Reframing Rumination

Why you can’t stop thinking about that one thing that happened that one time

There’s lots of talk in the self-dev world about morning routines, but can we talk about that moment when you actually first wake up? I don’t mean what you do once you’re out of bed, but rather what you do in those first minutes when you’re in that liminal in-between place.

It’s a precious moment, that liminal space. Mental systems are still booting up, and our personalities are still lying on the floor where we stepped out of them, sunny side up with the crusty bits showing.

If you’re anything like me, those first precious moments go sort of like this: “That was a weird dream, why was I doing that thing with the — wait, what was it? Whatever. Now… what can I worry about?”

Laying in my warm bed, under my weighted blanket, just waking up in my beautiful home, my mind gets to work, making me suffer.

While my favorite vice is anxiety about the future, I’m also a devoted fan of its ripple-back sibling, regret.

Choo-choo! Pulling into Rumination Station!

And so there I am, just waking up and immediately grinding on stuff that happened years ago.

Why did they do that thing? Why did I let that happen? What was I thinking? Ooh, I have a theory from several books that might explain that behavior. I’m sure I’ve got this figured out, wait wait, listen to this theory…

The next thing I know, I’ve been staring out my window for 20 minutes, completely unaware of where I am. Even though I haven’t gotten out of bed, my shoulders are already tightened up from obsessively psychoanalyzing myself or someone I haven’t spoken to in years.

But I’m THISCLOSE to figuring out why that one thing happened that one time, my ego whispers in my ear. Just give me a few more minutes to spitball a few more theories.

This is not an aspect of myself that I enjoy.

As I said in From Sh!tshow To Afterglow, “Make new mistakes!” And certainly, I have made a ton. Making new mistakes is great — but now how do I stop thinking about all those mistakes?

My brain is convinced it knows the answer, and the answer is: THINK MORE! It’s never worked, but every morning my brain throws me back in time, a fly on the wall, witnessing my previous selves through my own older eyes.

For years, I’ve watched my brain loop back to this one regrettable situation, this one relationship that went dark. It was thrilling and horrific and loving and cruel and coercive and full of trauma bonding and honestly? I’m sick of thinking about it. I’m sick of being a fly on that same wall, watching the same things, analyzing them through whatever new lens I’ve got to work with. (Ooh, does attachment theory explain it? Maybe the Enneagram! Maybe a new mystical theory?)

So, I’ve done what most of us do when something feels bad: I’ve pushed the discomfort away.

Using blunt force on your own brain.

After months and then years of unwelcome mental looping at 6 am, I learned how to push the thoughts away effectively.

Why did that happen? my mind would muse from under my blankets.

“NO,” I would tell my mind firmly, like a small dog. “LEAVE IT.”

But remember that one time when —

“NO,” I would shout at myself inside my head. “WE ARE NOT GIVING OUR POWER TO THAT SITUATION ANY MORE.”

But it was so —

“NOPE. Ariel, we’re choosing to move forward. It doesn’t matter anymore. It’s over. It’s in the past. Just stop thinking about it.”

The sad truth is that if you yell at yourself inside your own head long enough, after a while, it sort of works.

I say “sort of” because the memories continue to pester… they just don’t dare to show themselves in my conscious mind.

They show up in dreams, in random images, in the way totally unrelated situations will make me say, “Oh hey, this totally reminds me of that one time when — “

And then I’d catch yourself, curse under my breath (…LEAVE IT!!), and try to focus elsewhere.

But this old situation kept dogging me. In the mornings, in my precious liminal state, I’d find myself grinding on it. Late at night, I’d catch myself stalking on social media. The ruminations were still there, poking at me. I’d just pushed them away, into the basement dungeon.

I think we all know what happens to things in the basement dungeon: they become kinks. Demonizing and avoiding something is still giving it a huge amount of energy — it’s just oppositional energy.

Avoiding it only gives the rumination more fuel.

