Transcription
So, are you struggling with intrusive thoughts? I mean, man, you're really wrestling with these thoughts that come your way. Well, today I want to talk to you about one word that you can apply. And this one word can help empower you into a new journey that can help you into a journey of overcoming the influence that these thoughts are having in your life.
So, welcome to the healing and freedom journey. Mark de Jesus here. I am your friendly neighborhood 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've arrived at a great place. So, let's get into this.
I want to talk to you about this one word cuz I really believe this can help you. It's helped me tremendously and help so many people along their way. But first, let's talk about what are intrusive thoughts. I mean, what are we dealing with here? When it comes to an intrusive thought, it's a unwanted, involuntary thought, a feeling, an image or urge that enters your mind, usually without warning, right? They often feel disturbing. They give a sense of disturbance, some anxiety, some guilt, some doubt that just begins to increase. There's alarms that are going off within you, right? And this disturbance feels out of character with who you are. You can even question yourself and question your thoughts and wondering what kind of meaning is there to this. These thoughts often go against your values. They take what you value and flip it as though you are some kind of deviant, some kind of sinner, some kind of these are these are thoughts that need to be chased down and they increase a sense of confusion in increase a sense of anxiety, guilt, increase doubt.
Okay, I have so much that describes this in my material and if anything I'm sharing with you is a blessing. You're going to want to get a copy of the OCD healing journey where I get into this more.
Now, what you need to understand about intrusive thoughts first and foremost, everybody has them. This is important to keep in mind, these thoughts are not exclusive to you. People all over the planet have them. But for a certain group of people, there's a added chain reaction that kicks into play. It often creates a form of obsessions and compulsions. It's something that we call OCD for those of you that it gets into your faith battleground. It's often called scrupulosity. And it creates a cascade of these seven distortions. I talk about them all the time. all seven of them begin to kick into gear and create this whole alarm system that begins to go off.
Now, another thing that you need to know is that, as I mentioned, they go against your values. They take what you care about and they turn them and create an alarming urgency about them. I often find, and this is true even in research, is that they often trigger morally hypersensitive people. You have a very over over sensitive conscience. You're very highly sensitive to anxiety, a highly a highly sensitive to guilt, a high sense of sensitivity to any wrongness. Maybe you're a rule follower, a sinfocused Christian. Maybe you got legalism that's infected your journey. You've got perfectionism that's invaded your life. This intense rigidity about your thought world that makes you prone to feeling like you got to do something about it. And even within the distortions I teach about there's this high sense of inflated responsibility. That fifth one there in the distortions. I got to do something about this. What you need to understand is that the thought or the topic is not the problem. It's not the subject that's coming to you. It's actually your response that's more of the problem. This is what we need to understand.
Now there are common responses that we often go into to try to deal with these thoughts that are coming our way, right? There's a sense of spiritual excavation that we get into. We seek to interrogate the thought to find out where it came from because we think the content has great meaning that you need to dig into and understand. It's common that Christians can try to fight back the thought. We argue back. We tell it to stop. We tell it to go away. We do a bunch of forgiveness or repenting or we try to cast it out and we try to do all these spiritual calisthenics that we get into to try to fight it off. But the thought keeps growing. Maybe you start chasing demons around or or or whatever things you start getting into to try to make it go away. Make it go away. But there's an interesting thing that happens and keeps coming back. Keeps coming back. And at times you feel like the thoughts growing. You can get into mental compulsions where you're reviewing, analyzing, ruminating. The thought keeps growing bigger. Reassurance seeking where you ask others, you confess it, you web search it, you ask AI, you Google your symptoms. Or there's neutralizing rituals you can get into, trying to put a a good thought in there to to maybe replace it or undo it, asking for forgiveness, undoing it by maybe an opposite reaction. I gotta repay or get rebaptized again or I can't move forward until I get this thought and this thing just right. You may get into checking, trying to like review your feelings. How do I feel about this thought? What should I what should I do? Cuz maybe I feel it. Maybe I want it. You begin to monitor your body's feelings. Maybe even checking, do I secretly want this thought? You can get into confession and overconfessing of your sins, repeating the sinner's prayer, going back and getting saved over and over again or some kind of routine that you get into. Thought suppression is a common one. Stop it. Stop it. Don't think about this thought. Don't think about this thought. And how many of you you've come to realize when you do that, when you say, "Stop thinking about it. Stop thinking about it." It actually inflames it. Or maybe try to push the thought away. No, no, no, no, no, no. do everything I can. There's a lot of avoidance that comes into this. Staying away from people, places, things, settings, situations, anything that could trigger the thought from showing up and this creates compulsions. It creates a compulsive activity. So, you have the obsession. These things here create the compulsion. You get a little bit of the O, a little bit of the C is where we get the O C D that kicks into play.
