Transcription
Today I want to talk to you some more about intrusive thoughts. And the odds are you are here at this video because you battle with them. It's those thoughts that make us anxious. They seem to sometimes come out of nowhere. They disturb us. They get us in a lot of sense of conflict. And they can lead people down a lot of trails of inner torment.
Well, today I want to help you relate to your intrusive thoughts in a renewed way by using a metaphor that I think is important. is to help you to understand that your intrusive thoughts are trolls. And when you understand that, it can help change how you relate to these thoughts. So, welcome to the healing and freedom journey. Mark Deesus here. I'm your brother from another mother, bringing you insights along the way. I'm all about mental, emotional, and relationship health. And if you are too, you have arrived at a great place. So, let's get into this.
When we look at the subject of intrusive thoughts, we need to understand this picture of realizing that these thoughts are acting as trolls. Now, I'm going to put this on the screen for you because I think it's important as we start things off. If you've spent any time on the internet, you know what a troll is. Someone who shows up in the comments just to provoke you. They say something outrageous, offensive, disturbing, something designed to get under your skin, and they don't actually care what you say back. They just want you to react. The moment you've engaged, they've won. And here's the thing, they will keep going as long as you keep responding.
And that's why today I want you to get into your heart. Get into your understanding. These intrusive thoughts are trolls. They act like trolls. The problem is that we've been feeding the trolls and we didn't realize it. We didn't know. We didn't have teaching. We didn't have insight. I know I didn't. So, I didn't always know how to react to these kind of thoughts that were coming my way.
Now, let's just look at a simple definition of what a troll is. Now, I'm not speaking about those cute little dolls you can buy in the store or the ugly trolls you see under a bridge that are in stories. Although, we could use that as a metaphor, too. What I'm talking about here, if you were to look up what is a troll online, something like this would come up. An internet user who intentionally posts inflammatory, sarcastic or disruptive messages to provoke emotional responses, anger or arguments. How many of you in your own head you feel that battleground? You get stirred up in those kind of ways. And all of us have experienced trolls online. people that come into your comment section of your social media feed and it's just there just to provoke a response. There may be a bunch of reasons or whatever, but not looking to have an actual engagement, just looking to create a disturbance. And that's what I want to bring home today is that intrusive thoughts are trolls. And you need to use that to your advantage in learning how to respond in renewed ways.
Because these thoughts, they show up uninvited. It's the nature of it. Like a party they were not invited to. The content that comes into your mind is designed to provoke. It's offensive. It's disturbing. It's outrageous. A key thing to understand is that intrusive thoughts take your values and turn them upside down. meaning like they come at you as though you are the opposite of what you actually value. They often come with an accusatory way to them too, don't they? To accuse you with them, like bringing a hammer of law and accusation against you. They also intimidate. And this gives us another metaphor of like a bully. And those of you that have had experience with a bully, sadly an experience like that, what's the greatest power a bully has? intimidation. It's the fear that they bring. And these trolls do that. They just want a reaction because that's the food source. That's what they gain is any kind of reaction stimulates and it makes the thought or the subject or whatever is coming at you grow.
The intrusive thought is not trying to help you with something. It's not trying to add value to your life. It's trying to get a reaction out of you. The more you respond, the stronger the thought becomes. It escalates because responses stimulate the thought. Responses stimulate the topic of the thought that's coming at you. And trolls feed on your reaction.
Now, we have to understand we're very conditioned in our thinking patterns as human beings. When we respond to trolls, it conditions our thinking to keep responding that way. And so we end up in these cycles where the obsession begins over the topic and then the compulsivity is the pattern we use to try to make ourselves feel better. Then we can very easily return to it. Now you got the O and the C and that's obsessive compulsive.
Secondly, I have this on the screen. When you react, it decreases something called habituation. Now I'm going to talk about habituation in a future content. What is that? It's the ability in psychology and just in understanding the mind. It's your ability to move on from a thought. Habituation is where you can filter out what's not needed in your thinking to focus on what's actually important. With OCD battles and intrusive thoughts, it seeks to prevent you from that ability. So, you feel like you can't move on from the thought because you got to resolve it. You got to get that thing solved. The problem is when you're talking to a troll, it never gets resolved.
