When Thoughts Feel Like Monsters: A Different Way to Relate to the Mind

There is a particular kind of suffering that happens when we go to war with our own thoughts.

You know the loop. The thought arrives, sharp and uninvited, and then comes the attempt to argue it away, suppress it, distract from it, or convince yourself it is not true. And for a moment, maybe it works. But the thought comes back, often louder, and now you are exhausted from the fight as well as the original fear.

Grief and anxiety are full of these thoughts. I will never feel okay again. Something bad is about to happen. I am not enough, and eventually everyone will see it. They arrive without warning and carry a weight that can feel unbearable.

What if the problem is not the thoughts themselves, but the way we relate to them?

The Mind as a Storyteller

One of the central ideas in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ACT, is that the human mind is an extraordinarily prolific storyteller. It produces thoughts, images, predictions, and judgments at a remarkable rate. Many of them are useful. Many of them are not. And quite a few of them are simply not true.

The trouble is that when we are inside our thoughts, they feel like reality. A thought like I cannot handle this does not arrive as a story the mind is telling. It arrives as a fact. And when we treat it as a fact, we respond accordingly: we avoid, we retreat, we quietly shrink the boundaries of our lives to keep ourselves safe from the thing we fear.

ACT calls this process fusion: the experience of becoming so merged with our thoughts that we cannot see any distance between us and them. The thought and the thinker become the same thing. The reverse, defusion, is the practice of stepping back and seeing thoughts as thoughts rather than facts. Not arguing with them. Not trying to eliminate them. Just recognizing them for what they are: mental events, passing through.

The Boat and the Monsters

Here is an image I find useful.

Imagine you are on a boat, adrift at sea. Below deck, there are monsters. They are the accumulated fears, doubts, and dark thoughts that come with anxiety, grief, and the ordinary weight of being human: You are not capable of this. Something will go wrong. You do not deserve what you are reaching for. As long as the boat remains adrift, the monsters stay below. It is not peaceful exactly, but it is tolerable. You have found a way to coexist.

Then, in the distance, you see a shore. It is sunny and inviting. There are people on the beach, living their lives, connected to one another. It represents the things that matter most to you: the relationships you want to be present for, the work that feels meaningful, the life you have been putting off until the fear gets smaller.

When you turn the boat toward shore, the monsters come up from below deck. They are loud. They shout, they cajole, they belittle. Who do you think you are? Turn back. Stay where it is safe. You are not ready for that.

And here is the thing that ACT asks us to notice: the monsters cannot actually harm you. They can make noise. They cannot touch the wheel. They have no power over the boat except the power you hand them when you decide their voices must be silenced before you can move.

The question they are really posing is this: will you stay adrift to keep them quiet, or will you sail toward the shore anyway?

What This Looks Like in Practice

Cognitive defusion is not positive thinking, and it is not a way of minimizing what you are going through. It does not ask you to pretend your fears are unfounded. It asks something simpler and, in some ways, harder: to hold your thoughts a little more lightly.

In practice, this often begins with naming. When a thought arrives with the force of fact, try silently labeling it: I notice I am having the thought that I cannot handle this. That small shift, from I cannot handle this to I am having the thought that I cannot handle this, creates a real if subtle distance between the thinker and the thought. You are not the monster. You are the one who can hear it and keep sailing anyway.

Some people find it helpful to imagine difficult thoughts as weather: conditions that move through, storms you can observe without becoming. The sun does not disappear when it rains. It simply cannot be seen for a while.

What all of these approaches share is an orientation of curiosity rather than combat. You are not trying to defeat the thought or wait until it falls quiet. You are learning to see it clearly, feel the discomfort it brings, and choose your direction anyway. In ACT, that direction is always guided by the same question: what matters to you, and are you moving toward it?

The Shore Is Still There

Anxiety and grief share something important: they both whisper that the shore is not for you, that you are not ready, that it would be safer to wait just a little longer. And the longer we wait, the more persuasive that whisper becomes.

The monsters will come up from below deck when you turn toward the life you want. That is simply what they do. The goal is not to silence them first. The goal is to recognize that their noise is not the same as danger, that they are not steering the boat, and that the shore is still there, whether the monsters are quiet or not.

You do not have to feel ready to sail. You just have to keep your hands on the wheel.

If the thoughts and fears are making it hard to move, hard to function, or hard to imagine what forward could look like, you do not have to find your way through alone. I offer a free 15-minute consultation at shareyourgrief.org. No commitment, no pressure. Just a conversation.

