Managing Intrusive Thoughts and Intense Negative Self-Talk

The Healing Sanctuary
The Podcast

Last week, I had a really bad episode of intrusive thoughts and negative self-talk. After working through it, I wanted to share how I manage these thoughts, what I've learned about how they develop, and what you can do to manage and work through your own. This episode is based on my own experiences with thoughts that tell me I'm worthless, I have no value, I will never be loved, and so on, and I hope it helps you to feel better and find some relief from your own. Please note that I am not a therapist, I share based on research and personal trial and error, and I am not qualified to give medical advice.

Below, you will find a transcript of this episode. If you know someone who would benefit from this talk, please share it! You can find me on all the podcast apps, including Spotify and iTunes, under The Healing Sanctuary. These podcast episodes are free resources for anyone who needs it, and separate from my membership service.

The Healing Sanctuary: Meditation & Empowerment · Managing Intrusive Thoughts and Intense Negative Self-Talk

​The Healing Sanctuary: August 19th, 2022
Managing Intrusive Thoughts and Intense Negative Self-Talk

Hello, and welcome to The Healing Sanctuary! I’m your host Melissa Field, and I wanted to talk about intrusive and intense negative self-talk today. I wanted to do this episode because I was spiraling into a dark space myself this week, and I know there’s a lot of people out there who struggle with this type of thing also.

My intrusive thoughts go something like, “I’m a complete loser. Everyone knows I’m a loser, but no one wants to tell me. I’m worthless. I have absolutely no value. I would have more value if I didn’t exist. No one will ever love me. I am unlovable. I am human garbage.”

And on and on like that. These are intense thoughts. These are vicious thoughts. These thoughts silently destroy me from the inside. Up until recently, I wouldn’t even share with people that I was thinking them, because I knew how dark and hurtful they were. On some level, I knew these thoughts were not an okay thing to think. And this shame of how mean I am to my own self added to the deep and bottomless void that existed were my sense of self-worth and self-should should have been.

It wasn’t until a few years ago, when I shared one of them out loud with a close friend, that I began to actually confront the thoughts. Up until then, I’d felt powerless to do anything about them. I felt that if I acknowledged to anyone at all I thought them, that I would finally hear someone validate them, and I would be told that YES, they were true, and I was all the horrible things I thought about myself.

This is thing with intrusive thoughts, is they feel so intense that this intenseness convinces us they must be real, because how can anything feel that intense and that powerful and not be real? And that’s where I want you to begin with first. I want you to remind yourself that your thoughts can be extremely big, loud, and overwhelming, and also be telling you things about yourself that are not true. Your thoughts are not big and loud because they’re saying accurate things about you. They’re big and loud because the experiences that created them were intense. It may have been one highly charged incident, it may have been many small incidents or over time, or it may be a mixture of both.

I’m not going to go too much into what creates our intrusive thoughts, because I’m not a licensed therapist or counselor. I’m a meditation teacher who is speaking about this based on my own experience, and I’m a big believer in the power of therapy, and so I would love to encourage you to talk to a professional trained in this work if you want to explore the source of your intrusive thoughts further. As a short introduction, there are many, many different reasons we come to believe false stories about our own self, ranging from childhood abuse to racism to homophobia, and also things that are more subtle but just as impactful, such as a neglectful parent, being different than our parents and feeling like we don’t belong, having a highly critical care giver, or constantly being compared to a sibling or someone else. What created your intrusive and negative self-talk is highly personal to you, and no matter what caused it, your experiences were valid and you deserve to untangle from those thoughts and beliefs and to find new ones that are loving, encouraging, and supportive.

If you’re listening to this, there’s a strong possibility you’re experiencing these kinds of thoughts right now. And that’s okay, because we’re here to acknowledge those thoughts and find ways to tone down the intensity. And this is the first thing I want to tell you. The goal with intrusive and intensely critical, even hateful self-talk, is not to take it from a level 10 intensity to a level zero. I know from personal experience how desperate it can feel to get the intensity down to a zero, because the feelings inside of us are so awful, but when we make the goal to make the thoughts go away completely, we are often trying to reach for a step we’re not at yet, and because we need to take the NEXT step, and not try to leap ten steps ahead, we feel a sense of failure and an even bigger sense of hopelessness. So right now, just tune into yourself, and ask yourself, how intense are your thoughts? On a scale of 1 to 10, what number would you give the intensity?

