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“What do I do with negative thoughts?” is one of the most common questions people bring to therapy. There’s no single answer, only the wish for one. In a world where mystery is the eye of the needle through which all sense-making must pass, I’d like to make a case for turning to nature for an answer.

Why do my thoughts make my life worse than it is?

Because, as Seneca said two thousand years ago, “We suffer more often in imagination than we do in reality.” This is the question underneath most of what people bring to me, and the Stoics were grappling with it. The mind fills with disappointed thoughts, envious thoughts, regretful thoughts. Bitter and blameful thoughts. They come charged with sadness, anger, fear, shame, disgust. And the worst of them won't seem to go away no matter how much we want them to.

So what do we actually do with an unwanted negative thought? Before I answer, let me take you down to the river.

What can a snapping turtle teach us about negative thoughts?

Quite a lot, it turns out, about how to break a thought down and use it for parts. It's mid-September, and the Medomak River that winds behind our home is at its lowest. Only a foot or two deep in most places, the tea-stained water is marbled with green, and the sunny riverbed has turned into an underwater garden. Scattered across it are large rocks, dry and sun-bleached grey in the slanted morning light. As I write this, I am watching one of them move.

Well, it’s our snapping turtle. And in no rush indeed, making its way through the shallows looking to do what snapping turtles do. You know, snap something. Bear with me here.

The common snapping turtle, Chelydra serpentina, is Maine's largest turtle (woot woot!) and is considered a keystone scavenger. It eats a little bit of anything that comes its way: pondweed, carrion, fish, frogs, invertebrates, birds. If it's small and slow enough, our turtle will eat it. Promise we're getting there soon.

What do the different therapies say to do with negative thoughts?

Each major school gives a different answer. CBT says to challenge the negative thought against the evidence. Psychoanalysis says the thought is the surfacing of a deeper unconscious conflict. Somatic therapy says to work through the stored activation in the body rather than the thought itself. IFS says the thought is coming from a protective "part" of you, so get curious about it.

I think of comparing theories like a group of people standing on a beach at night, each pointing at the moonlight on the water from where they happen to stand. Every theory sees something true from its own spot. I love that. This isn't a post about revealing the one correct theory and why the rest are bunk. There is no shortage of hot takes like those out there because a couple thousand years of imperial monotheism has sure done a number on our ability to believe there can be more than one right answer at a time.

Shadowlight was created with pluralism at its heart--the conviction that there are multiple, often irreducible ways of finding meaning. When we say we take a body-mind-soul approach, we mean there is value in all the frameworks, so long as we don't cling too tightly to any one of them. So long as we don’t declare our moonlight is the only correct one. 

When I work with someone, an observer might spot an array of orientations in how I'm working. But I'm not thinking about a specific theory. I'm trying to listen as closely as I can, and what I want to say next just appears. It's always been that way. When I'm reaching for something to say, I try to describe it in a way I never have before. Reciting the same lines over and over tends to land flatter on both sides. But new language is discovered together, and when something happens for both of us in the room, that, wondrously, is where healing tends to arrive.

This is why I keep looking for fresh ways to think about old questions, and why I'm offering another spot to stand and look at the moon on the waves.

How do you "digest" a negative thought?

You treat it the way the snapping turtle treats whatever drifts past: eat the f**king thing.

Look around and you'll see that everything in nature is being broken down and used for parts, reconstituted, digested. In new-age circles we use the word "processing" incessantly to the point it loses meaning. But look at how nature actually processes. It pulls things apart, and what one organism discards, another one needs. I'd like to explore the idea of seeing a negative thought as raw material in need of a good grinding down.

Just as in nature, there is no single way to process something you want to eat. With a peach, you eat the outside and discard the pit. With a banana, you discard the outside and eat the middle. Knowing what's worth keeping inside a thought is context dependent. It isn't always straightforward, but what is clear is that living on a diet of the parts we were meant to throw out, like blame, leaves so many of us feeling varying degrees of sick. We have to be cautious about what we take into our bodies and minds.

What do I do with self-blame?

Recognize that blame is only nutritious in acute, high-stakes situations, and treat it as a peel rather than fruit. So many of our negative thoughts are lined with a layer of blame. There is always someone to blame, and people have a way of blaming themselves or others whenever things don't go their way.

Blame does have a role in humanity. A coyote has come into camp and grabbed one of our babies. Blame points all of our anger and focus at bopping it on the head so it drops the child and runs off. In the right context, blame can save a life. But when we chronically feed ourselves a diet of blame, everything becomes acute and high stakes, and our minds and hearts grow sicker the more blameful we become. Blame narrows us. It stops us from examining the wide scope of causality and the systems that manufacture hurt. If someone is hungry and steals a loaf of bread, are they to blame? Or is the society they live in sick, with theft as the symptom?

Blame also carries two meanings, and we tend to run them together. One points at an act, something done that damaged life or a relationship. The other points at identity. "You did a bad thing" slides quietly into "you are a bad person," and that second meaning is nothing short of poison.

How do you peel the blame banana?

Take a memory that carries shame, strip the self-blame off it, and keep only the learning. Here is the exercise:

Bring to mind a memory about yourself that has shame in it. Now, as if the memory were a banana, peel the blame off the shame and discard it. Shame and blame are fused so often that we forget they're separate things, which is a post for another day. Remove the narrow story that this happened because you are bad. Throw that away. It isn't accurate, so don't feed it to yourself.

Once the peel is gone, you can take in one of the most essential nutrients of life: learning. We need to be able to learn from the past, and removing the blame lets us digest what happened as a learning experience. So when the memory comes up, remove the blame and repeat to yourself: "Thank you, I'm learning. Thank you, I'm learning. Thank you, I'm learning."

If the thought comes back, repeat the process. Discard the peel, eat the fruit.

Learning happens when things don't go as planned. Through those experiences we come to understand who we are and how we want to live in accordance with our values. Learning is a gift, and it's worth being thankful for.

In your journaling, on a walk, or with your own therapist, bring the question: what can I take of value from this negative thought, and what can I discard? Walk with it the way the turtle walks the river, unhurried. Something will slowly surface. That question, asked and re-asked, is a whole practice for working with negative thoughts.

Want to practice this together?

You don't need me for this. But if you'd like company in the work, that's what I do. Shadowlight offers somatic and integrative psychotherapy by telehealth. Reach out to schedule a consultation.