What If Your Depression Is Trying to Tell You Something?

There is a story most of us have been told about depression. It goes something like this: depression is a brain disease. Something in your chemistry is off. You were born with a vulnerability, or you inherited it, and now it is expressing itself. The solution is to correct the imbalance, usually with medication, and get back to functioning.

It is a tidy story. It is also, increasingly, one that the research does not support.

This post is not an argument against medication, and it is not a dismissal of biology. It is an invitation to consider a different framework, one that many of my clients find more honest, more hopeful, and more useful: the idea that depression is not a malfunction. It is a signal.

The Collapse of the "Chemical Imbalance" Story

For decades, the dominant explanation for depression was straightforward: low serotonin causes depression, and antidepressants work by raising it. This idea was so widely repeated, in pharmaceutical ads, in doctors' offices, in popular books, that most people simply accepted it as established science.

It wasn't. In 2022, a comprehensive review published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, led by researchers at University College London, examined decades of studies on serotonin and depression and found no consistent evidence that low serotonin levels cause depression. The researchers were not fringe critics. They were not arguing that antidepressants are useless. They were documenting what many researchers had privately understood for years: the chemical imbalance story was a significant oversimplification, one that had been marketed aggressively but never actually proven.

What this means, practically, is that if you have ever felt vaguely defective, as though your brain were simply broken in some fundamental way, that story may have done you a disservice. Depression is real. The suffering is real. But "your serotonin is low" is not a satisfying or accurate explanation for why you feel the way you do.

So if it is not a chemical imbalance, what is it?

Depression as a Signal

In 2023, researchers at the University of Michigan published a randomized controlled trial testing what happens when people are given a different framework for understanding their depression. Instead of describing depression as a disease or disorder, the "signal" framing presented it as something that serves a function, a meaningful response to something in a person's life or history that needs attention. People who received the signal framing reported less self-stigma and more hope for recovery than those given the standard disease explanation. The framing mattered. How we understand our depression shapes how we relate to it, and how much agency we feel in addressing it.

This idea, that depression functions as a signal rather than a malfunction, is not new in clinical circles. It draws on evolutionary psychiatry, which asks: why would a response this powerful and this universal exist if it served no purpose? The honest answer is that depression, in many of its forms, appears to be the mind and body's way of saying: something here needs to change. Something here has been injured. Something here is asking for your attention.

The question worth sitting with is not "what is wrong with my brain?" It is "what is my depression trying to tell me?"

Two of the Most Common Things It Points To

In my practice, depression rarely arrives out of nowhere. When I sit with clients and we slow down enough to look beneath the symptoms, two things come up again and again.

The first is trauma, particularly experiences from early in life that shaped how a person learned to see themselves and the world. The research here is striking. Studies consistently show that adverse childhood experiences, including abuse, neglect, and household instability, significantly increase a person's lifelong vulnerability to depression. The connection is not merely statistical. Early experiences of being unsafe, unseen, or unloved leave traces in the nervous system and in the stories we carry about our own worth. Depression, in many of these cases, is not a brain disease. It is the body's long memory of something painful that was never fully addressed.

The second is the inner critic: that relentless internal voice that tells you that you are not enough, that you have failed, that other people are managing life better than you are. Research published in 2024 found that working directly with self-criticism in depressed patients produced significant improvements in depressive symptoms, self-compassion, and self-esteem. This tracks with what I see clinically. For many of my clients, depression is not a mood that descended from nowhere. It is the cumulative weight of years of harsh self-judgment, the exhaustion of living under a verdict that is never quite "good enough."

Paul Gilbert, the psychologist who developed Compassion Focused Therapy, has spent decades studying the relationship between self-criticism and depression. His central insight is that the inner critic was not born cruel. It developed, usually in childhood, as a way to stay safe, to meet high expectations, to avoid punishment or rejection. It was adaptive once. Over time, it becomes the thing that is making you sick.

What It Means If Depression Is a Signal

If depression is a signal, then the job is not simply to silence it. The job is to get curious about what it is pointing toward.

This does not mean refusing medication if medication would help. Signals can be so loud they make it impossible to function, and sometimes we need support to turn the volume down enough to do the deeper work. But medication that quiets the signal without ever asking what it was signaling is, at best, a partial answer.

It also means something important about how you relate to yourself while you are in it. Depression is not evidence that you are broken. It is not proof that your brain is defective or that you are constitutionally ill-suited for the life you are trying to live. It may be evidence that something happened to you that left a mark, or that you have been living under a weight of self-judgment that no person was designed to carry indefinitely.

