Thought defusion is an acceptance and commitment therapy concept that stems from the age-old practice of mindfulness.
Mindfulness practice has been a fundamental way for people to resolve the challenges in life, to expand their being and possibilities of life for a long time.
It’s a natural skill that we all have. It’s just that we haven’t developed it very well.
Unless you have done meditation or awareness practice a lot, you may not realize that you are not your thoughts.
Your thoughts come to your head, you just didn’t learn to catch those and walk away from them.
We can say positive things, that is good. That is creating a story of a life that you want to live.
However, there are limitations that I have found in always trying to sell yourself on the story and make yourself believe it.
Stories are good as guides or maps to guide us to where we want to go. Obviously the story you’ve had about yourself and social anxiety is not a good story and leads you to the direction that you want to go.
But I don’t want you to make you believe that story.
It’s a guide map to where you want to go because fundamentally, you want to be able to hold our story and beliefs lightly so that we can be flexible because that story at some point may not quite work for you.
So you don’t want to make yourself believe and have all this difficulty being caught in your thoughts.
So we have to learn how to step away from this current social anxiety story and these negative thoughts and observe them and let them go.
Because we’ve been practicing this so much and then caught in the story, it’s going to be hard at first but the more you gain distance from these thoughts the more that you don’t have to listen to them.
We’re retraining your relation to your thoughts, how you relate to your thoughts so that not only can you dissociate from the social anxiety thoughts you can also dissociate from all your thoughts.
You can follow ones that you like that take you in a certain direction but you don’t want to hold onto them because you’ll stop being present and see what else is happening.
You can let thoughts inspire you but you’re not going to follow them.
With thought defusion, the having noticing exercise is the basic exercise which I can teach really quickly to help you gain some distance from your thoughts.
Like this for example, everytime that you leave me a message telling me about your frustrations we declare those as what is coming from your mind.
So right there you are typing what’s in your mind.
That is not your static, that’s not the way things are.
That is your mind painting the picture of how your reality are showing up and what it’s used to and how the circuits are trained.
We can retrain those circuits and that’s what we’re doing with thought defusion and mindfulness practice.
First you have to have awareness that you’re doing this.
Once you have that awareness, you pick a thought and you start to see thoughts and you let them go.
Having noticing exercise is about a particular thought or set of thoughts that you can kind of gain distance by putting some extra words in there.
So if I have a thought that nobody likes me and people know that I’m socially awkward. That thought is creating my reality.
I am set up to fail because I believe I’m that thought.
You have to declare that you are having the thought that you are socially awkward.
Next step is noticing that you have the thought that nobody likes you which should be getting further away.
Now, you created distance from that thought.
The more you practice the easier it gets.
I encourage you to practice this exercise everyday in combination with breathing.
We’re not taught how to breathe properly.
I will soon teach you to do internal breathing which is very powerful.
The fundamental and foundational base of mindfulness is what this is about.
Mindfulness is almost a misleading word, it’s about a deeper mind.
You need to do these practices and some other new ones.
Cheers,
David
