Anti Compulsion

The mindfulness approach comes down to one global rule: to fully accept that the thoughts that are going through your head are indeed the thoughts that are going through your head. It means dropping any denial that what you are thinking is anything other than what you are thinking. Compulsions are strategies for resisting the experience you are having, whether it be an experience of thought, emotion, or anything else. So mindfulness is the anticompulsion, the antiresistance.

​When you use compulsions to resist a feeling, like anxiety or fear, you aren’t destroying that feeling. You are simply pushing it aside. Every time you experience discomfort and push that experience aside, you are stacking it on top of the last one. So every time you are triggered, you deal with not only the experience you are having, but also the large stack of pain you’ve been building up. Practicing mindfulness by choosing acceptance as the first response is how you can take some of that pain off the stack and start dealing with problems as they are in the moment.​

Acceptance doesn’t mean defeat, and it doesn’t mean that what you are accepting is the meaning behind the content of your thoughts. What you are accepting is merely that those are the thoughts that your mind is receiving from your brain. So to effectively use mindfulness, always start with acceptance

To fully accept a thought, you have to be willing to accept that the thought may have meaning. This doesn’t give the thought meaning. To the contrary, this liberates you from having to be certain. So when presented with an intrusive thought, start by using mindfulness to take an observational, nonjudgmental stance toward what’s happening. I’m having a thought about being raped is a much different experience from This guy wants to rape me, he will rape me if i dont run away right now!

Acceptance is hard. It’s not as simple as stretching out your arms and welcoming your thoughts. It’s the work of breaking down resistance to thoughts, and sometimes the effort that takes can be overwhelming. It can reduce you to tears, to depression, to not wanting to try to fight. So sometimes it’s necessary to step back and assess the situation to better determine how important it really is for you to do your compulsions. It’s as if your mind is stuck with the opinion that you cannot tolerate the discomfort and must do a compulsion, so you are getting a second opinion from yourself.

Remember that assessment of the obsession is not designed to prove the thoughts or feelings untrue or safe. The point here is simply to help you guide yourself away from the compulsive response. If the thought is "I’ll get a disease from touching that public pay phone" and you are able to restructure that to "Public pay phones make me uncomfortable, but in my experience, I’ve never gotten sick as a result of touching one", then you are less likely to engage in compulsive behavior.

Thoughts and feelings are not evidence. Evidence is evidence, and if you don’t have it, observe how you are responding without it. You still have to accept that you may be wrong, but at least you can point yourself away from compulsions. Then, with the thoughts assessed for distortions, you can go back to acceptance. You had that thought. Now back to the present.

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