That is a very different story. And in my experience, it is a more useful one, because it opens a door that the disease model tends to close. If depression is a signal, there is something to listen to. There is something to address. There is a path forward that is not just management, but genuine change.

A Note on Getting Help

Getting curious about what your depression is pointing toward is not something you have to do alone. In fact, it is often easier with a guide, someone who can help you slow down, look beneath the surface, and begin to understand what your inner world has been trying to say.

If you have been carrying depression and wondering whether there might be more to it than a chemical imbalance, I would be glad to talk. You can schedule a free 15-minute consultation at shareyourgrief.org. No pressure, no commitment. Just a conversation.

The Exhausting Math of Perfectionism: Why You're Always Behind Even When You're Ahead

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that has nothing to do with how much you've accomplished. You finish the project. You get the good review. You cross the last item off the list. And then, almost immediately, your mind pivots — not to satisfaction, but to the audit. What could have been sharper? What did I miss? What would it have looked like if I'd started earlier, tried harder, cared more?

This is the exhausting math of perfectionism: no matter what you produce, the numbers never quite add up.

The Moving Goalpost

Psychologists have a name for what happens in the moment after a perfectionist finishes something: contingent self-worth. The idea is that for people who struggle with perfectionism, their sense of value isn't stable — it's perpetually tied to the next performance. Complete one task, and rather than registering a moment of genuine satisfaction, the goalpost simply moves.

This isn't stubbornness or ingratitude. It is, in many ways, how perfectionism was designed to work. Researcher Dr. Gordon Flett has described perfectionism as a system built on the premise that you are only as good as your last output — which means that any completed output immediately becomes last, and therefore no longer enough.

The result is a psychological loop that is nearly impossible to win. The finish line exists only long enough to become the new starting line.

Why the Brain Can't Settle

Drawing from a neuroscience perspective, this experience has a name: the reward prediction error. When we complete something meaningful, the brain's dopamine system is supposed to provide a brief signal of satisfaction.  In the perfectionist's brain, the anticipated reward — the "good enough" standard — is set so high that the completion rarely triggers it. The brain registers not a reward, but a shortfall, and immediately redirects attention toward the gap.

What this means, practically, is that perfectionists are often working harder than anyone around them and feeling worse for it. The effort is real. The achievement is real. But the internal experience is one of chronic deficiency.

This is not a character flaw. It is a pattern — and patterns can be changed.

The "Should Have" Spiral

One of the clearest signs of this loop is the post-completion debrief that perfectionists conduct almost automatically. You finish a presentation and walk out of the room already cataloguing the slide you wish you'd revised. You send an email and immediately notice the sentence that could have been cleaner. You have a difficult conversation and spend the rest of the day reconstructing it, line by line, for a better outcome you can no longer reach.

Cognitive behavioral therapists refer to this as post-event processing — a tendency to mentally review completed events through a critical lens, emphasizing what went wrong and minimizing what went right. Research consistently shows that this kind of rumination doesn't improve future performance; it primarily increases anxiety and deepens self-doubt.

In other words, the debrief feels productive. It almost never is.

The Cost of Always Being "Almost There"

When the goalpost is always moving, you never actually arrive anywhere. And the cost of that relentless forward-leaning is significant.

Relationships suffer when the people around you sense that their effort — and yours — is never quite enough. Creative work suffers when the fear of the post-completion debrief makes starting feel dangerous. And perhaps most quietly devastating, your sense of identity suffers: if your worth is always contingent on the next thing, there is no stable ground beneath you.

Dr. Kristin Neff's research on self-compassion speaks directly to this. She has found that people who treat themselves with warmth and kindness after a setback or an imperfect performance are more resilient, not less — more likely to try again, not less motivated. The inner critic, for all its noise about raising standards, is in fact raising anxiety and lowering the capacity for genuine growth.

Toward a Different Kind of Accounting

If the perfectionist's math is always yielding a deficit, the work is not to lower your standards — it is to change the equation.

Notice the pivot. When you finish something and feel the pull toward the debrief, pause and name it: "I am doing the thing where I immediately look for what's wrong." That moment of naming — what therapists call defusion in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy — creates just enough distance to choose a different response.

Acknowledge completion as its own category. Not "it's good enough, I suppose," but a genuine recognition that you finished something, and finishing is a real accomplishment with real value. For many perfectionists, this feels almost embarrassingly simple. That discomfort is worth sitting with.

