Viewed this way, our thoughts, especially dark ones, often have no meaning at all. In recent years, some psychotherapists have revived an old idea about thoughts, treating them as fluctuations-or “wavelets” as Lucille calls them-of a vast ocean beyond our mind and body. Sometimes thoughts that arose in your mind during the day were just thoughts, not a defining aspect of your ultimate essence.īut cognitive behavioral therapy was not the end of the shift away from thoughts as solid aspects of ourselves.
One of the main shifts that came with cognitive behavioral therapy is that your thoughts no longer had to necessarily mean anything deep about you. Since the 1980s, though, Freudian psychoanalysis has slowly been replaced by cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) as psychology’s main method of helping people deal with dark thoughts-what psychiatrist Aaron Beck called “automatic negative thoughts.” This is especially a problem for people with obsessive compulsive disorders, because their dark thoughts can become just another compulsion pulling them forward. Tracing the roots of your thoughts to the deepest layers of your psyche can help you deal with anxieties, phobias and neuroses.īut focusing too much on your thoughts, especially dark ones, can often end up reinforcing them, and giving them more solidity than they actually have. “Thoughts have meaning, so every thought is the tip of an iceberg,” Jonathan Shedler, a Colorado psychologist, told NPR’s Invisibilia.Īccording to Freudian psychologists like Shedler, there is great value in understanding where your thoughts come from. In addition to giving us modern psychoanalysis, Freud also taught that beneath our thoughts lurked a treasure trove of hidden information about our lives. But while our thoughts are undeniably connected to us, our true relationship to them is much more complicated.Īs spiritual teacher Francis Lucille says about our thoughts: “The thinker and the thought, the seer and the seen, the hearer and the heard are names that refer to this one single Reality.”įor a long time, our thoughts formed the basis of our reality-thanks in large part to Sigmund Freud. So strong is our connection to our thoughts that we often think they are the core of our being. In the quest for our true identity, what could be more authentic than our own thoughts? They are real and vibrant, and always with us, like children-or sometimes wild animals-tagging along wherever we go.
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