Thinking is the summoning of ghosts

How can we rest in open awareness, dodging the pitfall of Cognitive Fusion?

Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views they take of them.

Epictetus, Stoic Philosopher

I find it useful to think of thoughts as ghosts. Not all of them haunt us, but the ones that do are unsparing wraiths. I turn to this metaphor because thoughts have two specter-like qualities: they can materialize from seemingly nothing (the stoic philosopher Epictetus noted this when he referred to spontaneous thoughts as “appearances” in his writings), and if we permit them, they can possess us.

The mystical appearance of a thought is not enough to qualify it as ‘haunting.’ Rather, it is a thought’s capacity to seize and grip our psyches that produces this effect. Roughly speaking, the ability of thoughts to possess us and subsequently haunt us is what psychologists call ‘cognitive fusion.’ When this occurs, we are no longer able to view our thoughts as being separate from ourselves. We become what we think!

Pema Chödrön, the Tibetan-Buddhist nun, famously quipped that we are the sky and everything else is just weather. This includes those thoughts that magically materialize and wander through our minds. I find that this sage insight carries immense power. It captures a form of thinking that scientists only formalized at the turn of the 21^st century.

Eastern traditions such as Buddhism have long noted that we are not our thoughts. It took psychologists a few decades to expand this insight into a therapeutic framework.

In the 1970s, the clinical psychologists Steven C. Hayes began suffering from debilitating panic attacks that he could not explain. During these bouts of mental turmoil, he came to realize that when panic-triggering thoughts surfaced in his mind he would often hasten to combat them and joust them into oblivion. However, this approach only strengthened the triggering thought.

In the decades that followed, Hayes worked with his colleagues Kelly Wilson and Kirk Strosahl, to develop a framework to understand how he could mitigate these tempestuous thoughts. It was during this period that the team of researchers developed Relational Frame Therapy. It emerged from studies that sought to understand how humans learn to relate symbols, words, and concepts to each other in ways that reshape experience itself.

This is a revolutionary idea!

Words are not merely descriptors of reality; they also hold the power to subtly influence how reality is perceived!

(Check: Sources for Further Thinkering)

This has massive implications for how our thoughts can affect us if we are unable to defuse from them. For instance, if a thought surfaces in our minds that highlights a feeling of loneliness, we can end up believing that we are lonely, even though the thought refers to an ephemeral emotional state. Paradoxically, once we are cognitively fused to the thought, the feeling is also reinforced (which is what Hayes observed with his panic attacks).

In 1999, Hayes, Wilson, and Strosahl published a landmark book titled Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change. It described a detailed framework that they had developed to help individuals exorcise the thoughts that haunted them. Their framework consisted of six steps:

1) Acceptance – Admitting that there is a ghoulish thought in mind that is attempting possession.

2) Cognitive Defusion– Seeing our thoughts as immaterial ghosts and not literal truths.

3) Present-Moment Awareness – Paying attention to what is happening in the moment, i.e., a thought is attempting to possess me.

4) Self-As-Context – Being the sky and treating thoughts as weather.

5) Values Clarification – Choosing a set of principles to help orient ourselves. This helps distinguish us from our thoughts.

6) Committed Action – Acting in accordance with the values towards which we are oriented instead of the hearkening of our thoughts.

By attempting to put this framework into practice, we can take strides towards allowing inspiring and uplifting thoughts to possess us as opposed to the crippling ones that far too often find ready accommodation in our minds.

Thoughts are ghosts and they will possess us. What matters is not how impervious our minds are to possession, but rather how skilled we are in telling apart a friendly ghost from a fiendish one. 

~ Granville D. Austin

Sources for Further Thinkering:

Happiness Is an Empty Promise – Steven Hayes – There are many things that “feel good but don’t live well”

Who dunnit? Cross-linguistic differences in eye-witness memory – An exceedingly interesting paper that reveals how language influences memory.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: Origins and Creators – An incredibly informative resource!