← Decoded | Unlock The Secrets of Human Behavior, Emotion and Motivation
Decoded | Unlock The Secrets of Human Behavior, Emotion and Motivation
The Truth About Intrusive Thoughts and OCD
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What do you do when a thought enters your mind that feels disturbing, foreign, or completely out of alignment with who you think you are? You ask yourself, why would I think that? Does this mean something about me? Am I secretly capable of something horrible? Most people immediately assume that if that thought entered their mind, it must somehow be coming from some deeper layer of themselves. But this assumption is one of the most destructive misunderstandings about how the mind actually works. Your brain is wired for deception, but here's the truth. Patterns can be broken. The code can be rewritten. Once you hear the truth, you can't go back. So the only question is, are you ready to listen? Let's start with a question that many of you are afraid to say out loud. What do you do when a thought enters your mind that feels disturbing, foreign, or completely out of alignment with who you think you are? A thought flashes across your mind and immediately your body reacts, your heart rate starts to increase, your stomach tightens, and suddenly you are questioning everything you once knew about yourself. You ask yourself, why would I think that? Does this mean something about me? Am I secretly capable of something horrible? Most people immediately assume that if that thought entered their mind, it must somehow be coming from some deeper layer of themselves. And don't even get me started on shadow work or parts work. Believe me, we will get into that in future episodes. But this assumption is one of the most destructive misunderstandings about how the mind actually works. Intrusive thoughts are unwanted, unrequested, often really disturbing thoughts that appear suddenly and repeat themselves in cycles that can be discerned through pattern work. They can involve fear, taboo images, catastrophic scenarios, relationship doubts, sexual thoughts, fears about harming others, fears about your faith or going to hell. Many people experience them but don't ever talk about them because they feel ashamed. And I get it. But intrusive thoughts are far more common than most of you realize. In fact, many people live with them for years and have never even heard the term. I see this time and time again. In Break Method, people get to the end of module one, where we have a lecture about intrusive thoughts and ocd, and people show up on their next session and say, busy. You just explained 30 to 40 years of my life and my pain, and I finally feel understood. So I want you to remember, you are not your thoughts. Just because something populates inside of your mind doesn't mean that it originated from you, and it doesn't mean that it's originating from some deeper, shadowy side of you. Okay, I will break this down extensively today, but this is Going to be a thread we'll have to keep pulling because it is extremely complex. We'll try to highlight the different areas from the physical structures involved to the emotional structures involved. But this even has tentacles out into multi dimensionality and spiritual conversations. So I will try to help highlight or illuminate the entire system. But this is going to take a couple, a couple piggybacking sessions to fully expose it. To understand intrusive thoughts, we have to first understand anxiety itself. Anxiety is really not the villain that many people think that it is. Especially in today's world where people talk about anxiety and panic attacks. Is this thing that can hold you back. And here's the reality you guys know from watching these episodes. If anyone knows about anxiety and panic attacks, it's your girl. I've been there for many, many years of my life, so I understand how destructive and debilitating panic attacks and severe anxiety can be. Certainly not trying to diminish that. But I think what ends up happening is we talk so much about very debilitating anxiety or generalized anxiety disorder and panic attacks, and then we shy away from claiming the emotion of anxiety. Right. We try to kind of bulk them all together. So it's very frequent that I would have a client break and they're like, oh, no, no, I don't experience anxiety. And I'm like, really? Okay, let's go down the list. And it's like, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. I'm like, so you do actually experience anxiety. You're just not having panic attacks. You are using it as a way to stay busy, stay functional, stay on top of things, make sure that nobody gets in trouble. That is still anxiety, my friends. So we have to keep in mind that anxiety has gotten bulked up into, I think a lot of the labels that are really more specific toward generalized anxiety disorder and panic attacks, those are separate. You can still experience anxiety as one of your primary emotions without having panic attacks. And it's important to consider that when we're thinking about anxiety. One of the easiest ways to draw correlation would be because it's language that many of you understand, the language of fight, flight, freeze, fawn, flop. And one of the things that I think is important for us to consider here is in break method. And if you need to go back to early episodes in season one, I explained to you what the different emotional addiction cycles are and which ones are the most common. So you can go back to that. I believe the episode is on like the overwhelm trap or something like that. You can go on the deep dive. You can go on a little scavenger hunt. Worst case scenario, you find another epic episode and you're welcome. So going back there just to kind of drop a little bit of foundational knowledge is in break method. We have found that people experience a cycle of three emotional states. You start with your origin emotion, which is how everybody responds to fear. Fear is the most primary emotion that every human being experiences. It is what often is wrapped up into our instinct. Right? Our instinct is to run away from the bear, divert any sort of unnecessary blood flow to areas that aren't required so that we can put it all into our large muscles and we can save ourselves by arguably running away. This would be the origin emotion. We then move into a protective emotion. So instead of what happens when we initially realize we are in a bad situation, the protective emotion is, what am I gonna do with what I assume is going to happen to me? Do I run toward the danger and try to fight my way out of it? Do I run away from the danger and try to avoid it entirely? Do I go toward the danger and try to reason with it, manipulate it? Fawn to try to make it like me? Right? These are all the different things the brain is running through. And we each have specific patterns that we repeat over and over again. Example would be you don't fight and fawn someone because we know there's a three part cycle. You may fawn in your protective response, which you know, that's me. I fawn in my protective response. But eventually that doesn't