When you react with compulsive actions, it tells your mind. So when you react to this thought and start engaging with it, it tells your mind this thought is dangerous. You better pay attention to it. So the next time it comes around, you're going to have another response and it's going to be more and more heightened. And as I've tried to help you to see here, the troll takes any reaction, anything. So getting into the debate with the thought, that's a reaction. Arguing with the thought, that's a reaction. Trying to convince yourself that you're the opposite, you've reacted now. Confessing it repeatedly, you're reacting. Web searching the topic to see if you're a problem with this because you've had this thought. Another reaction praying the thought will go away. A common Christian response, God, make the thought go away. When's this thought going to go away? People write to me, Mark, when is this thought ever going to go away? Because many Christians want God to just remove the thought for them. Or many Christians think that their spiritual or religious applications or their rituals that these are exempt from this. It's not compulsive. I'm doing very godly things. The problem is that we are seeking relief. And when you're seeking relief, you're hoping the troll will just go away. But what we need to learn to do is stand to the troll and not respond to it and not feed the fear of it.
This is very important to understand because we want the troll to go away. The troll represents your intrusive thought. we just wanted to go away. But what you're needing to learn to do is to no longer be afraid of it to be able to stand in the presence of it and it no longer dictates your life.
Now, many of us get into the intrusive thought cycle. This becomes a big part of what's called OCD or scrupulosity where the thought arrives and it creates some form of disturbance within us. heightened uncertainty, a sense of disgust, anxiety, a large sense of guilt or shame. So then you react and engage by doing something to try to neutralize it, to try to like make it calm down or to appease it. It's like we we we we try to do something to appease. But you're not going to make a troll you're not going to make a bully go away by appeasing it. You have to actually stand to the fear and not react. But in this pattern here, we feel like we get temporary relief. We said the thing, we did the little prayer. We got reassurance. We looked it up online and we went, "Ah, now I feel better." What we don't realize is we've fallen into a trap because now the next time the thought returns, it's going to come back stronger. Because we've told our brain, we've told our internal world, this thought needs to be paid attention to and we need to respond every time it shows up. So the troll learns which thought get the biggest reaction. And so this even happens within your brain, within your mind. Your nervous system starts to become trained. Danger, danger, danger. And it sees this is a problem. Next time it comes up, I've got to react in the same way.
If you think you resolve the topic, quote unquote, the topic can shift subjects and change to other things. And so if you challenge a blasphemous thought and you feel like you resolved it, maybe the intrusive thought shifts to a violent one. You resolve the violent thought, it moves to a sexual one. The content is not the point cuz it can find all kinds of content. It's your reaction to it that needs relearning.
Now, there's a lot of strategies we use that backfire. We do thought suppression, push it away. This increases the fear, the fear and the perceived danger. Oh, this thing is dangerous. That suppression tells you this thought super dangerous. We apply the don't think about it approach. Now, as Christians, we need to understand when you do that, you apply the method of the law. And when you apply the method of the law, it actually makes it grow. And I've taught about that from a script scriptural standpoint. But let me just explain it practically. If I tell you whatever you do, don't think of the color yellow. Whatever you do, don't think about yellow. Don't don't let anything yellow enter into your screen. Well, that's difficult because I've already got yellow in the heading of the slide that I'm showing. There's some hint of yellow that you could probably pick out in the painting behind me or something or shades of it. Even my lighting has a tinge of of amber to it and could have some yellow in it, right? It fires up fire. That's the nature of it. And or we go into reassurance seeking temporary relief relief that trains the brain to actually need more because you actually don't find peace. You need more reassurance later on and more reassurance over confession. Where as Christians we treat the thought showing up as sin. That thought just showed up. It's sin now. And it requires repentance. It requires forgiveness and resolution. But quote unquote resolution doesn't happen. The spiral continues. We go into avoidance patterns of all these things to just try to never have to deal with that thought showing up. I find even in spiritual warfare framing we by doing that we give the thought enormous significance. I'm dealing with this enemy. Here it comes. It's speaking to me. Or we get into demon chasing. And a lot of spiritual warfare approaches invoke law-based performance-based tried tactics to try to like make everything better. And it inflames OC OCD distortions. Uh I have topics on that long form. I talk about spiritual warfare and OCD. You can look all that stuff up. But one of the things that I talk about is not feeding the trolls. In fact, in a previous video, I talked about the power of one word. That one word being nothing. doing nothing to react to the thought.
