By: Sue Perbody

Therapy teaches us a lot about our internal and external struggles, as well as various techniques to overcome these problems that we face in our everyday lives. A portion of the help with overcoming these issues is taking the therapy we learn in a one-on-one session and using it in our everyday lives. Make notes on various techniques learned in your therapy sessions and apply them to real-life situations. You’ll be surprised at how much better you’ll feel about yourself.

Put this scenario together for a moment; you’re in your mid-twenties and you just finished college. You received your first adult job, and it pays decently. You just left a toxic relationship with your former partner, and the transition to a new journey in life is troublesome, at first. You’re used to being pushed around and talked down to. You’re trying to get used to this new position of leadership and credibility. Unfortunately, you keep having intrusive thoughts of your new boss talking down to you just like your former partner would do to you. What have I learned from this past relationship that I can use in my everyday life?

According to Psychology Today, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, also known as ACT, provides us with a cognitive diffusion technique to learn how to stop avoiding, denying, and struggling with inner emotions. Instead, we accept these emotions and come to terms that they are responses to certain situations that should not prevent us from moving forward in our lives. Your therapist taught you this cognitive diffusion technique to allow these thoughts to pass through your mind like a leaf on a stream of water. You’ll come to accept these thoughts of your past trauma and remain present in the moment when having these thoughts. We are more than our thoughts, feelings, and experiences. We have values that set us apart from these principles.

Imagine this thought in a scenario of content versus context. The content is the thought of your new boss talking you down, the words and images that make up the thought. The context is the location, or sense of self where the content of the thought occurs. So often we identify ourselves with the content of our thoughts as if the thought is really happening. But is it? By changing how the thought is heard, for example, by putting it in a specific voice or character in your mind; think of your favorite musician, actor or comedian, we can more easily see that the thought is not us, but rather we are the context for our thoughts. This is not a control strategy per say, but a new way of relating to ourselves. Will these intrusive thoughts stay away for good? Not exactly, but you are diffusing them; letting them show up and go away on their own. You are a being that can observe your own process of thinking. We often don’t make contact with it because we are pulling leaves out of the stream to define ourselves. You are separate from your thoughts, making them easier to diffuse because we are a being with thoughts, instead of becoming the thoughts.

If you are experiencing anxiety or intrusive thoughts from a past traumatic experience, it is important to follow up with your doctor, psychiatrist, or mental health counselor to develop different techniques to diffuse these behaviors. Not all techniques work for everyone, but it doesn’t hurt to give it a shot and see what some in-office and at-home therapy can do for your mental health.