work. You trying to control or manipulate or coerce or whatever other people. Sometimes it's effective for saving yourself, sometimes it's not. And the reality is, often it's not because we can't actually control other people's reactions. But I digress. If your protective emotion is that fawn response, you're probably stepping in, you're trying to smooth over people. Please placate, be helpful to other people to try to keep them stable. Eventually you're still gonna get pissed. Okay? You're still going to build up resentment. You're going to overload your plate. You're gonna feel like the whole world is on your shoulders. Eventually you're gonna get overstimulated. And guess what? When you get to your escalating emotion, which is that third emotional position, you're probably gonna snap into anger and example. For me, I fawn and then I fight. I don't ever run away. Maybe I should. That might be some pattern opposition that I should consider, but I don't run away and avoid. So typically, if you were to look at that spectrum of the fight fright, fight fright, fight, flight, freeze, fawn and flop. Typically you have one that matches with your protective emotion and then you have an alternate that matches with your escalating motion. When people go to anxiety as their protective emotion, they almost always go to anger as their escalating motion. In break method, we have found that you can also go to an alternate of apathy. So example would be that would look like in the flight fright language. Flight fright. I keep wanting to say fright. Maybe we want to make it a thing. Fight flight. In that language, anger could be fight anger could also be flight. And then if you're adding in the apathy element, that could be the flop mechanism, which is where you essentially stop trying to do anything and you either dissociate or you detach or you go into some sort of catatonic state. In either case, you stop trying to help yourself at all. So it's important for those of you listening to try to wrap your head around what your cycle is. Because if you do the opposite and you go to anger as your protective emotion, which for those of you that are in a relationship with one of these, I am. It's not hard to tell. People know when they're quick to anger. So a person like this is quick to anger, and then they typically will go to anxiety as their escalating motion. And they could have one of those, those piggybacking patterns where they have a anxiety shame pattern, or they could have an anxiety apathy pattern. And in the case of anxiety shame, sometimes you have either a, like a freeze fawn, or you could have a fawn freeze that corresponds to that. If you have anxiety apathy, you could have a freeze flop. You could have a fawn flop. Either one of those would correspond. So when we're thinking about these anxiety, now for our working definition, is your brain trying to figure out what it needs to change about its external environment as a way to stay safe? I have to double check this. I have to placate this person. I have to withhold this information. They can't quite handle this. So your brain is giving you an effective checklist of what you have to do to survive that is anxiety. So if you do that, do you experience anxiety? So anxiety is your brain's attempt to protect you through thinking your way through it. So instead of fighting your way through it, it's how can I use my brain to strategize my way into survival? So in this way, the Brain is becoming both superhero and psychic simultaneously. Because it's superhero. It's like we can save you, we can get through anything. But also it's psychic because it's trying to anticipate, albeit through assumption, what is likely to happen to you in the future. And guess what? It's probably going to skew it negative. It's probably going to skew it catastrophic. And this is where we find ourselves in this conversation. It convinces you that if you think hard enough, worry hard enough, analyze, anticipate every possible scenario, somehow you can prevent bad things from happening. It actually tricks you into feeling productive. But the reality is that most of the things the anxiety tries to control are actually completely outside of your control. Because last time I checked, not God. At the same time, anxiety is convincing you that it has some sort of special insight into the future. It's also telling you possibly that this is intuition. If you want more information on this particular issue of the Instinct versus Intuition, go back to season one, episode four. That episode is awesome. And it digs really deeply into how to discern instinct from intuition. But right here where we're at in the anxiety loop, this is telling you that the danger is real. It's telling you that something terrible is about to happen and that you have to pay attention. And this is the psychic illusion of anxiety. And this is why it's so important to learn how to discern the difference between instinct and intuition. Because intuition, quite honestly, is usually inviting you toward the scary thing, not to justify pulling away from the scary thing. While instinct, of course, going back to that initial example of running away from the bear, instinct is usually causing you to manage, manage your distance from whatever that perceived dangerous thing or person is. And what happens in anxiety is that your brain starts to believe these assumptions, which again are really just predictions about what it thinks is going to happen. But many of these predictions are rooted in assumption. And these assumptions are built through your early childhood emotional pain. So they're not necessarily taking into consideration real objective reality. Today, if you are a consistent listener of this show, you probably listened last time about probably three, two to three weeks ago. Basing on the timing of our production schedule, an episode about somatic healing. And I shared a story about how as a younger child I was really anxious, but that anxiety would kick in when I was subject to my parents decision making. And then suddenly, as soon as I was by myself on the mean streets of New York City in the middle of the night, I was suddenly not afraid. Why is that? Was one situation objectively more safe than the other. Yeah, for sure. I was most likely objectively much more safe in the situations where I was in full blown panic with my parents because they didn't trust them than I was on New York City streets by myself at three o' clock in the morning. But my brain interpreted one as safe, although objectively it was not, and the other as unsafe, even though objectively it was probably not unsafe. So it's important for us to remember that what our brain deems as safe is not based on the rules of objective reality. It has everything to do with all of our previous emotional experience, what we perceive about ourselves, what we perceive about other people involved. So we have to remember that all of these patterns that we're talking about today are jumping off of this launch pad of our early childhood experiences. And the brain is going to adapt to those experiences by producing protective