Someone asked about obsessive thinking in my webinar. The transcription of my answer is below:

Man:  I keep having to deal with obsessive thinking about the affair. Lies make you go around and around in your head. What do I do?

My Response: You keep going back to the past and thinking about the lies that were told, thinking about the situations that were less than honest. In some level, you’re trying to discern the truth. That’s what I’m reading into this, maybe that’s not accurate. But it’s not obsessive thinking in a negative way, because what you want is to know the truth.

When you go back to situations in the past, where you were lied to, for example, a person is going back and saying, “You know, back then it felt really kind of strange, where I had this kind of sense that something wasn’t quite right, but I didn’t say anything or I didn’t do anything.”

Your intuition at that particular time was picking up on the lie, but another part of you denied it. What you want to do now is to go back and you want to affirm yourself and say to yourself, “I was right on target. A part of me was right on target even though I didn’t want to know it, even though I didn’t want to face it.”

So, if you begin to break yourself into those kinds of parts, the part that is thinking about something over and over and over again really is trying to work on something, trying to make sense of something, trying to heal you in some way. So, it’s not all bad, it just takes a lot of time and, often, a lot of energy.

So, if you have obsessive thinking, just take some time and say, “What in the world am I thinking about?” and then ask yourself this question: “What does it mean to me that I’m thinking about this?”

What most people discover is: what it means to you is that you have bumped into a part of you that doesn’t feel very good. So, “I bumped into a part of me that began to question myself, when I began to feel that my husband or my wife was slipping away from me or was lying to me.”

So, asking that question, “What does this mean to me?” often brings up some of our own deep seated negative thoughts or negative feelings about ourselves. Then, you can begin addressing those questions or those feelings and saying, “That’s not really true,” and you can begin to put some reality on who you really are.

Then, often, this helps eliminate or greatly reduce much of the obsessiveness, or the mind that keeps working, working, working, even when you’re sleeping.