Now, here's the problem with these responses. The problem with these responses is that they confirm that the thought is quote dangerous. When you practice these things, it validates, yeah, that thought is problematic and I got to really do everything I can to stay away from it. It increases the fear factor over this thought. It actually stimulates the thought. Your fussing and wrestling, all these things you do, it makes the thought grow. It keeps it active. It can actually keep you locked in catastrophic reactions and keep you in shame. Oh my goodness, how could I even have this thought over time? The thoughts expand. Now, they may expand into other topics and other territory. Your compulsions can expand. You start doing more and more things to try to combat these thoughts that you're wrestling with. But then over time the truth is they start imprisoning and shrinking your world and you find that the bubble is just coming in closer and closer and closer around you. These things that we do in practice they actually don't bring long-term peace. They increase fear. They increase the rigid legalistic rule following perfectionistic ways that we're bound under. And like everyone who writes to me about this and everyone who's battled this, they exhaust you. They exhaust you inside. They that you're tired, you're worn out. Many fall into depression and deep despair and discouragement. They don't know what to do anymore. These practices have actually keep you from moving on from the thought because really in reality these intrusive thoughts that everyone has but for the compulsives are a deep struggle are thoughts we can move through move past and move on in our life and our journey but we need equipping but these compulsive activities they don't allow us to do it. So therefore it blocks us from long-term healing. Now, we may do something that gives us like a temporary peace. These compulsions give us a temporary ah because we're seeking for relief, but they actually don't lead us into what we really need, which is long-term freedom. Instead, we remain in these crisis kind of reactions.
So, today I want to present to you one word that we need to begin practicing. One word. It's so simple. And some of you as you hear it, you go, "Well, I either didn't think about this or I go, well, that takes a lot of practice." But this is actually something that we need to apply. This one word in how to relate and how to respond to your intrusive thoughts in new ways is this nothing. Nothing. This is actually what you need to do and learn to do. This is going to take practice. Your intrusive thoughts are not going to lessen over time. In fact, it's not about your intrusive thoughts going away. Every week, people write to me, "How do I make these thoughts go away?" It's not about making the thought go away. It's about arming yourself with a renewed response and starving your compulsive reactions because all those reactions are actually making the content stronger and they're bringing more because you're arguing back and then a new argument comes up and then it inflames in another area and then you're chasing and chasing and chasing and chasing down. What you actually need to learn to do in response to these thoughts is nothing. Don't push back. Don't argue back. Don't fight back debate. Come up with a list of rituals and things you got to do and fussing. Don't avoid. Don't run. Don't hide. You stay right where you are. One step in front of the other. Do nothing in response to this thought. You feel the fear. You feel the discomfort. You feel the waves of stuff. the urges that are flowing through your physical body and your mind that want to take over that demand you do something about these thoughts. Nope. You do nothing. You do nothing.