responses like what we're responding with today. So, example I used that I go to Fawn and then I go to fight. No flight. But I am seriously considering that as we're talking about this right now. So those protective responses are likely to show up now in your adult age in very deep ruts. It's very hard for us to change behavior as an adult. We can often become more aware of it. And unfortunately, what I have seen more often than not in the mental health, Instagram therapy, conscious community, spiritual community places is people become more aware of their patterns and they become better at talking about them, but they don't actually change the pattern from the root. And as you may know from listening to this podcast, that is the only work I'm genuinely concerned with. Anything that just causes you to talk more elegantly or intelligently about your problems, but doesn't ultimately solve the underlying problem feels, frankly like a total waste of time to me. I would never want to do that for one moment of my life. If you've been anywhere near the health and longevity space lately, you've probably heard the word peptides thrown around everywhere. Some people are calling them the future of medicine, others are warning you that the space is going to get messy fast. The reality is that both things are probably accurate to some extent. Peptides are rapidly moving into mainstream healthcare. Clinics are prescribing them, biohackers are experimenting with them, and regulatory conversations are evolving quickly. Which means one thing is becoming very clear. Your education on peptides matters. That's why I wanted to tell you about a program created by Ashley Madsen. Ashley is a double board certified physician assistant and a longevity clinician who's been prescribing peptides in clinical practice for over a decade. She's also one of the few educators in the space who approaches the topic from a clinical physiology perspective. Not strictly hype. Her course is called Peptides for High Performance. It's a self paced online program designed to help people understand how compounds actually work inside of the body. In the course, she breaks down things like metabolic peptides, mitochondrial optimization, growth and hormone support, regenerative repair, and sexual vitality. But through the lens of real clinical strategy and safety. This isn't a peptide stacking course. It's about truly understanding the mechanisms, the physiology, and how to use these peptides responsible in an industry that is evolving quickly. So whether you're a clinician, a serious health professional, or a biohacker who just wants to understand what you're really experimenting with, or maybe you just want to understand where the healthcare system is about to transition. This is one of the most grounded educational courses I've seen yet. Enrollment is open now, and if you use the code busy300, you're going to get $300 off the program. Just head to the show notes and enroll. So I tend to focus all of my work on not just teaching you to be aware and talk about it in an intellectual way, but how to actually get to the root and uproot the entire pattern so that you don't have to be held hostage by this pattern for the rest of your life. Because these responses will persist and they will dig deeper ruts, and they will cause you to consider the ruts that they've created as this sort of safety, familiarity. But those ruts cause you to not do the things in your life that you ultimately really want to do. Maybe you really do want to have a connected relationship where you experience peace and vulnerability and that feels not just attainable, but safe. Right? That involves you learning to get out of your rut, to step out of the pattern in which your brain is currently stuck. And this is where intrusive thoughts often enter the picture. Because the intrusive thoughts act like triggers to put you into your protective emotion. So I'll give you an example. Let's say that you're having a totally normal, relaxing day. You're like, oh, the kids are at school, the house is clean, I'm baking. And then without any sort of request, your brain's like, maybe your mom's gonna die. And you're like, wait, what? I was just trying to enjoy the fresh smell of bread. And now you're trying to get me to think about what would happen if my mom died. Okay, so this is an example of an intrusive thought. Why would I go from peaceful relaxing situation? My senses are engaged now, my brain almost daring me to think about something horrifying. Well, I'm glad you asked. Sometimes and there are different types of intrusive thoughts as I mentioned, because we are going to talk about some of the spiritual etiologies of intrusive thoughts as well. But let's use the example of the one I just gave you, like maybe your mom's gonna die. My brain was not used to as a child experiencing peace because something was always about to change. Something was always about to go wrong. So as a child it became a setup for me to feel at ease and peace because then I would get blindsided. So my brain decided if I remain in a hyper vigilant state and I'm always ready for something bad to happen, then at least I'm not caught off guard and I can step into that strategically. Right? This is the example of the anxiety showing up like a superhero, like it's cool. I'll just remain hyper vigilant all the time. I'll always be ready for some sort of strategy and then I won't get blindsided. It's going to be great. What does that do to your nervous system over the long haul? Well, it's not good. I got diagnosed with lupus when I was 23. I had three different forms of cancer and cancer, cancer adjacent when I was 15. It was a wild time. So let's just say my body didn't manage being in constant hyper vigilance well, as nobody's does. But nonetheless my brain decided that was a more viable long term strategy to keep me safe. So now fast forward into my adulthood. Thankfully for break and a wonderful husband and amazing kids and financial access and success, all these things, right? I can have days where I am at home doing nothing now baking bread because I'm a sourdough mom and the kids are at school and maybe I do have these moments of just complete relaxing peace. Aha. But my brain is addicted to the chaos from my childhood, right? And I'm giving you this as a hypothetical scenario. Thankfully this doesn't happen to me anymore. But certainly like 20, 16, 17, 18, you betcha. This would have happened for sure. So I'm relaxed. My brain actually gets the cue that relaxation and peace. That's actually dangerous because now you've let your guard down. What if, right? That's where the what if message starts to come in and it wants to Pull me into hyper vigilance. You can't relax. If you're relaxed, then what if. So what ends up happening is sometimes for some people, the brain will think of an intrusive thought. You didn't try to call it in. But now your brain body somatic connection is trying to get you to a place that feels familiar, which to me would be hyper vigilance if I were going off my old pattern. So what's happening is that my brain is triggering me to think