Set the terms of "done" in advance. Before you begin a project, decide what "complete" means. Write it down if it helps. When you reach that standard, completion is the verdict — not a provisional state pending further review.

Distinguish between reflection and rumination. Healthy reflection asks: What would I carry forward? Rumination asks: What does this say about whether I am enough? One is useful. The other is the loop.

A Note on Perfectionism and Grief

For those navigating grief alongside perfectionism — and there are many — this loop can take on an especially painful dimension. Perfectionists often apply the same relentless audit to their mourning: wondering if they are grieving correctly, enough, or in the right way. They may replay conversations with the person who died, cataloguing words they wish they had said and things they wish they had done differently.

If this resonates, please know that grief is not a performance to be evaluated. There is no standard you are failing to meet. And the love underneath all of that self-scrutiny — the love that made you want to do things right — is not something that needed to be earned in the first place.

The goal isn't perfection. It never was. The goal is a life you can actually inhabit while you're living it.

Perfectly Anxious: Understanding the Link Between Perfectionism and Anxiety

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes not from doing too much, but from never feeling like what you do is quite enough. If you have ever finished a project, received praise, and immediately shifted your focus to what you could have done better, you may be familiar with the quiet tyranny of perfectionism.

Perfectionism and anxiety are close companions — and understanding why can be the first step toward loosening their grip.

The Perfectionism-Anxiety Connection

Perfectionism is not simply having high standards. Researchers distinguish between adaptive perfectionism — a healthy pursuit of excellence — and maladaptive perfectionism, characterized by a fear of failure, harsh self-criticism, and an all-or-nothing thinking style. It is this latter form that fuels anxiety.

The mechanism is straightforward: perfectionists set standards that are, by definition, nearly impossible to meet. When those standards are not met — and they rarely are — the perfectionist interprets the shortfall not as a normal part of being human, but as evidence of personal inadequacy. This creates a chronic state of threat that the brain interprets as danger, activating the same anxiety response as a physical threat. The result is a relentless cycle of striving, falling short, and self-criticism that keeps the nervous system in a near-constant state of alert.

Where Does Perfectionism Come From?

Perfectionism rarely develops in a vacuum. Research consistently points to several contributing factors:

Early experiences of conditional approval — growing up in an environment where love or praise felt contingent on achievement can teach a child that their worth is earned, not inherent.

A response to uncertainty or chaos — for some, perfectionism develops as a coping mechanism. If I can just control my performance, I can control outcomes. It is an understandable strategy that ultimately creates more anxiety than it resolves.

Cultural and social messaging — we live in a culture that celebrates productivity and achievement while stigmatizing failure. Social media, with its curated highlight reels, amplifies the illusion that everyone else is performing life flawlessly.

Temperament — some people are simply wired with a stronger sensitivity to mistakes and a heightened need for order and predictability.

Tools for Loosening Perfectionism's Grip

The goal in managing perfectionism is not to abandon your standards — it is to build a healthier relationship with imperfection.

Practice self-compassion over self-criticism. Research by Dr. Kristin Neff demonstrates that self-compassion — treating yourself with the same kindness you would offer a struggling friend — is more effective at motivating change than self-criticism, which tends to increase shame and avoidance.

Challenge all-or-nothing thinking. Perfectionism thrives on binary thinking: success or failure, good enough or worthless. When you notice this pattern, try asking yourself, "Is there a middle ground here?" A project that is 80% of what you envisioned is not a failure — it is a completed project.

Set process goals rather than outcome goals. Instead of "I need to do this perfectly," try "I will give this my genuine effort for the time I have." Shifting focus from outcome to process reduces the anxiety that comes from fixating on results you cannot fully control.

Embrace "good enough." Psychologist Barry Schwartz's research on decision-making introduced the concept of "satisficing" — choosing an option that is good enough rather than optimal. Perfectionists are maximizers who exhaust themselves searching for the best possible outcome. Learning to satisfice in lower-stakes situations is a skill that can be practiced and gradually expanded.

A Note on Perfectionism and Grief

For those who are grieving, perfectionism can add an invisible layer of suffering. Perfectionists often feel they should be grieving "correctly" — that their emotions are too much or not enough, that they should be further along by now, or that they are somehow failing at the very human act of mourning. If this resonates with you, please know that there is no right way to grieve. Grief, like life, is beautifully and necessarily imperfect.

Reaching out for help is often the hardest step — especially when part of you worries that your struggles aren't "bad enough" to warrant it. They are. I offer a free 15-minute consultation where we can simply talk about what you're experiencing. You can schedule that here.‍ ‍