Now, what does non-reaction look like? Because for many, it feels counterintuitive. It feels like maybe you're doing something wrong. I got to solve this. Well, non-reaction is not suppression. You notice the thought, but you don't react to it as though it's this heightened emergency. You may feel fear, but you don't feed the fear. There's a big difference between feeling fear and feeding fear. There's that troll again is a great way to respond. Name it for what it is, a troll. It's not a revelation. It's not a special hidden insight. Your mind is checking for threats. You don't feel safe. It's okay. I'm learning to be loved right where I'm at. I don't have to respond to this. I'm going to let this thought pass through without feeding it, trying to fix it, trying to resolve it. I notice the thought. I'm not going to give it my energy. I feel uncomfortable right now. I'm going to feel the discomfort and I'm going to return my attention to what is in front of me that is real and that is true and that is actually of importance right here and right now. I'm going to stay present in the moment even though this thought seems to be on the back burner and it's yelling and screaming and demanding my attention. This takes practice. This is not something that will all of a sudden change overnight. It takes daily regular practice and you'll fall into some goofy patterns of the past and you get back up. You keep practicing again.
I want to say this too is that God is not an intrusive thought because many Christians treat their intrusive thoughts as God. God trying to get their attention, God trying to warn them, God trying to send them a signal. It reveals the distortion of how they even relate to God as though he's waiting around the corner and at the last minute he jumps in to throw a thought your way. In fact, letting the thought pass by will in the long run mature your thinking and what you relate to as God thoughts. That's a whole subject within itself. But not reacting, not reacting to the troll, not feeding it, it actually welcomes a sense of maturity in your life. Because this will not only help you with your intrusive thoughts, this will help you with all of your thoughts. It helps you to gain a sense of self-control. The ability to have an urge, to have a disturbance, to have an emotion washing through your mind, your body, even at times feeling like it's consuming you, but it doesn't dictate your behavior. And I find that one thing that OCDers and those who suffer with scrupulosity and struggle with it but work the process they become stronger in self-control because how they relate to these thoughts and changing that develops all kinds of new patterns and how you relate to thoughts in general.
Now what happens to the thought when you stop feeding it? It loses its charge over time. Slowly you increase your ability to move on to other topics and other things. Doesn't happen right away. Way I describe it is the volume lowers. H you you see it screaming then maybe sometime down the road it's not screaming as loud. Still there but the volume lowers and the volume lowers and over time it gets to a place where it's just not grabbing your attention anymore and the volume is so low. And there's another aspect to it where the urgency fades. you're not as reactive anymore. You're not you're not in a place where every alarm is just triggering you to do something. It helps you to relate to all anxiety and even potential panic attacks cuz you start to learn that there's that alarm going off right now. Uh this is what's happening to me. And now you learn to regulate your emotional response in a new way. I even find that it helps you to stop organizing your life around avoidance. avoiding the trigger or avoiding it because you know when a trigger happens you've practiced your response. You know how to deal with this. You've done it before. You can do it again. We have to be reminded that freedom from the from uh is not the absence of the thought. Freedom is not like the thought just going away. It's it's it's in the absence of terror when the thought arrives. So basically, you're learning to no longer be afraid of that thought. When you're no longer afraid of a thought, you have now become incredibly empowered. And what I find in my journey is the ability to regain my ability to choose thoughts, to choose my focus. Those of you that struggle with intrusive thoughts, when you work the process in the journey, you can gain a powerful ability to have healthy focus. This is where I'm going with my thoughts. this is where I'm going with my actions.