about maybe a deep rooted fear or something that I've maybe been considering in the back of my subconscious to try to ruin my moment of peace. Because to my brain, peace actually feels dangerous. I hope that painted a picture. I hope that you can take a moment to think about what that would be for you. Because each one of us has has a different scenario. Or maybe peace isn't your trigger. Maybe it's feeling like someone's trying to tell you what to do. Maybe it is feeling like somebody's not listening to you. We all have whatever our primary trigger pattern is. So I urge you to consider that right now. If you have no idea what that is, A great place to start is always to go to breakmethod.com and start with brain pattern mapping. We'll be able to tell you what your biggest areas of trigger are, your self deception patterns, how your blind spots are currently holding you back, et cetera. So you can go to breakmethod.com and do that if you're really completely unsure. So now let's get back into this anxiety. We now understand that our brain is trying to protect us, to keep us in this sort of rut where life probably sucks to some extent, but it's a suck that our brain is used to, so it feels safe. So now our brain starts to come up with these different ways to make us think of something to get us back into the state that feels like the familiar. And the brain can start to scan for threats without you even thinking about it. So sometimes you're doing something and you think that you're focused on this other thing, but your brain is actually scanning for threats around you. Sometimes your brain is actually trying to jump to some sort of wild future scenario that has nothing to do with what you're currently focused on. And I think it's important to remind you that when anxiety does pop up, it's typically coming to you packaged in a specific okay, so very rarely is it going to be like, I wonder what it would be like to. That doesn't sound like intrusive thought. Intrusive thought anxiety. Sounds more like your son's skiing today. What if, because there's been avalanches, he goes on this one specific cliff and he does it without testing the snow quality? Right. That's a more intrusive thought form of anxiety where it's trying to be pitched to you as highly specific, which makes your mind latch onto it more. When it kind of goes through generals, that's usually not a sign of intrusive thought because your brain is actually trying to pitch to you that this particular moment that it's giving you is actually urgent. Like, this is the thing to pay attention to. And the other thing that's important to remember that I've talked about in previous episodes regarding my panic attacks is even if you had had 2,000 panic attacks, where every sing single time, you realize at the end, oh, that was just a panic attack in the moment, your brain is going to trick you into thinking, but this time it's a heart attack. It doesn't matter that the last 1999 times, it was actually just a panic attack. This one time, this is actually really dangerous. This time I have to go to the hospital. And this is how it uses that specificity against you. It. So if, as you're trying to talk yourself out of it, you're getting pushed back, but this time it's real or this time it's specific. We know this is a time to step back and observe very carefully. So now we want to zoom out for a moment and try to look at the mind from an entirely different perspective. I want you to imagine the mind like a map of territory. So think about in ancient times when different clans would plant their flags and they've got their coat of arms, and you can see who ruled which territory. Your mind functions much the same way. Thoughts are constantly trying to plant flags in a territory of your mind. And some of those flags represent truth, clarity, faith, and wisdom. Okay, great. Some of those flags, you're. You're actually trying to claim your territory in a sound way. Example, when you're going through break method and you learn Eli every time you execute Eli properly, you are firmly planting a flag of sovereignty on the territory map of your mind. But other thoughts are going to be more representative of fear, shame, despair, bitterness, self deception, regret, remorse. And the moment you allow one of those thoughts to remain unchallenged, it starts to establish territory on your map. And I want to remind you that territory is never lost all at once. So don't feel so overwhelmed right now that you're like, what's the use? I'm too broken. Territory is always lost incrementally. One foothold becomes an outpost. One outpost is going to eventually become a fortress. Intrusive thoughts will follow the same expansion pattern. And I'm not going to lie to you, they do escalate exponentially. But you can also collapse those exponentially as well, because they're all starting from a very clear origin point. And if you know how to collapse them from the origin point, even if you let it go, I'm giving an arbitrary number 1000 layers deep into intrusive thought. If we capture the right pattern origin, you can just as easily collapse out all of those same layers. But when we're thinking about the stages of this, I want you to remember that the first stage is a suggestion. It's a thought that appears suddenly and it might feel shocking or disturbing, but at this stage, it's trying to see if you will take the bait, right? It's dangling the thought to see what you're going to do with it. And if you immediately challenge or dismiss it, it often fades away. The second stage, you start to engage with it. You start to have a conversation with it, maybe you start to bargain with it, start to justify it. And instead of dismiss thought entirely, you are starting to analyze it. Maybe you're questioning it, maybe you're searching for evidence. And I think this is one of the biggest traps of shadow work, or parts work, asking the question, is this coming from something deeper? Is this something that I don't really know about that's just compartmentalized? I encourage you right now, hear me when I say this. Do not do that with intrusive thoughts. Create separation, create distance. Do not allow these thoughts to engage with you. I will tell you some stories if we have time at the end of this episode about clients that have mistakenly followed the advice of certain therapeutic modalities and done this and have made the issues so much more profound. So please tread lightly, be careful here, because if you engage with them at all and you potentially try to allow room for those to be coming from some deeper place in you, you risk actually identifying with it and allowing it even deeper access to you. The third stage is narrative based. The thought starts to become part of a story about your life or a story that weaves into maybe deep insecurities about you. Think of yourself. So instead of separating, that was a weird thought, or ew, I wonder where that came from. You actually start to say, maybe this is something that's tied to something about Who I really am. Maybe this is something that's a hidden, shadowy, compartmentalized part of myself. The