Two weeks ago, my four-year-old saw something she didn't want to see.
It was a flashing light.
A white screen that flashed at her repeatedly until she was in tears.
She's hated flashing lights of every sort since an epic thunderstorm a few years ago. That fear was further cemented during a hotel stay some months later, in which the intermittent flash of our room's smoke detector scared the stuffing out of her when she woke in the middle of the night.
Anyway, we lay in bed together a couple weeks ago and she burrowed her small face into my chest, crying and asking for the flashing to stop.
Only I couldn't stop it.
It wasn't real. She was imagining it.
We'd been lying there, playing a visualization game my husband came up with to calm her and get her ready for sleep. It involves closing our eyes and imagining clouds of different shapes floating by.
"There goes a rocking horse," I said.
"I see that rocking horse now, too!" she answered. "And a hat with a pom-pom on top."
"There goes a red bell pepper," I said.
"Is it really red, or are you imagining that?"
(Adorably hilarious because, of course, the whole thing is imaginary.)
"Well, it's a white cloud in the shape of a bell pepper, but I think it would be red if it were real."
For whatever reason, and after some time playing the cloud game, she told me she saw a flash. A white, flashing screen. And she got into a panic about it.
"Open your eyes," I told her. "There's no flashing in your room. No storms, no lightning, nothing."
"But I see a flash!" she cried out.
It didn't matter that it was in her imagination. It didn't matter that she knew it was in her imagination. It was as scary to her as anything real. And no one, not even her, could make it stop.
She talked herself through trying to replace the thought with something else.
"I could think of something jolly! A flashing Santa belly!" Her voice was strained, frantic, as though she was trying to convince herself to be cheerful.
She carried on with various ideas for what she could think about instead. A noble endeavor, and something I think we can all relate to. Who doesn't love a good reframing, a solid mantra or affirmation?
But the more substitutions she came up with, the more that white flashing screen would intrude and bring her back to tears.
"Your mind is safe," I told her. "There's nothing it can do that's unsafe. This is what I coach people about."
"Do some coachy things for me," she pleaded.
I explained some basic facts about her mind. About all minds.
It's a machine, so it tends to spit out a lot of repetitive stuff. It gets into the habit of thinking about certain things in a certain way.
It's entirely safe. (She disputed this vehemently. It makes her think scary things, so it couldn't be safe, she reasoned. "It's a dangerous soup." And as much as I love that moniker, I told her it just isn't true. There's no dangerous soup inside her head. Or yours.)
Sometimes we get stuck on a particular thought. We don't let it pass the way all our other thoughts pass, because there's something about it that scares us, something that feels meaningful or personal, something that hooks us and keeps us engaged with it. It's completely innocent on our part. Still, when that happens, the mind latches onto it even harder and keeps serving up that same dreadful thing again and again.
The trick, I told my daughter, is to understand that this is what all minds do. And to not resist the scary thoughts that it sometimes produces.
It’s showing you some terrifying flashes? Okay. Acknowledge that it feels scary, but don’t forget to also acknowledge that your mind has made it up. It isn’t real.
Desperately wanting your mind to stop doing something pretty much ensures it'll keep doing that same thing. Thinking you can't handle the flashes or the feelings that come along with them makes a mind, all minds, return to them.
Not because minds are awful (they're not!), but because this is just their nature. Resisting the thought gives it a ton of energy.
Welcoming the flashes? The feeling of terror? Getting to a place where you can say, I hate feeling like this, but I can handle these feelings (in fact, they're being handled as we speak)? That’s when the mind can let go of the offending image. It loses its charge, and the river of thought is once again flowing, unimpeded.
Now, obviously I didn't say all this to my four-year-old. But it's what we might talk about if you came to me, completely terrified of and terrorized by something you were imagining.
And although a white, flashing screen (or a monster under the bed, or a shadow lurking in the closet, etc.) seems to an adult mind to be nothing more than a figment of the imagination, all of our grown-up fears, fixations, and worries are much the same. Intrusive thoughts, certainly, but also all the other things we find ourselves anticipating and trying to mitigate as we navigate life.
Don't fight your mind. By observing with gentle curiosity, you can start to peel apart from it a little—and that little bit of separation gives you the chance to see just how repetitive and not-personal all of its content really is.
There goes my mind again—showing me these scary things I really don’t like.
You don't need to *do* anything to change what your mind is showing you. In fact, the more you try to intervene, the more energy and attention you give to this thing you'd rather not think about!
The nature of thought is to flow.
Your mind is designed to move on.
There's no dangerous soup up there, I promise.