M. and D. parted. When M. came to see me, she said that she had spent the previous several weeks sitting in her apartment and constantly thinking: "What went wrong?"
One day M. received an e-mail from D. stating that nothing had come out of their relationship and that he no longer wanted to see her. “I keep thinking,” said M., “suddenly I overlooked something. We were happy together. But I don't understand how he could have parted with me by email.
The wheels in M.'s head were spinning tirelessly. She seemed unable to let go of this situation. She continued to replay in her mind various episodes of their relationship: “I keep coming back to our fights. I wonder if I could have done otherwise. " Or was she looking for a clue as to why D. was selfish and cruel: "I think there were signs that he was selfish, but why didn't I notice them?" M. found it difficult to agree with the idea that D. could have good qualities and at the same time be selfish. "I can't weld it together," she insisted.
M. suffered from one of the most common problems of depression - a tendency to ruminate.
The word rumination comes from the Latin ruminari (to chew). Obsessively thinking about something, we scroll a negative thought or memory in our head. We can tell ourselves:
- I can't get it out of my head.
- I cannot understand why it happened.
- I wonder why this happened to me?
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- It's just that I feel so bad - I just can't get away from how awful it is.
- It's so unfair. Why me?
Research shows that people who are prone to compulsive ruminations are more likely to become depressed when they have problems and stay in this state for a long time. Women are more prone to obsessive thoughts than men. What's more, recent research has shown that there may even be a "rumination gene", so we may have a predisposition to obsessive thoughts. The good news is that you can do something with them.
RUMINATION AND DEPRESSION
When you meditate obsessively, you focus on yourself - especially your sadness, negative thoughts, pain, suffering, and the past. You keep complaining to yourself - and ultimately to others - about how badly you have been treated, how unfair life is, how worthless or flawed you feel.
One patient talked about her situation, jumping from one rumination to another (complaining about her husband, boss, friends, childhood and depression). Another patient during our meetings kept thinking about his physical pain and suffering, moving from one part of his body to another, and then about how unfair his wife was to him.
There are several reasons why rumination is a key element of depression.
First, by compulsively thinking about something, you focus solely on the negative. You dig into all the bad feelings, sensations and experiences that your mind can get attached to.
Secondly, you ask questions for which there are no answers: "What is wrong with me?" or "Why me?" Focusing on unanswered questions makes you feel both bewildered and helpless at the same time, which makes you even more depressed.
Third, you complain about things that you have no control over, for example, "I can't believe this happened." This only makes you more upset.
Fourth, by compulsively thinking about something, you do not live in the real world around you. You don't take action, solve problems, and receive no reward. You are trapped in your head.
Fifth, by scrolling through rumination, you emphasize your feelings of helplessness, rather than self-confidence. You deprive yourself of the feeling that you can actually do something that will change the course of events. All these harmful consequences of rumination can make you wonder: "Why am I doing this to myself if it is so bad for me?" The answer is that you actually think ruminating is helping you.
Why do you think rumination makes sense?
We believe we can figure out why something happened, let go of what hurt us, and avoid repeating the same mistake. M. thought: "If I find out why D. broke up with me, then I can move on" or "I can avoid that problem in the next relationship." Some of us are prone to rumination because we don't trust our memory; we believe that we may finally realize the important detail that we have overlooked that explains what happened, and only then can we close the door to the past. "What if I'm missing something?" - repeated M.
What's wrong with these goals? First of all, you don't have all the information you need to achieve them. Even by thinking for weeks on end, you will not know what other people think or what they were hiding from you. We almost never know for sure why someone did something. Plus, rumination won't help you close the door to the past and move on - it will keep you firmly there. You are revisiting an old movie instead of creating a new experience.
How is rumination different from simply thinking about the past? Don't we want to think about what happened, understand the meaning of our lives and learn from the mistakes that we or others make? Doesn't reflection help? Of course it helps, and we take stock and learn from our experience. Reflection helps us hone our judgments about the future and engage in self-correction to avoid repeating mistakes. But rumination goes beyond reflection. Obsessively thinking, we get stuck on the thought, continue to scroll it endlessly - and achieve nothing.