fourth stage is the stronghold. The narrative starts to solidify into a belief that starts to shape your behavior and perception for the long haul. This process can also be understood through something I present in break method called the emotional domino effect. Domino one is where the initial thought or memory appears without awareness of the underlying pattern driving it. So this is where it comes forward, but you don't, you didn't request it, it came to you. Domino 2 occurs when additional thoughts about the past or even imagined futures start to stack on top of the original thought, right? So they start to become a sandwich, so to speak. Domino number three is when those thoughts begin spreading into other areas of your life, creating exaggerated or catastrophic assumptions about the future. So the initial thought becomes, well, I'm gonna now tie it to this person or this story. What if this problem augments and oh my God, what if now I'm gonna get divorced, right? The once you allow that initial intrusive thought, you can slip off the edge very quickly. I had a client who struggled with intrusive thoughts. And this person was adorably sweet, so kind, from the South. If you heard her voice, it would sound exactly like you're imagining right now in this moment. And this is, by the way, not uncommon. I've had many clients like this, but this one in particular stands out. Any thought she would think, she would latch onto it and think, well, maybe so this person, for example, would watch a documentary about a murder and she would actually think to herself, is it possible that I'm a murderer and I wouldn't know it? So such a deep seated self trust wound that anything that popped up, she tried to immediately make it mean something more deeply about herself or assume that maybe it was coming from some deeper layer of herself. So this is an example of how an underlying issue can start to compound by tying it to other parts of your life. Oh well, if that was true, maybe this is true, maybe I am, et cetera. So it starts to compound. Then when we're looking at domino number four, this is happening when your assumptions turn into beliefs and they're actually anchoring themselves into your brain. So this is where it starts to come back into that sort of more self fulfilling prophecy. And then Domino 5 is where those beliefs start to influence your behavior. So going back to the example of the what if, like if I'm watching this documentary, they were a murderer and they didn't know it. What if I'm a Murderer and I don't know it. I can't trust myself. Maybe is that Domino 4 assumption? Domino 5 is if I can't trust myself, maybe XYZ could happen where now I'm magnifying it out to some sort of future scenario. But what's important to remember. Let's think about this client for a second. What if that paranoia got so elevated that they chose to, I don't know, go to the police and confess to a crime that they never actually committed? Okay, this actually, shockingly happens a lot. So let's say the Domino 5 example with this person is they watch the. They are fearful watching the documentary. Well, they didn't realize they're a murderer. Maybe I'm murdered and I don't know it. And then that turns into a story about maybe I'm a murderer. And maybe in that state of paranoia, they actually go confess to a crime that they didn't commit at all. They're just in a paranoid state based on an initial intrusive thought. And at this point, they're now confessing to a crime. And what if. If they went to jail for the rest of their life for a crime that they didn't commit because this intrusive thought wasn't corrected, and now it's influenced their behavior into a consequence that can't be undone. You think that this is unreasonable until you work in the line of work that I work in. And it's not unreasonable. You guys, if you don't get really good at discerning where you are in the domino effect, you can slip off the edge far too quickly. I always tell people the line between sanity and insanity is razor thin, if at all. And many people, in particular those who have the brain pattern types that tend to correlate over to personality disorders, they're often very unaware of objective reality versus their skewed version. I know we've gone through this extensively on podcast episodes. It's hard for people like that to know where they are in the dominoes because they are not. Not able to pull back and perceive with any sort of metacognition in the first place. Right? There's so much emotion driving the train that they can't stop and see things differently. So for a person like that, being able to understand where they are and their emotional response, dominoes can be really challenging. So I want to emphasize here, stopping this domino effect as early as possible is extremely critical. Once the thought progresses far enough down the chain, it becomes hard to reverse. I'm not saying it's impossible. It's totally possible, but we have to catch it as quickly as we possibly can. And this is why to me, awareness is an important stage. You do have to become aware of something in order to stop it. But far too many people get stuck at awareness and they don't learn how to intervene and rewire to make the thoughts stop in the first place. And by the way, you can get rid of intrusive thoughts. I've said it before, I used to struggle with this a ton. And now if I'm not actively thinking, my mind is completely quiet. I could never have conceived of that. In the earlier years of my even like early adulthood and childhood, my mind was constantly full of back and forth chatter. Now if I'm not thinking, it is completely quiet. And that is attainable for many of you. It's not easy, but it is a process that we do in break method that can restore your ability to actually be at peace and presence without constantly having that tug of war happening in your mind. Let me ask you a question. Have you ever noticed how you can know something is unhealthy and still do it anyways? You know you shouldn't react that way in an argument. You know that habit isn't good for you. You know that that thought pattern is rational. And yet somehow your brain runs the same loop again. This is where a lot of personal development goes wrong. Awareness alone doesn't change the brain. Repeated behavioral input does us. Your brain changes through neuroplasticity, through the pathways you strengthen with action, not just awareness. And that is exactly why I created Renew your mind. This program sits at the intersection of neuroscience, behavioral rewiring, and biblical teaching around the command to renew your mind. Inside this program, I walk through what's actually happening in the brain when patterns form, why your prefrontal cortex shuts down under emotional pressure, and how specific behaviors activate areas like the anterior mid cingulate cortex, which is responsible for resilience, discipline and the ability to push through discomfort. But the most important thing we talk about is pattern opposition. Because if you want a new life, you can't keep feeding the same neural pathways that created the old one. Scripture