First, it’s important to realize that your body is not trying to drive you crazy, it is merely trying to protect you by alerting you to what it believes to be a potential danger to you. So, here are four things you can do to help yourself overcome intrusive thoughts and memories.
Accept the thoughts as signals that your body is trying to care for you.
Resist the urge to focus on the troublesome thought. Simply recognize and label it, such as, “Oh, that’s just my system trying to protect me.”
Tell yourself that you appreciate the warning but the sense of threat is only due to a past painful experience and not a currently unsafe situation.
Putting words to the feeling and the truth about the situation can help your amygdala to relax, sensing that you are now taking over and in control of keeping yourself safe.
Don’t try to resist it. The more you allow yourself to “judge” your thoughts, the more likely you are to perseverate on them. If you tell yourself that you “have to fight the thought,” you run the risk of actually thinking about it more, as your amygdala will perceive the “I have to fight the thought” as an activating arousal to its chemical system. For this reason, it helps to acknowledge (as in the first bullet point above) but not to label it as a thought that you “shouldn’t” be having. Thank the thought for trying to protect you, but tell it that you are safe and can handle things now.
Relax your body. Taking a deep breath in, holding it, and then releasing it slowly may help (3 cycles of this can really start to calm your system). Also, progressive muscle relaxation, where you tighten various muscle groups one section at a time and hold for several seconds prior to relaxing the muscles can also help. The goal is to alleviate physical body tension to activate your body’s calming parasympathetic nervous system that can help you feel more in control.
Consider reaching out for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) treatment. EMDR helps to integrate sensations, memories, and troublesome thoughts into your system in a way that it can process and helps them to recede into the past, allowing you to move forward. Through the use of bilateral stimulation, whether through back and forth eye movement work, pulsar hand sensors, or left and right audio tones, EMDR works with the brain’s circuitry to help you replace internalized negative beliefs and messages with positive and more helpful ones.
Most of all, it’s important to remember that Intrusive thoughts and memories may feel distressing, but they are “only” feelings, indicators that there are areas in your body, from your history, that are striving to find healing. Accept these signals as friends who simply need to know that you thank them for the warning, but you are not in a current, actual situation of threat.