that your thoughts are entering from the doorway on your left, passing in front of you, and exiting the room from the doorway on your right. As your thoughts cross the room, you can give them a visual image—birds flying, an animal running—or you can simply say “thought” as they enter. Don’t analyze or get attached to any thought. Just allow each to have a brief moment in front of you, before it leaves through the right-hand doorway.
Some thoughts seem urgent and demand more attention. They tend to stick around longer than others. Some thoughts are persistent and show up over and over again. This is how thoughts often are—urgent, persistent. Simply notice them and let them go. Turn your attention to the next thought, and the next. Do the meditation for five minutes, and notice what happens. Do your thoughts slow down or speed up? Do they feel more or less urgent? How hard was it to let go and turn to the next thought? The mere act of observing thoughts often has the effect of slowing them down, and making you feel calmer. But however the meditation makes you feel, the important thing is learning to watch your popcorn machine mind.
Mindful Focusing
This technique draws from Buddhist practices that go back thousands of years. It starts by just noticing the breath, following it in through the nose, down the back of your throat, into the lungs, and down to where your diaphragm stretches and releases. As you make each outbreath, count—1 on the first outbreath, 2 on the second, and so on till you reach 4. On the fourth outbreath, start your count over at 1.
As you focus on your breath, it’s inevitable that you’ll have thoughts. You can use the experience of watching your breath as an opportunity to also be aware of what your mind is doing. As each thought arises, acknowledge it (there’s a thought) and then bring your attention back to your breath. The full sequence for mindful focusing is (1) watch and count your breaths, (2) notice when a thought shows up, (3) acknowledge the thought, and (4) go back to noticing and counting each breath.
Do five to ten minutes of mindful focusing every day for a week. Watching how thoughts show up, while each time returning to the breath, is a good way to observe your mind. No matter how much you try to stay focused on the breath, your mind will keep “popping” thoughts. You’ll also notice how some thoughts seem urgent and harder to let go of.
Labeling Thoughts
Another way to gain distance from your thoughts is to label them. Types of labeling include:
Now that you’re better able to notice and label critical thoughts, the next—and most important—step is to let go of them. Most “letting go” strategies involve imagery that somehow creates more and more physical distance from the thought—until it disappears. The following are some examples, but you can easily make your own.
Some people find it easier to let go by doing something physical:
It’s time to put these components together. The first priority is to be alert for the critic. Noticing the attacking thought, when it comes, is how you stop chaining and start defusing. You can often recognize the critical voice by how it affects your mood. As soon as you start to feel down or deflated, pay attention to your thoughts.
Now label the thought: I’m having the thought that…or I’m having a thought. As previously discussed, this is important because it creates distance from the cognition and reminds you that it’s just something in your mind.
Lastly, choose a visualization or physical response (turning your hand, taking a breath) to help you let go. It’s often effective to have one of each—a visualization of the thought floating away and a physical experience that promotes the same thing.
Exercise: Putting It All Together
Doing defusion takes mental muscle. A good way to practice is to visualize a recent upset where your critic started kicking you. Keep watching that scene—in your mind’s eye—until the judgments show up. Notice the thoughts, as your popcorn machine brain starts generating self-attacks.
Now, as each thought shows up, label it. And then use a letting-go visualization or a physical response to distance from the attack. Keep practicing—with each judging thought—until they feel less real and less powerful.
Tony was an app developer whose critic told him he did things “the stupid man’s way,” that his good ideas were “obvious,” and that his code solutions were “inelegant” and “cumbersome.” In addition, the critic frequently attacked him for how he spoke to clients, and even to friends.
Tony decided to try defusion because he had trouble, at the moment the critic pounced, remembering ways to resist. “All I can think about is what’s wrong with me,” Tony told his father when they talked about his problems at work.
Tony practiced the white room meditation, but found mindful focusing more useful because he could return attention to his breath between thoughts. After a while he started labeling thoughts during mindful focusing. He used the labels, “critical thought,” “worry thought,” and “thought” (for all other categories). Then he started using the same labels whenever he noticed himself “going into a funk” and became aware of attacking thoughts.
To let go of thoughts, Tony started with the leaves on a stream visualization, but found doing something physical was more effective at work. When critical thoughts showed up, he labeled them and took a breath. As he exhaled, he made a small hand gesture—like pushing something away—and let them go.
Tony discovered that defusion made it less and less likely that he would get caught in long chains of negative thought. It also made him more alert to the critic when it showed up, and helped him realize these were just thoughts—not “the word of God.”
Now that you are beginning to watch, label, and let go of self-attacking thoughts, there are some advanced defusion skills that can further distance you from the critic.
You can also use silly or mocking voices to make fun of critical thoughts. Tony used a newscaster voice to mock his attacking thoughts: “Tony’s medicine ball voice gave him a beating at work today.” Tony, as a child, was entertained by his father’s Donald Duck imitations. Now he began using that voice himself to say out loud his critical thoughts.
Another technique is to sing (to familiar tunes like “Home on the Range”) some of your self-attacks. “You, you are the worst—nitwit to walk on the earth,” Tony sings, and then starts laughing.
Here’s another question: Is the thought actually causing pain rather than protecting you? Does it make you feel worse about yourself—more ashamed, more afraid, more sad? If that’s the case, your thought is a “double whammy.” It’s failing in its purpose, and doing damage, besides.
Tony had just finished a conversation with a client where he was trying to identify features she wanted designed into an app. As the client walked out the door, the critic started in on him. His suggestions had been “simplistic” and “stupid.” There were the medicine ball thoughts again. Tony began by asking himself how far back this thought went. He could remember thinking he must be stupid when his third-grade teacher chided him for not paying attention. She made him sit by himself, so he could “concentrate” better. That was thirty years ago, and the same thought had showed up regularly ever since.
Now Tony examined the function of his thought, and he noticed something interesting. Back in third grade he didn’t think he was stupid; he thought he must look stupid. The thought seemed to be a motivation to try harder so he’d never again be embarrassed by criticism. The thought had the same function now—he was still telling himself that he looked or sounded stupid so he could avoid (in the future) feeling hurt or wrong.
But was it working? Had the thought protected him from feeling wrong and embarrassed? In truth, the thought hadn’t helped Tony at all. It seemed he’d spent his life feeling wrong and embarrassed; if anything, the medicine ball thoughts had made the feeling worse.
Tony realized, at a deeper level than ever before, that this was, after all, just a thought. Not truth or reality. It was a thought that was supposed to push him to do better, to be more effective. But all it had ever done was make him sad and scared and hesitant. He knew the thought would show up again, but he had a new way to respond: seeing it for what it was—a mere thought.
Remember that you don’t have to argue at length with your pathological critic, attempting to respond in fine detail to every attack on your self-esteem. You can gain distance and perspective by using your defusion skills, reminding yourself that these attacks are only thoughts–repetitive, annoying, but transitory and soon gone.