says be transformed by the renewing of your mind. But most people were never taught how to actually do that. Renew your mind gives you the framework to begin interrupting destructive patterns. Strengthen your ability to regulate emotion and build the emotional resilience that is required to become a new creation. If you've ever felt like your reactions, habits or emotional patterns are running your life instead of the other way around, this program was built for you. Renew your mind can be accessed at Stan store busygold. So I emphasize that thoughts do not exist in a vacuum. Thoughts can have the desire to trigger you back to that emotional homeostasis state that your brain and body are used to. Right, we talked about that example. Your brain produces thoughts through memory prediction, emotional pattern recognition. We know all of this. But these aren't the only forms of influence. And I dropped a pin earlier in the episode that we were going to talk a little bit about things that are more multi dimensional and here it comes. So brace yourself. And this is a much more in depth conversation. In my renew your mind course, we go deeply into this. So if you are excited about learning more about the spiritual multidimensional side of mental health issues, definitely go on to Stan store busygold and you can go to my renew your mind program. We go deeply into that. I'm gonna, I'm gonna skirt around the edges here because this is a topic that is not for everybody and I totally recognize that. But I would be remiss in my duties as a teacher here to not acknowledge that there are other places that intrusive thoughts can come from. So if we're going biblical here for a second, Scripture does describe that the mind is a place where influence absolutely occurs. Ideas can be planted, distorted, amplified and stolen. In the parable of the Sower, Jesus describes how seeds are planted in the heart and immediately stolen away by the enemy. This suggests that thoughts can be interfered with and manipulated. A few years ago I taught a three day long series on deliverance and mental health. I do have this going up on my website for purchase again, I haven't. I've been moving things to my new website and in waves and this will be ready pretty soon. But I am going to talk a little bit here about a piece from that called dimensional pathways. And if you go to the show notes for this episode, I am putting the PDF there so that you can download that PDF to get the visual of what I'm explaining right now. So in this visual framework I help illustrate how thoughts and thought forms can be influenced by the spiritual realm. Emotional wounds can become entry points for influence from other realms. When someone carries rejection wounds or thoughts about abandonment, it can become really easy to trigger you from these higher realms. When someone carries shame thoughts of condemnation, these intrusive thoughts can gain traction really easily. When someone carries fear catastrophic thinking, it becomes really easy to get deceived into aligning with your intrusive thoughts. Words also play a really powerful role in this process. Because they act like agreements or contracts. In the spirit, when someone repeatedly declares things like I will never change or nothing good ever happens to me, or I'm just broken, those statements reinforce both neurologically and spiritually. Words shape your perception, they influence your choices, and they reinforce your identity narratives. They can either reinforce the truth or they can reinforce your self deception if you are not careful. This is why Scripture emphasizes the importance of guarding your mind and taking every thought captive. Sovereignty of the mind. Reflecting requires that you place active resistance, that you be constantly planting the flag on your territory. Intrusive thoughts cannot simply be tolerated or ignored. They must be challenged. So how do you do that? In a practical way, the first step is to stop identifying with the thought. A thought appearing in your mind does not mean that it belongs to you or that it defines you, or that it's coming from some deep, shadowy place inside of yourself. The second step is to intentionally create distance from the thought, observe it instead of becoming it. The third step is to use logical questioning to dismantle the thought. This is something that we specialize in. Break method. And if you've ever heard me refer to ELI questions, I am going to place a PDF of ELI questions specifically for intrusive thoughts on the Show Notes. So that will be available on the Show Notes along with the framework from Dimensional Pathways. So. So do make sure to go to the show notes and do the opt in to download the form. The ELI questions are things that you can use to highlight the logical error in what your mind is currently coming up with so that you have the ability to see new possibilities and get your way out of it. You want to be asking yourself whether the thought aligns with objective reality or whether it's attempting to push you back into a pattern that you've experienced before. So I explained that this pattern operates like a rut. And our brain has become very good at using what seem like justifiable excuses and rationalizations to get us afraid to move out of the rut or in some cases, to go back into the rut. Going back to that example of if I was just home relaxing in my house, my brain's gonna use that intrusive thought to try to justify going back into hypervigilance because it's actually afraid of peace. So that is that example of me coming into agreement, being like, oh, you're right, and now I'm not in peace anymore. So from a scriptural perspective, I've allowed the enemy to actually take that piece away from me and go back into hyper vigilance. Arguably, where going back to that domino example, I start to make worse decisions about my life and get myself further off track the longer I let that thought multiply into other thoughts. And with that in mind, the fourth step here is to reconnect with some very clear, measurable goals. Get clear on what. What you want from your life. What are you trying to accomplish? When we are clear on what we want and how we want to define those, it becomes easier to measure if what we're currently doing is ever going to get us there. And this is one of the things that I think is most helpful for overcoming anxiety. When we're thinking about how anxiety functions, it often functions like someone trying to keep you stuck in a cave. And if you've taken break method, you've heard me talk about Mr. Crude from the movie the Croods. If you haven't seen it, it's an adorable movie. But in the beginning of the movie, it's about this. This kind of cave family from arguably Neanderthal times. I don't know if. Is that a preferred term anymore? I don't know. I don't know what language is off limits. I think that's still the term. I'm gonna let you guys figure that one out. But in this movie, Mr. Crude is the only one that goes outside of the cave. And he keeps his whole family inside of the cave so that he can keep them safe. So he tells them about what's happening