If you’re at a 10, or if it even feels so intense it’s off the scale, that’s okay. There’s no number that’s so high it’s hopeless. There’s only the place you’re at now, and that’s where you are. Take a deep breath, and as you do so, give yourself permission to let go of all judgement for the intensity of your thoughts. You are having these thoughts for a reason. Experiences in your life, that came from people who either didn’t understand you or who were guiding you based on their own negative self-talk, built these stories within you. The stories are INSIDE of you but they came from OUTSIDE of you. They are not yours. They are based in the thoughts and ideas of people who just didn’t know how to love and guide you properly, and that’s not your fault. As someone who believed for decades that I deserved to be treated like a worthless piece of garbage, I can tell you, no one is born unworthy and undeserving. We are all born deserving of love and support, and if we didn’t get it, the fault is not in us, it’s in the society, culture, and family systems that are broken. You are not broken, but there is a lot around you and in the world that is.
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So as you sit with the number of intensity between 1 and 10, I want you to go down two notches. That’s the goal for you today. Your goal for today is to go down two numbers from where you are. I know this might not sound like a lot, but when you lower the intensity, even slightly, you take a lot of the pressure off. It’s like you’re no longer slamming on a gas pedal, but instead, you’ve eased off, and now you can control the vehicle a little better. And when you lower the intensity just a slight bit, you allow in space for things that will lower it even further, and then will gradually lead you into getting it down to a very manageable place, perhaps a 2 or 3.
How long it takes you to get to a 2 or 3 is going to be personal to you, and it will fluctuate over time. If it takes you a few days this time, and then next time it takes you a few months, that’s okay. It doesn’t mean anything. Progress is a funny thing in that it’s not a straight line to recovery, but a zig zagging line that generally only makes sense when we can look back.

Now that you have your goal to lower the intensity a few notches, we’re going to ease into that. We’re going to do this gently, because wherever these thoughts are coming from, is a highly wounded place, and we don’t ambush a part of ourself that’s already hurting and in need of love. So we’re just going to start by acknowledging that these thoughts are here.
Give yourself a moment to fully acknowledge these thoughts, and say to them, I see you and I hear you. You’re here. You want my attention. I acknowledge you.

Now that we’ve acknowledged them, we now want to acknowledge that they are thoughts, not facts. Thoughts are not pillars of cement within us that cannot be changed or moved. They are neurons, tiny little fibers in our brain, that can change at any time. And so as we acknowledge that these thoughts are here, we don’t want to just fall into them and say, Yes, you’re here, you’re the ultimate truth, and I have to listen to you and abide by you.

Rather, we just want to acknowledge that they’re here, and they are rooted in OTHER people’s false stories. If your thoughts are not allowing this in, and they’re shouting at you that they ARE the truth and that’s just how it is, this is when you want to remind yourself that the goal here is not to go from 10 to 0, but to just lower the intensity. You want to let in a crack of light. And so present it as a question, as a curiosity. What if these thoughts aren’t the whole story? What if there’s other information you need that you don’t yet have? What if it’s possible that some or all of what these thoughts say is a lie? What if you’d been raised in a loving and supportive way? What would the thoughts say to you then?

At this point we’ve covered the first four steps I take when dealing with my own intrusive thoughts, and I just want to go over them again. The first step I take is to honor the intensity of my thoughts, and to honor where I’m at on a scale of 1 to 10. I remind myself that there are no right or wrong numbers, there are only reflections of experiences that led me to this point. The second step is to set a goal to lower the intensity by a few notches, and to know that this feels small but it’s important and helpful to the big picture. The third step is to fully acknowledge the presence of the thoughts within me, and to know they’re coming from a very wounded place, and I don’t want to attack this part of me that’s hurting, I just want to let it know it’s seen and it’s heard. And the fourth step is to then acknowledge that these thoughts are NOT facts, but stories within me built upon false information.

This last step is the one I tend to focus on the most. I remind myself over and over, these thoughts are not about who I AM, they are about the messages I received from outside of me. These thoughts tell me about the well-being of the parents, society, and culture that guided my own self-image. I acknowledge that these thoughts are like programs running on a computer, and I am not destined to run the same program for the rest of my life. I have the ability to choose new thoughts, which will in time, rewrite the inner program I’m running.
And this brings us to the last step. After we’ve acknowledge the thoughts, and acknowledge that they are not rooted in the truth, we want to open to the knowing that we can access new thoughts. We want to acknowledge what the truth of our own self is. We want to acknowledge how our heart would talk to us. We want to acknowledge that we are not worthless, we have value, and there are people who love us, just for who we are.