Are you suggesting that “everything should make sense”, “people should do this and not otherwise”, “life should be fair” or “I need to understand”? If so, you might think that rumination is a useful thinking tool for bringing clarity, understanding, and certainty, but it doesn't work that way.
Let's look at an example of an event that can lead you into the trap of rumination. This is something unpleasant, for example, a break in relations. This event creates confusion in your head, making you think, "Everything has to make sense, so why not in this case?"
This question arises from your assumption about how the world should work: situations should make sense, actions should be fair, people should not experience ambivalence. How do you let everything make sense again? You decide to use a mental rumination strategy. What if, if you replay the situation often enough and carefully enough, then everything will fall into place, saving you from confusion and pain?
You erased yourself from life and became obsessed with your thoughts. But no matter how long you think about the same thing, you still do not achieve certainty or clarity, you are still confused. Therefore, you are thinking more and more. Now you are truly stuck in isolation and inaction - in a hopeless depression.
Does rumination work for you?
We talked about how you hope to benefit from your rumination. You can also ask yourself what harm they are doing. For M., the harm was her being stuck in the past. Scrolling through the thoughts in her head, she felt depressed, angry and anxious, it was difficult for her to enjoy life. In other people, harm includes increased self-criticism, regret, inability to enjoy the moment, and irritability. From my point of view, rumination just hits you in the head over and over again without any effect.
Ask yourself if the harm outweighs the benefit. The next time you catch yourself ruminating, see if it makes you feel better. Ask yourself, “Will they really help me? Will it be better or worse for me to continue thinking like this?"
Once you come to the conclusion that you will feel worse, you can start using techniques to break the vicious circle.
LEARN TO RELEASE
Thought fixation supports your view of the need for certainty and clarity (and you believe these things are actually achievable). You think you need to know exactly what happened. "There are so many unanswered questions, - said M. about D. - Why would he say one thing and do another?"
What's wrong with not knowing for sure why something happened (or even what exactly happened)? Stop and think about it. What good is it if M. knows exactly why D. did what he did? Even if she could find out for sure, the reality is that he's gone, it's over, and she needs to move on. Getting an answer to past events will not help her live a better life today.
Watching the road in your rearview mirror won't help you get where you want to go.
Accept uncertainty
Think about all the uncertainty that you've already come to terms with. You accept it as you rush along the highway - you don't know if you will bump into someone there. You embrace uncertainty when talking to people - you don't know what the other person is going to say. And you accept it in your daily work. You accept it because you have to live in the real world.
Most rumination-prone people equate uncertainty with poor outcomes. But she is neutral. I don't know if there will be a hurricane tomorrow, but that doesn't mean I need to hide in the basement. And such people sometimes think that gaining certainty is a sign of responsibility: "I need to know why this happened in order to take better care of myself." But it is not so. The best way to take care of yourself is to be clear about your priorities and develop a habit of living a self-confident lifestyle. This is what the psychologist helps you to do.
Just as we find it difficult to put up with the uncertainty of events and their causes, we find it difficult to put up with duality. M. constantly said: "I cannot understand how he could be nice at one moment and detached - at another."
In reality, she said that it was difficult for her to recognize the duality of D.'s feelings. He felt different emotions at different times. But this is inherent in human nature. We are complex beings, constantly changing our point of view, experiencing new stimuli and opportunities, and seeing things in different ways.
M. wanted to see the situation from one side only: “D. either he loves me or not,”but that was unreal. People have mixed feelings, and intrusive ruminations won't change that.
Accept your own ambivalence
The truth is that M. herself had very mixed feelings towards D. during the relationship and after their breakup. When meeting him, she felt that she was carried away by him, at times enjoyed his company and thought that he was quite smart. However, at other times she found him unreliable, withdrawn and irritable. She treated him in two ways for quite some time. When they broke up, her duality just took a different form - she missed him, felt confused, felt some relief that it was over, and got angry. M. found it hard to live with conflicting information, which her own feelings dictated to her, because she believed: "I really want to feel only one thing."