out there. He draws them pictures. But to keep his family safe, they're not allowed to go outside because it's too dangerous. He goes outside, he brings back food, he brings back water, et cetera. And I think his motto is something like, never not be scared. Fear keeps us alive. So now I want you to think about when anxiety is behind the wheel and it's telling you all these things that have to have to get done so that you can air quote, stay safe. What it's really doing is it's acting as Mr. Crude telling you, you can't go outside of this can't cave. Well, if you want love, peace, vulnerability, connection, excitement, pleasure, most likely none of those things are inside of the cave. So you have to get good at arguing with Mr. Crude so you can get out of the cave. Most people don't know how to do this. And to be honest with you, most people can't even in this analogy, highlight, I want to get out of the cave, right? Their brain has gotten them so twisted in actually justifying their own repetitive demise that they've become. They've become like Stockholm syndrome, right? They like being stuck in a prisoner of their own mind. So we also need to get you clear on what it is that you want that is outside of that cave, because we can then use those end goals to entice you out of the cave and to get better at arguing with Mr. Crude so that you can get your way out. When intrusive thoughts appear, one of the most powerful questions you can ask is whether reacting to that thought will move you closer to that end goal or further away from it. Does this response move me closer to the relationship that I want, or does this reaction move me closer to the life that I want to build for myself? Is this pushing me further into the cave my brain keeps trying to trap me in? These sort of simple questions can tell you a whole lot about whether this intrusive thought is something to consider or something to immediately separate yourself from. And this is where the concept of renewing your mind becomes incredibly important. Renewing the mind does not mean pretending that intrusive thoughts don't exist. Right? I'm not asking you to sit there and go, la la la la la. Right? There are certain cases where I will have clients that have really intense, loud, intrusive thoughts, put on a really loud song for a set period of time. But for the most part, I'm simply not telling you to go, la la la la la. We actually have to go to battle with it. We have to learn how to challenge the thought. We have to learn how to dismantle it, and of course, rewire the underlying system that's causing it to rise up in the first place. Place that process does require awareness. It requires intentional questioning. It requires behavioral opposition and ultimately alignment with the truth. In the downloadable that I'm giving you on the show notes, I'm going to have a whole little scavenger hunt exercise for you. So for those of you that experience any of this, please report back. Do join the Rewire Room, which is our free community. Let me know how it's going with your work on that scavenger hunt. I have seen it help thousands of people before you, and I'm excited to share that tool with you for free in the show Notes Intrusive thoughts do not define you. They are attempts at influence. They are invitations to get you to believe a story that's probably not true and probably has intent to do harm. And the moment you learn to challenge these thoughts rather than submit to them, your power dynamic in your mind shifts. Your mind was never meant to have open borders where any single thought can start to take territory. It's meant to be your sovereign territory and guarding it requires awareness, discipline and pattern opposition. But the good news is that the brain is wildly capable of change. Patterns can be rewired, thought loops can be dismantled and strongholds can be broken. Break Method is a great way to learn how to oppose patterns and rewire from a very secular, scientific based program. And if you're interested in how that piggybacks with the spirit realm and what happens with familiar spirits and demons and other things in the spirit realm, Renew your Mind is a great, great option for you. I definitely recommend choosing carefully. Obviously Break Method is a really in depth, long four to six month long intensive program. It is very much mental health focused. Renew your Mind is a lecture series and many of the people in Renew youw Mind have done my other work before. So Renew your Mind is. We still give a lot of tools, there's a lot of worksheets, but Renew your Mind is more of a top level overbeat overview to understand what's happening at the intersecting point between our emotions, our physicality and the spirit realm. And ultimately, when you're in Renew your Mind, you will spend time learning how to heighten discernment. Claim territory in your mind and you will learn practical tools. But it's much more about understanding how the mechanisms work rather than exclusively working on yourself. And we know this because we've talked about neuroplasticity so many times. The mind becomes what it repeatedly believes. And if you want to build a different life, it has to start with learning how to guard the territory of your mind one thought at a time. I've already told you this, but if you let one go, it exponentially augments. So you have to guard your territory with intention, with tools. Go download that PDF in the show notes. Do report back. Do join the Rewire Room. It's a totally free community on stand store. Let me know how I can help you with this. You do not have to live with intrusive thoughts. They can be rewired. I told you that if we had time I would give you a couple stories that I think are important. One is, and I know it's a hot topic and if you want another great episode on this, it's my episode with Dr. Dave Rabin on the psychedelic report. We talk quite a bit about medicine and hallucinogens, et cetera. So one thing that I want to mention is that when we're talking about intrusive thoughts thoughts, one of the access points or doorways that you can open is through engaging in medicine ceremony. So things like ayahuasca, ibogaine, peyote, etc, even honestly like mdma, Molly, that kind of stuff. So when you are engaging in something like that, you are opening yourself up. And arguably the sovereign part of your soul spirit often goes kind of to the background, which allows you to be more easily influenced by other things. And if you don't have a really strong sovereign spirit and already know how to, in essence, fight in the spirit realm, doing medicine journeys can be profoundly dangerous. I've seen people come back from medicine journeys suddenly convinced that they were gay, even though they were married for years before, had a perfectly beautiful life. And ultimately what really happened was that that some sort of spirit actually hopped in there, got access, and then they started to have intrusive thoughts and rumination they couldn't get out of it. Thankfully, I was able to get those clients out of it completely. And I've seen this happen multiple times over. And I've