from the moment we wake up, in a by-now  very familiar set of painful thoughts. We  

will dwell - once again - on how awful we look and  more particularly, on how our nose is repulsively  

proportioned relative to the rest of our face.  We will think - once again - of a website we  

inadvertently visited twelve years ago and how  the police might be preparing to close in on,  

and arrest, us. We will think - once again - of  how several of our neighbours (especially the  

people upstairs) might be colluding to ruin and  disgrace us. Or we will think - once again - of  

something we said to a colleague which we fear  they misconstrued and which may well lead them to  

seek disciplinary action against us at any moment. These thoughts may ostensibly be about a variety  

of topics but beneath the surface, they have two  key features in common: they are about something  

appalling we feel we are or have done. Or they are  about something appalling we fear that others are  

about to do to us. We are the victims of  one of the cruellest and most remorseless  

of all mental afflictions: obsessive thinking. Crucially, obsessive thinking is not - despite  

the linguistic proximity - to be confused  with thinking per se. It certainly looks,  

on the surface, as though the obsessive thinker is  thinking a lot. All day, they might be drawing up  

dense charts and jotting down intricate matters  in a notebook. They might want to leave a party  

early or escape family life in order to go to  their room to ‘think.’ They might have become  

near world experts in plastic surgery or police  surveillance techniques or an area of employment  

law. They would be able to tell you everything  about tracking devices, post operative skin  

treatments and the minute by minute developments  in a specific aspect of the media agenda. 

Their cogitation may be extreme but we  may still want to resist calling any of  

this thinking. As obsessive thinkers, we are  not making progress though anything of note,  

we’re not advancing through a dilemma; we’re  not clearing up a priority. We are thinking in  

order not to think. By which is meant, we are  using one kind of thought to ward off another.  

We are employing obsessive thinking as a defence  against thinking more laterally and emotionally  

about who we are and what has happened to  us; against knowing ourselves properly. 

To try to break the agonising loops in  our minds, we might try to ask ourselves  

a deceptively simple-sounding question: if  we could not think about our chosen topic,  

if we were to be debarred from returning to our  favoured theme, what might we think about? What  

other thoughts might lie behind or to the side  of our entrenched ritualised preoccupations? 

Our minds are unlikely to yield a neat  answer. But we can hazard a generalisation:  

if we could not think about our obsessive  topic, we would most likely to need in one way  

or another to feel intensely, overwhelmingly  sad, lonely, desperate or bereft. Behind the  

monomaniacal thoughts about cameras or data  packets or legal processes or social media,  

there is almost always an extremely frightened,  isolated, unloved child who long ago could not  

bear to inhabit their own experience. Obsessive  patterns of thinking have gripped themselves  

remorselessly to the walls of the mind in order  to prevent a tragic re-encounter with an early,  

highly vulnerable and hurt version of oneself. In a bid for relief, we should dare - for  

once - to risk not returning to our usual  themes and instead, while conceding that this  

is what we might be doing, to stop running.  We should pause where we are and leave our  

secondary thoughts time to catch up with us. We  should put down our fixations and let the waves  

of our background grief and fear wash over us.  However tightly we have associated our problems  

with our favoured topic of scrutiny, there has  almost certainly long been something bigger,  

older and more tragic that we have been unable to  look at: that we were maltreated by a caregiver,  

that our parents chronically preferred a sibling  to us, that a father humiliated us repeatedly  

to overcome his shame at his own sexual abuse. We have at an unconscious level made a desperate  

choice to think ill of ourselves or to worry  about plots against us in order to impose a  

degree of logic on an otherwise impossibly  confounding early experience of neglect or  

betrayal: to an indigestible experience of  untrustworthiness, to a failure of love. 

Our minds may gradually have an opportunity to  grow less consumed by obsessive thoughts the more  

we can interpret our preoccupations as symptoms  of other concerns we are in flight from; the  

more we can give up our feelings of persecution,  unacceptability and guilt in favour of a sadder,  

slower older truth about ourselves:  that we were very badly let down indeed.