The problem with this intolerance to your own duality is that it tells you to get rid of feelings (you have to make yourself feel only one thing).
Think about your long-term friendship or relationship. Don't you have mixed feelings about your best friend, parents, or coworkers? Don't you have mixed feelings for yourself - for those traits that you like about yourself and those that you don't like? Perhaps conflicting feelings are a sign that you value the versatility of relationships and people. Perhaps mixed feelings are realistic.
What is the difficulty in accepting mixed feelings? M. began to realize that no matter how much she thought about D., she would still experience mixed feelings - both about herself and about him. But if she could accept ambivalence as a sign of the complexity of the situation and the fact that there were both pros and cons in the relationship, then she would realize that mixed feelings can be accepted. And since one of the reasons behind her rumination was to get rid of mixed feelings (as a result of accepting them), she was able to stop her obsessive ruminations.
Isn't it better to take reality for granted?
We often meditate obsessively because we cannot accept reality as it is. We are like brooding cows chewing gum over and over again. The more you "chew" the situation, the worse it becomes for you, the less chance you have of doing positive things. We continue to "chew" the situation because we cannot accept it. But what does it mean to “take it as it is”?
Let's take the case of M. There were several things that were difficult for her to accept. She could not come to terms with the fact that she did not know why there was a break in relations, with the fact that D. had conflicting qualities, or with the fact that everything was unfair. She could not come to terms with what she did not know for sure, and with the fact that it was "unexpected." It was difficult for M. to accept such things - at least she was convinced of it.
But what does it mean to accept reality?
When you accept reality, you simply say, "I see it as it is." You are aware of the "given." You are not saying that it is fair, or that you like it, or that it doesn't hurt. Last year, I broke my finger by being pinched by a window frame. It was very painful. I could sit and mutter to myself, "I can't believe what an idiot I am for pinching my finger." But that wouldn't help. Or I could constantly repeat, "Why me?" But that wouldn't have helped either. Instead of obsessive meditation, I needed to accept the pain, get to the emergency room, where my finger was bandaged to a splint, and learn to type with one hand while working on a book. I could continue to scroll thoughts in my head or get out of the situation. I chose the latter. It really hurt trying to write a book with a broken finger,but it gave me the opportunity to take my own "medicine" and take advantage of constructive discomfort and successful imperfection.
Now, if you choose to accept reality as it is, you have a place to start. You can say, “Okay. I'm here. Where do I want to go? M. was able to admit that D. did what he did; accept that it made sense, that she was hurt, sad and annoyed, that she now had no friend and that she had to search for something new.
Think about something that you constantly thought about in the past, but stopped doing it now. What changed? You just accepted the reality as it was. And then you decided to create a new reality by living your life in the real world.
Why should the past make sense?
M.'s ruminations were her desire to "make sense" of what had happened. “There are some things that I just don't understand,” she said. But why does everything in our life have to make sense? Let's take a trivial example. Let's imagine that you are driving on the highway and you are late for a very important meeting. Someone overtakes you and zigzags. He waves out the window, shouting something to you and someone else. Your first thought is that he might be drunk or insane. But at the moment, what is more important to you: find out why he is behaving this way, or get to a meeting? Obsessively thinking, we often try to make sense of what happened.
But would it be bad if some of the things that happened to you didn't really make sense? What if M. can never figure out why D. did this? Will this prevent her from having friends, being productive at work, or starting other relationships? How does the fact that something in the past didn't make sense has anything to do with your life?
Many things don't make sense - and we don't stop thinking about it, and if we stop, then we don't care. Rumination-prone people seem to prefer to assume that they need to make sense of what happened to them. They think this will allow them to close the topic.
You can close the topic by turning the chapter on the past and moving on to the next stage. Living in the present, you close the door to the past.
- Robert Leahy, Beat Depression Before It Beats You