also seen this happen with weed as the gateway. I think some of you who've been watching this podcast and have done break method, you know how I feel about weed, maybe we'll do a whole episode on that. But the point is, when you put yourself into a situation where you're not firmly rooted in objective reality, you're not not of sober mind. It's so much more easy for these intrusive thoughts to manipulate you and dig their claws in there and get you feeling as though you are not wholly yourself. And it's because you've stepped back and you've allowed too much space. I think this is why biblically, we are called to be of sober mind, which doesn't just mean sobriety like, you know, don't drink alcohol, although certainly, you know, being of sober mind, it comes along with those items as well. But it means to be firmly rooted in the present moment, right? Like, highly aware of the detail in your environment so that things can't get twisted or manipulated. And when you intentionally engage in something that shuts off that sobriety, you can leave an open door for intrusive thoughts to jump in there. And just as I laid out in this episode, they do augment, they do have the ability to grow exponentially. And then you can start to feel very quickly like you lose yourself. And with certain things, like, for example, ayahuasca, you do go into this state of neuroplasticity after that where you are more malleable, you are kind of less sure of where your hard, sovereign edges are and those two things when sandwiched together can lead to a complete psychological crisis. So this is why I always encourage, if you are going to do something like that, do something like break method first, where you have firmly rewired, you've, you've rid yourself of the blind spots and the self deception tendencies so that when you can go in there, you, if that's one thing that you choose to do, you can go in there with what we call and break your break helmet on. And you know how to actually go to battle with these things without essentially being influenced or deceived by things that do objectively operate in the spirit realm. So that is something to be really cautious of. And I mentioned in a couple of these client scenarios that they engaged in other forms of therapy that certainly made this worse. One of them is a very specific type of exposure therapy. So this poor gentleman was told by a therapist, well, go watch gay porn and see if you feel anything. It's like, okay. This guy literally came back, he didn't. He suddenly heard this voice saying, you're gay, you're gay, you're gay. He had never had a thought like that in his whole life. Is married, he has kids, he's like, help me, I need this voice to go away. And what this therapist told him to do when this person is already highly susceptible to visual images is to go watch a bunch of gay porn. This was a colossal fail of the mental health system. This person came to me on the brink of suicide and thankfully we were able to pull this person out of it and get them to the other side. And it was, it was a very intense experience. But I bring this up because this is unfortunately not uncommon. This is very common when you understand an in break method. When you do brain pattern mapping, we see your behavior markers, somebody that has a very specific behavior marker that shows that in their protective response, they go up into their head, they can lose touch with objective reality very quickly. And if you tell a person like this, oh, go expose yourself to all these other visual stimuli, you're actually piggybacking those intrusive thoughts and you're pushing that person all the way into that fourth, fifth domino for sure. And then you're making it harder for them to ever remove those visuals. So I'm saying this because this is not an isolated event that in more traditional forms of therapy, intrusive thought, thoughts and rumination and even things like gender dysphoria have been made worse by the types of exposure therapy that they're asked to do. So consider that if this is something that you are experiencing or you have a child or a teenager that's experiencing this, take me up on this. Take your first step as brain pattern mapping. We will show you if this is something that is likely to work for you and what the potential risks are of going down the road of. Of potential exposure therapy with a lot of visuals, even things like emdr, working with hallucinogens. Because there are certain people that are highly susceptible and at risk when they have a brain pattern that matches what I'm describing right now. There are other things that can certainly work better, faster, more effectively, with less risk for you. So if I'm speaking to you and this is something that you or a loved one are experiencing, brain pattern mapping is $47. It doesn't take you that long to complete. And at least then we know what we're dealing with. What are the underlying architectures that are needing to be worked with to get you to the other side? Because nobody wants you to be held hostage in your own mind. I know how awful that can feel. And it's why I spend my entire life helping people free themselves. Right. I'm not freeing you. I'm teaching you how to get the key and unlock your own cage. Because we were not designed to be in constant struggle and rumination and suffering. There is a way to the other side. And yes, it does take work. I'm not gonna lie to you. It's hard work, but it is work that, when done in the right sequence with the right person, can free you for the rest of your life. You do not have to live with intrusive thoughts, but you do have to understand why they're there in the first place, where they're coming from, and how to uproot them. So I do hope you will take me up on the brain pattern mapping and do go to the show Notes. Notes. That PDF is going to be a nice little exercise for you to practice how to break the strongholds of these intrusive thoughts. Because you do not have to live this way. Hope you enjoyed this episode. Please share it with somebody who needs it. And do me a favor, go on the YouTube version even if you're not a YouTube person. Hit, subscribe, Hit like, give it some love in the comments. I really appreciate. We're really trying to grow YouTube and I know that we have a heavy audio listener base, but if you could do that, I'd be so grateful. And if you could also go to Apple or Spotify and give us a rating, hopefully five star, because there are some people that don't seem to like my what they decide are my political beliefs. Every one star is because I apparently have some sort of political beliefs that they don't like. Although I don't really talk about politics on here. So anyways, if you could do that, I would be so grateful and I will see you all next week. Bye. Your brain isn't broken, it's running. An old code break method is a system that maps your neurological patterns, decodes your emotional distortions and rewires your behavior fast. No talk therapy spiral, no getting stuck in your feelings, just logic based rewiring. In 20 weeks or less head to breakmethod.com and see what your brain is really up to.