And it's interesting because as I've taught people this and walked people through it, it reminds me of something important that's in scripture that is often not taught. We get into Ephesians and Paul talks about spiritual warfare. Many Christians get lost in those scriptures and they apply them in very distressing ways, but there's something tucked into it we don't see. I wasn't taught it, but it's right there and it's repeated where Paul says, "When you've done all to stand, you stand." Stand, therefore, this passage of scripture is reminding us, we've already been given armor. We've already been given what we need to walk through this, but we've been taught we've got to do a bunch of things and jump through a bunch of hoops to try to combat these thoughts away, to try to fight them all away, to try to argue them all away. And we get in these repetitive, compulsive cycles that actually inflame the thoughts. You do nothing but stand. You stand in the storm while the waves are crashing against you. You stand when the winds are coming against you. You stand in the midst of the hurricane and you hold on to the love that God has for you. This goes against so many of our responses that we typically do. But here's the key that you need to understand when it comes to our thought world is that when we begin to apply this, we actually face the fear. The problem is not the topic, the content. It's your reaction to the thought. And the reaction to the thought is your confusion and fear over the content that's being brought to you. And that goes into a variety of forms and ways that it happens. I remember in the early stages of my journey, one of the first topics I began writing about was I will not fear because I I realized that so many in the body of Christ were strangled by the work of anxiety, worry, and all the aspects of fear that create rumination. Really the reality is we're afraid of the thought. But when I learn to stand, I'm actually facing the fear. And I learn to overcome the fear I have about the thought. When you're no longer afraid of the thought, it begins to lose its power over time. The power of the voice, the volume of it lowers and lowers and lowers because you're actually standing up to the bully. And for many of us, we've not been taught how to face our fears and walk through them. We go into fight or flight. We go into avoidance. We go into the fight of fixing and all this stuff we're fussing over, increasing our stress response, increasing our stress response. Meanwhile, God never intended for us to fight our battles from a place of fear. You and I are on a journey of learning to overcome our fears. I do nothing to the thought and what it's saying.
Now, in the midst of it, as I'm standing there, I'm learning to embrace the love that God has for me. I'm learning to stand because this is the moment where I'm embracing his love. And in love, one of the things I teach about is what I call the gentle redirect. I can gently because that gentleness is important. I can gently redirect my thoughts into a renewed direction. Maybe it's whatever I'm doing that's in front of me. I'm at work or you're with a friend or maybe you're just by yourself and or or you're in some kind of setting where these things are kicking up because oftentimes when we're in relational proximity, we're with other people, the stuff's firing and it's trying to like make us disconnect. But in love, I can gently redirect my thoughts into a renewed direction, which is what's right in front of me, which is what's important and what matters. It's that gentleness that's there. It's a compassionate response. You see, in this, we're practicing what I consider to be the most important practice when it comes to the battles we're waging over our thoughts and our lives. It's found in 1 John 4. And it was given in a video that I talked about this one scripture saved my mental health. And I stand on that because it has been so valuable. Perfect love casts out fear. It is the love of God that I need. Now, many of us go, "Well, I just want to feel that love and just I want to just kind of sit in a cocoon and and yes, there's moments for that, of learning to fill ourselves, learning to recalibrate safety, but there's also the stretch muscle that I need. I need to learn to walk in the safety of God's love, but also practice it by stretching my muscles, my spiritual and emotional muscles, and to learn to stand in the midst of this thought, doing nothing to try to combat back, to try to argue back because these thoughts are trolls. And the moment I start engaging a compulsion, the troll starts to gain energy. It starts to gain power because it's got my attention. What I'm going to do is I'm going to stand in the power of nothing. And this takes practice, but it's going to open up my healing journey. It's going to strengthen my heart. And it's going to lead me to greater maturity to help develop my character, develop not only my response to this thought, but in response to all thoughts. For God's not giving you the spirit of fear, but of power and love and a sound mind.
If this resonates at all with you, I encourage you to get a copy of the OCD healing journey because this is going to help you get rooted in this. It's going to help you to recognize the problem is not the problem to help you walk through the seven distortions that influence your journey and give you some tactics to begin to overcome the torment that these intrusive thoughts bring. If this video was a benefit to your life and your journey, click that like button. You can also consider subscribing. That would be wonderful. You can also go over to my website, mark the dehesus.com, where you can click on the donate button if you'd like to support these videos. You can also go to my topics page to find out more about resources and materials and even my about me if you want to hear more about my journey and how I'm helping to support believers to live in mental, emotional, and relationship health. I pray this was a blessing to you. Lwell and 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."