This is another moment when the thoughts might start shouting at you and telling you nope, not gonna happen. I’m in charge and I’m not going anywhere. If this is happening, this is only natural, and it’s not because you can’t change. There is actually a biological reason for this that will explain it all, and because I don’t want this episode to be 2 hours long, I’m not going to go all the way into it. I will share a resource at the end that will help you to learn more about this, but for now, what you need to know is your brain likes to preserve energy. It likes the path of least resistance. It likes thoughts you’ve been thinking for a long time because they’re deeply rooted, and it takes no effort to think them. So when you default to negative and intrusive thoughts, it is no way because on some level they must be true. It’s a simple, biological and chemical aspect of evolution, which is that these thoughts are already there, and so your brain flows electricity there first. Planting and growing new thoughts DOES take energy, and that’s why change should be approached as a marathon, and not a sprint.

One way to counteract the thoughts when they refuse to let you think new and more positive ones, is to ask yourself how these negative thoughts benefit you. When you understand what they do for you, they can be easier to let go of. This might sound strange, what benefit could there to be cutting you own self down?

For me, when I’m spiraling in negative and hateful self-talk, I’m doing so because deep down I want to spare myself from disappointment. I am so fully convinced no one will ever really love me, that I believe if I reject myself first, and tell myself all these horrible things, it’ll hurt less when other people eventually do it. And of course, this process of self-protection and defense is not actually rooted in reality. I have a very loving and supportive network of friends who would never say things to me like “You’re worthless. You’re human garbage.” This is never going to happen, and yet my brain tells me it is and so I better say it first so I don’t feel like the rug has been pulled out from under me.

Another benefit for me is it gave me a sense of connection and closeness to my parents. If I agreed with the way they put me down, then on some level, we were bonding. If I agreed with them when they were in a state of rage and making me feel two inches tall, then I believed I would be more likely to gain their approval. If I agreed with the way they treated me, then I wasn’t alone. It made me feel like “we’re in this together,” and what I really wanted deep down, was to just not feel so alone.

Just like my previous example, this is highly irrational and makes no sense when you start to break it down. And this is where asking yourself what benefit you gain from your intrusive and negative thoughts can be helpful. It starts to breakdown their foundation, and you start to go, “Wait, that doesn’t make any sense at all. And if that doesn’t make sense, then maybe there’s more things in here that aren’t real and not based in reality.”

Acknowledging that these thoughts have benefits to us, even ones that are distorted and irrational, can also help us to see that at the root of it all, we were just trying to help ourself in the only way we could. We created these thoughts with very limited tools and knowledge, and although in the end these thoughts caused a lot of pain, they were not created because we want to hurt and destroy ourselves. At their very core is the seed of self-love, a seed of trying to protect us and help our inner self when we were just scared and being mistreated and didn’t know how to process these experiences.

And from that seed of self-love, something else entirely new can grow. Something based on what you know now, and based on what YOU want to tell yourself.

I think this is a good place to stop, even though there’s a lot more I want to share with you. I really want to talk more about transforming negative self-talk into positive self-talk, which I do through visualization. I have so much to share about this, and you can learn more with the resource I mentioned earlier. I have put together a course that will teach you about neurons, how our inner self talk developed, why your brain defaults to negative thoughts, and how meditation and visualization can help with changing these experiences. This course also gets into the spiritual aspects of healing, how your thoughts work with the energy of the Universe, and what co-creation and the Law of Attraction actually mean. It’s everything I wish I’d known when I began working on my own healing and transformation. This course is offered on a donation basis, or you can get it for free when you become a member of The Healing Sanctuary.

You’ll find links to both this course and The Healing Sanctuary through my episode notes, my bio, or by going to my website melissa-field.com. You can also find me on Instagram at meditate_with_melissa.
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Thank you so much for listening to this episode. I have so much love and respect for you for showing up for this today, because I know how scary and uncomfortable it is to face these things within ourselves. If you know someone who would benefit from this talk, please share it with them. And I’ll hopefully be back soon with more to share on healing and personal empowerment!