Now, what the trolls don't want you to know is they don't want you to know that the weapons are shame and fear. Cuz when shame gets there, you feel just terrible that the thought even showed up. When fear is there, you're afraid of the thought even showing up. And so the fear and the shame cause us to overreact, right? Because we have this sense of like these thoughts are us. This means something about me and about my identity. So this leads us to an understanding that the content of the thought is not your identity. This isn't who you are. Intrusive thoughts are not a window into something in who you are. You but you don't strengthen your identity by arguing back. You don't go I'm going to know who I am because I'm going to argue back with everything that that invades that. Do you notice that people that walk insecurity in who they are, you don't see them yelling back, fighting back, cuz like the louder we yell, it shows the more insecure we are. Do you notice that pattern? People that are secure in who they are, they actually more calmly walk through. And that physical picture is what I want to encourage you to develop within. You don't do this overnight. It comes about with practice.
The problem is that intrusive thoughts, they attach to what you care about the most. And what you care about the most has a road into your identity, doesn't it? So your your sense of who you are as a parent. If you're you you're a parent and you're a loving parent and you get a violent thought about your child, it's because you love your child. But these thoughts have wrapped around that. A devoted believer gets blasphemous thoughts because their faith matters to them. The thought is not a window into your identity. It's a troll targeting your values and so that gets an inroad into your identity and a lot of people can struggle with thought action fusion just because you have a thought. You feel you're so capable of it and then you tie it into your identity and who you are and creates a lot of torment.
What the trolls don't want you to know is that starving your compulsion dissolves the thoughts and its power over time. You can gain your focus back. You can become stronger in your faith. you get some little wins. And when you get little wins, it can encourage you to remind you, hey, you can do this. When I started having victories over certain thoughts that then I remembered that when another subject would come up and the disturbance would hit, hey, I've done this before. I can do this again. And so, the troll doesn't want you to realize you can choose your focus. You can choose your new direction and what you're going to focus on. There's a video I've done called the gentle redirect. If you want to know more about that, check that out. The gentle redirect. Search my name, gentle redirect. It'll show you the video. It's helped a lot of people about how we can gently redirect our focus from whatever the thought is screaming into what is healthy and into what is helpful right now. You're not feeding it. You're not reacting to it. You're moving from that. and you're gaining back that sense where I can point my compass in a new direction.
So, which aspect of this was helpful for you today? You've been struggling and fighting with your intrusive thoughts and wondering why they keep coming back stronger. Maybe this teaching has been helpful for you to break things open. You've been feeding the troll. It's okay. Everyone who struggles with intrusive thoughts has done this. I have over and over and over again. Nobody taught us. But starting today, you can begin practicing something different. Not fighting, not suppressing, simply just not feeding this. And if this is something that you're walking through, then trust and know you're not alone. Many, many others are working through the same process and they're gaining victory, too.
So, who could benefit from this that you know of? Is there a friend that you you say, "Hey, you know, this helped me out a whole lot. I think it could help you, too." Do me a favor, click that like button and click subscribe. that would bless me a whole lot. You can also go over to markahjesus.com to find out more about our materials and resources. You can even support these videos by clicking on the donate button and it's greatly appreciated those of you that have supported this content and supported the ministry work. Most of all, I'd encourage you get a copy of the OCD healing journey because this is going to help you to understand how to navigate through intrusive thoughts, how to get more to the root system of what it's like to walk in the grace of God, to experience his love and let that love have a deep and meaningful work on our life and our journey. You can also find all kinds of materials on OCD by going to markus.com/cdhelp.
Lord willing in the creek, don't rise. This is your brother from another mother saying I'll be back with more insights for your healing and freedom journey. But in the meantime, I'm out.