The arousal of avoidance

In my open marriage, I understood viscerally how pushed-away thoughts could get disproportionately hot… and how mental allowance could quickly cool things down.

A decade ago, I had a crush flare up with an old friend, a spark that maybe there was an attraction between us.

The spark felt naughty. This person was a friend! I was married! How could I? The naughtiness felt interesting.

“But wait,” I asked myself. “Why would it be naughty? I’m in an open marriage! I could pursue the spark if I wanted!”

I made the conscious choice to give my imagination free range to consider the situation… What would that dalliance look like? I would talk to my husband about it, establish the ground rules, check in with my friend, see what happened…

When I allowed myself to fantasize without judgment, I quickly saw that my friend’s vaguely irritating qualities would be even more irritating in the context of a hookup.

I let myself play through the idea with full awareness and allowance and quickly saw how, without the heat of forbidden naughtiness, the idea had very little appeal. With this allowance, the crush quickly faded.

Having that experience helped me gain compassion for monogamous folks who cheat on their partners. If I’d felt that spark of attraction and NOT felt ok about allowing myself to think the possibilities through, the crush would have probably seemed deeply interesting.

Shame is such a powerful aphrodisiac. It’s easy to get horny for the elephant in the room you’re trying to avoid.

This is to say, I already had the first-person experience with understanding the arousal of avoidance… and yet I still yelled at my brain and told it to stop ruminating.

And yet still, I tried to build a wall to keep the intrusive thoughts away.

And yet still, the ruminations persisted.

Why the fuck can’t I stop thinking about that one thing I did that one time?

But then my perspective drastically shifted.

Here’s what shifted things for me:

If everyone and everything is just a projection of my own stuff, that meant that obsessing about an old relationship was just me obsessing about myself.

(…Typical!)

If every relationship is just a mirror of my own stuff, then those obsessive intrusive thoughts weren’t really about the other person. The intrusions were about me.

Again: typical!

So my ruminations weren’t about me not moving on from an old relationship… they were about me refusing to move on from myself.

What if rumination is just your psyche’s unwillingness to abandon itself?

That thing you can’t get over? That situation you can’t forgive? That person you can’t let go of?

It’s you.

It’s always been you.

Your inability to “get over it” is your unwillingness to leave pieces of yourself behind.

We project so much onto other people, but the reality is that we’re all complex, tangled webs of identities and personas and archetypes and shadows and angels.

When I look back on that dark relationship all those years ago, I understand that most of that darkness was in me. All those things I projected on someone else and then pushed away?

Those were my unloved aspects.

It’s healthy to end toxic relationships, and I’m glad I ended that one all those years ago. That said, I forgot to fully love and integrate the difficult aspects of myself that got me into that situation.

It’s healthy to remove yourself from toxic situations, but you gotta make sure all of you gets out.

You can’t leave bits of yourself behind.

Don’t abandon yourself like that!

This includes the parts you may not like, that you projected onto someone else to hate. Even those parts need love! Think of them as challenging small children. Even when they’re difficult, you must not abandon them.

You can try, of course! But in my experience, if you leave parts of yourself behind, those rejected aspects of yourself will keep calling to you. If we don’t integrate our darker, troubling, unloved, frustrating aspects, they’ll demand our attention.

Rumination is one of those demands.

Your little shadow children are clever: they know it’s painful to look at dark aspects of your own psyche, so they put on masks and pretend to be other people.

“Remember when that person did that?” your little shadows will say, and you’ll think, oh yeah, I hated that. And your shadow children are stoked because they’re getting attention. It might be negative attention projected onto someone else, but they don’t care.

When you’re hurting, sometimes even negative attention is better than neglect.

Your shadow children are delighted, because at least now you’re looking in their direction. They might be wearing masks and playing dress-up to pretend to be someone else instead of you, but it’s you.

That’s why you have to go back and collect these pieces of yourself: if you don’t, they’ll whine and harass you, poke you and kick you in the balls when you’re not looking.

