Lesson 24: The Loop.

Have you ever found yourself stuck in a thought loop?

Maybe it's an idea that just circles round and round in your brain, or maybe it's a song that won't go away.  Those are pretty benign examples.

However, there are other, more malicious examples.

Often, when the thoughts are accompanied by strong negative emotions, it can become a cycle of anger revolving around in your head.  It can even be triggered preemptively, meaning that it happens just because you think the reality MIGHT happen.  This is often where anger fantasies are created.

Or maybe it happens because once something bad DID happen, and now you think it will every time. Or you think that because a bad thing happened, that everything involved is also bad and evil all the time.

And, eventually, these things spill out of our heads and into the real world, creating problems that didn't exist.  Sometimes creating the very problem we thought might exist and didn't until we made it so.  (I just had a mental image of Captain Picard point and saying "Make it so."  It's a Star Trek thing... never mind.)

I recently had the misfortune of watching a teenage girl get passive-aggressively barraged and have her greatest love and passion insulted and condemned to her face simply because the other person had suffered an injury at the hands of thing this girl loved.  Even though it was this persons own fault that it happened.  But to this person, it didn't matter.  Instead of being considerate, this person kept calling the object of the girls passion "evil".

Which it isn't.

In fact, this person was so traumatized by their experience, any time someone even mentions this thing, they start calmly freaking out and spewing hate.  The thought returns and it starts looping and the emotions spiral until control can be regained.

Now, let me pause here.  I totally get that traumatic events can cause, well, trauma.  Emotional as well as physical.  I get it.  I understand it.  I've been there.  You learn to deal, or you get help, or you avoid the thing.  But what you don't do is hurt the feelings of others simply because you had a bad day once.

Back to the point.

Maybe it's a relationship, or an aspect of a relationship and every time a certain trigger happens you automatically "know" what will come next, or NOT come next and you start to spiral.  Suddenly, for no real reason at all, you are angry all because of how you think events will play out, even if they don't.

Do you know what an alcoholic (or anyone else who's been through rehab) calls this mental process?

Addiction.

Yep.  Addiction.

Not long ago, I listened to an alcoholic tell the story of his addiction and sobriety.  He told about how he was so drunk all the time that every time he sobered up he became suicidal.  Finally one day he decided he was going to kill himself and the only thing that saved him was that the bartender who's bar he had passed out in (as had the bartender) asked him to have a drink with him before he took off for the day (about mid morning the next day after the drink fueled unconsciousness occurred).  As a result, the drink turned into drinks until both were thoroughly plastered at which point the guy had forgotten he was going to kill himself.

And so it went for a while.  Eventually he realized one day that the only thing keeping him from killing himself was his drinking and he decided to ask for help.

He went to a legit rehab center and took it seriously.  And while he learned many things, here is the thing that applies for the point.  He learned that he did NOT have a drinking problem.

Her learned that he had a THINKING problem.  It was the wrong thinking that kept him in the mental spiral that in turn kept him in the drinking spiral.

And, while his body itself is most definitely addicted to the substance, it was the addiction of the thought process surrounding it that kept him from trying to stop.

The same is true for each of us.

These thought loops that grab us and "force" us down a specific emotional path of anger and frustration are in many ways an addiction.  To go a different way would require us to give up something.  Perhaps the sense of power that the emotions of rage give us.  Maybe the sense of entitlement that emotions of injustice give us.  The sense of me being in the right and you being in the wrong.

We would have to decide and accept that it is completely irrelevant, as almost all of our friction and fighting is.

If you want to act different, you have to think different.  We can not use the same thinking that created the problem to solve the problem.  (That was Einstein.  Just so no one thinks I'm claiming wisdom that isn't mine.)

Like all things, it comes down to a choice.  

In this case, do you want to pretend that you are better?  Or do you want to actually BE better?

Think a different thought and make a different choice.

Have a great night.