Cognitive Defusion and Self-Compassion: How to Stop Being Your Thoughts and Heal Anxiety, Depression & PTSD

Most people try to fix internal emotional pain by changing the external world—pursuing success, relationships, or possessions. But as a psychiatrist specializing in integrative approaches to anxiety, depression, and PTSD, I see how this often backfires. Cognitive defusion and self-compassion offer a proven path to change how you feel from the inside out.

What is the likelihood of success in solving this internal challenge when all of one's attention is on the external world? To be direct, not good. The complexity of the world consistently presents obstacles to accomplishing the above intentions. To make things worse, when we are not successful in feeling better feelings of inadequacy for not succeeding in accomplishing these and feeling better are added to the distress we started with. We then can begin to experience feeling hopeless that we will every feel better. So how to change the way we feel? It is a complex process and today I will be talking about where to begin. So step one to changing how you feel is....

What Is Cognitive Defusion? (From Acceptance and Commitment Therapy)

Cognitive defusion is a well-studied principle from our most up-to-date neuroscience from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. (https://contextualscience.org/act). This principle aligns with the core approach to healing from many of the world's wisdom traditions. In short this means, you are not your thoughts. Rather you are the one who experiences your thoughts, and thus have the ability to respond to them in the way you choose.

Your thoughts and the feelings are like the weather. While at times there may be fierce storms occurring, they always pass. The entire time you are the blue sky through which they pass appearing again once they have moved on.

Cognitive Defusion - You are not your feelings, you are the one who experiences your feelings

Why Avoiding Emotions Reinforces Suffering

Most people live in a state of cognitive fusion believing they are their thoughts and feelings. In this experience distressing feelings are taken as unchangeable reality. As nature does not tolerate a vacuum, with intolerable emotional pain present some tool needs to be used to reduce the distress. What kicks in is one's flight-fight-freeze response to get away from the pain. So people act in the outside world to try to change how they feel when the challenge is an internal one. The problem with this approach is that unlike physical pain, when we avoid emotional pain our brain sends signals back to the emotional center of our brain that reinforces the very signaling that created the painful emotions in the first place. So the painful feelings one is trying to get away from are actually reinforced. In effect, what one resists persists.

This is like what occurs with the classic finger trap toy. As anyone who has played with one of these knows using more force to get away only tightens the system. What is to be done is to paradoxically relax and move towards the "trap." The reason people do not know to use this approach to change how one feels is because historically there are very few people who have had access to this approach to healing in society, and for each of us individually, our parents who taught us to be in the world, did not.

The Brain Operating Manual: Practical Steps to Shift Your Feeling State

To add to this, if someone did have the idea to turn into the feelings without any tools to reduce their distress they likely could have been overwhelmed by the feelings. So now that you know that you are not your feelings and you have the agency to respond to your feelings as you choose, it is time to share tools that are vastly more effective than avoiding them by trying to change things in your life situation. I have shared an approach to navigating one's feeling state in a previous post (https://www.drjonslaughter.com/post/treat-your-anxiety-symptoms-trauma-and-depression-with-this-brain-operating-manual) and will list again here before moving on to the most powerful of these tools.

Brain Operating Manual to Create the Feeling State You Want

1. Turn inward and look at your feelings.

2. Label your feelings.

3. Remember that you are breathing to begin to reconnect with your body and ground yourself.

4. Put your attention on being in the space of compassion and love for yourself and others.

5. Let your distressing feelings pass through you like turbulent weather systems.

6. Put your attention on the feeling state you would like to experience - have feelings of calm, secure, empowerment is one many identify as their intended feeling state.

7. Repeat this process.

The Science of Self-Compassion and Neuroplasticity

Of all the above, the most powerful step is by far self-compassion. If there was a One Step Process the feel the way you want this is it....to be in the space of compassion and love for yourself and others in as many moments as possible, as we are all connected. Our most up-to-date neuroscience has demonstrated the power of mindfulness to heal. Of the wide variety of mindfulness experiences, Compassion Focused Mindfulness interventions have been shown to be the most powerful. Along with the turbulence occurring in these times of great change an amazing blessing has occurred. The field of the science of Self-Compassion has emerged. With leaders such as Dr. Kristen Neff and Dr. Christopher Gerber, as well as Dr. Daniel Siegel at the Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA, we have learned of the power of self-compassion, drawn from our ancient wisdom traditions, to literally heal the brain. People who engage in self-compassion activities begin to experience changes in signaling patterns in their brain that in as little as 8 weeks lead to the growth of new brain tissue. By actively participating in compassion focused mindfulness for as little as thirty minutes per day you can change your brain leading to new patterns of thinking and feeling. Indeed, love is the answer. I write in detail about the healing power of Self-compassion here - https://www.drjonslaughter.com/post/the-power-of-self-compassion-in-treating-ptsd-depression-and-anxiety.

Guided Self-Compassion Exercises and Resources

I offer a number of Guided Meditations that walk you through how to use the above approaches. Please visit my youtube channel to experience these. It can be found on my Links page https://www.drjonslaughter.com/links .

Here are some links to exercises from other sources you can use to heal your brain, and heal yourself:

1. https://self-compassion.org/self-compassion-practices/

2. https://chrisgermer.com/meditations/

3. https://www.uclahealth.org/uclamindful/free-guided-meditations