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Obsession / Obsessive Thinking Part 1

© Robert Burney

"We were taught to approach life from a perspective of fear, survival, lack and scarcity. . . . . . We were taught that life is about destinations, and that when we get to point x - be it marriage or college degree or fame and fortune or whatever - we will live happily ever after.

That is not the way life works. You know that now, and probably threw out that fairy tale ending stuff intellectually a long time ago. But on some emotional level we keep looking for it because that is what the children in us were taught. We keep living life as if it is a dress rehearsal for "when our ship comes in." For when we really start to live. For when we get that relationship, or accomplishment, or money that will make us okay, that will fix us.

We do not need fixing. We are not broken. Our sense of self, our self perception, was shattered and fractured and broken into pieces, not our True Self."

"Life is not some kind of test, that if we fail, we will be punished. We are not human creatures who are being punished by an avenging god. We are not trapped in some kind of tragic place out of which we have to earn our way by doing the "right" things.

We are Spiritual Beings having a human experience. We are here to learn. We are here to go through this process that is life. We are here to feel these feelings.

Doing our emotional healing allows us to feel clear about what is in front of us instead of torturing ourselves by obsessively thinking, trying to figure out what's right and what's wrong."

Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls by Robert Burney

Obsessive thinking is an emotional defense that, like all of the various manifestations of codependency, is dysfunctional. Being in our heads - thinking, fantasizing, ruminating - is a defense we adapted in childhood to help us disassociate from the emotional pain we were experiencing. It is dysfunctional because it keeps us focused on the future or the past - we miss out on being alive today. It is dysfunctional because our attempts to escape unpleasant feelings causes us to generate more unpleasant feelings.

Worry - which is negative fantasizing - is a reaction to fear of the unknown which creates more fear, which creates more worry, which creates more fear, etc. This fear is not a normal human fear of the unknown. It is codependent fear: a distorted, magnified, virulent, mutated species of fear caused by the poisonous combination of a false belief that being human is shameful with a polarized (black and white, right and wrong) perspective of life. This self perpetuating, self destructive type of obsessive thinking feeds not only on fear, but on shaming ourselves for feeling the fear.