Meeting the little dark witch

Inspired by this aha about rumination, I decided to try working with it through a conscious dance practice. The general idea with a Somatic Recapitulation practice was to use music and dance to call in a prior period in my life, to re-meet me then-self.

I figured, if I could create a container to meet these old aspects of myself from that time, maybe I could finally move forward and stop thinking about it?

Opening portals to challenging times is painful AF, so it helps to have a ritual or a practice to create a safe container.

I put on the old clothes, turned the lights off, lit the candles, put the headphones on, and played the music from that period.

Then I waited.

It was the little dark witch who showed up first.

She was traumatized and terrified, squinting suspiciously. Her eyes narrowed at the world, and she was fueled by the ZING of attachment anxiety shooting through her solar plexus. That the only nourishment she had to keep her going.

There was no trust, no faith. The world was a scary place where bad things happened, and people left and abandoned her. She was sure she would die alone, starving in the cold.

But she also was starting to be aware of her power. Trauma had cracked off her blinders, and suddenly she was aware of life coursing through everything, and the reality that if she focused a little… she could shift the flow. She got confused between hypervigilant PTSD and psychic power, but she had both.

She was hurt and scared but also powerful.

She flexed her fists and tried to cast a spell that would be her medicine. It was dark and explosive, fueled by panic and insomnia, worthlessness, and manipulation. It would bring what she thought she needed to feel better.

She’d tried to make magic, but she didn’t know what she was doing, and she made poison.

Dancing with my little dark witch all these years later, I realized that I was still trying to spit out the poison, but I still couldn’t get the taste of it off my lips.

This little dark witch was mischievous and sinister, dirty and extremely motivated. Mostly, she was terrified.

“You didn’t trust that it would ever be ok again, did you?” I asked her.

“No,” she said, shaking her head, hair wild and knotted with spit and come and god knows what else.

“Do you feel how things are safer now?” I asked her. “We have trust practices and intuitive knowing. We have a container of faith to hold us when we fall. We don’t have to manipulate the world to get what we want — we can create that safety internally for ourselves now.”

I extended my arms out to her, holding her little hands. Her knuckles were inked with sigils and incantations.

There in my living room, lights low, old music on the headphones, my little dark witch looked up at me. The tightness around her eyes softened into wonder and curiosity.

“I do,” she said. I watched her heave a sigh, her shallow breathing going deeper into her belly.

“Come dance with me then?” I asked, and she did.

She is me, and I am her, and we are integrated once more.

The universe folds pieces of itself into origami, over and over.

The little dark witch was just the first who appeared. There were so many others, too. The gay douchebag bro in his racecar, the long-necked swan, surrendered to its fate, hanging loose from the jaws of the beast that’s consuming it. The redneck troublemaker. The neglected baby and the spoiled brat.

They’re all me, and I tried to deny it and abandoned them years ago, and now they’re all rushing in, jostling each other and shouting for my attention.

It was an exhausting reunion.

After my somatic recapitulation, my stomach turned and I felt nauseous. My belly was weird for days.

I wasn’t surprised. It’s a lot to digest, meeting a whole family of selves that you projected onto someone else and then rejected and abandoned.

But when I think of how many years I’ve been dogged by intrusive thoughts, rumination, and compulsive analysis that I didn’t want… I’ll take a few days of feeling bad.

It’s worth it to integrate all these little selves.

I did this work in part because a beloved encouraged me to.

“I’m sick of thinking about that era,” I’d said. “I was a dark little witch in those days, and it wasn’t good.”

“I don’t know,” my beloved said. “I think I might like that dark little witch.”

That was what cracked me open… the idea that some aspect of myself that I’ve banished could be loved by someone else, but somehow not by me? It felt deeply cruel.

So here’s me passing that encouragement on to you: bring home all your shadow children. You deserve to feel whole.

You deserve to have mornings to yourself, under your blankets without rumination.

You deserve to stop thinking about that one thing that happened that one time.