Excessive Thinking and Trauma: Why Overthinking Is a Form of Dissociation

Written by Roland Bal

Why Overthinking Is a Trauma Response

We all experience sometimes that we excessively think. When you're busy or have been busy for a while your thought processes become a bit more activated. This will be a bit more pronounced when you've gone through trauma or suffer from emotional stress.

It is as if the energy goes up into the head and it activates. I've referred to this before as dissociation, which can be mild or can be very pronounced, as with trauma. The emotional content, or emotional residue, that you're holding in the body kind of goes up into the head and then it gets activated there.

Our minds are conditioned to getting somewhere: to arrive, to reach, to achieve, to making an effort. Unfortunately, this mindset has filtered through into meditation as if meditation, or mindfulness, is but a tool that can be used to get better results, more financial success, an improvement in relation to self and others. While there is no doubt that meditation can have these benefits, they can never become an objective of meditation itself as it defeats the very essence of meditation. These positive benefits are by-products of meditation. The moment you are making these benefits an objective, you are inviting conflict because you are sustaining two opposing mindsets: where you want to be and where you currently are.

Excessive Thinking as Dissociation

Your thought processes — when they go on, on their own — always have comparison in them, or projection into the future: "it shouldn't be like this," "why did this happen," "why am I still like this," and so forth. There's always some form of judgment or comparison or guilt or blame with self-reproach in that.

The moment you shift into, or shift your focus, your attention, into the feeling, how it sits in your body, you're cancelling out that conflictual movement of your thoughts. And it sounds very simple but it's actually very hard to do, because the moment that you're arresting your movement of thought, very quickly a thought wants to get back in. It's almost like it has its own personality — it wants to grab your attention and take that energy from you.

What you're actually doing is arresting the movement of thought, the processes of thought, by connecting to the physical sensations of it. And that takes you out of duality.

How to Arrest the Movement of Thought

Without going into the why, or the how, or the when, or the what — can I ask you to tune into the feeling of those thoughts. This might sound a little bit weird but if you could close your eyes now or after the video below, see if you can work with this.

Close your eyes just for a moment and tune into the activation in the head area, of your thought processes. Can you tune into the busyness, the feeling of the busyness itself? First of all, can you see that your thoughts are racing or going in a particular direction when you close your eyes? Now just close your eyes and feel that busyness of your thought processes.

It might feel as tension in the head. It might feel as heat in the head. It might feel as tension on the frontal part of your eyes. Can you connect with that? Can you connect with those tensions?

This might sound really simple but what you're actually doing is arresting the movement of thought, the processes of thought, by connecting to the physical sensations of it. And that takes you out of duality.

Have a listen to this video here below for the full guided exercise.

Tuning into the Feeling of Your Thoughts

So again, just catch yourself as a thought wants to get back in, but switch back again into how that feels in the head. The sensation of it, the pressure, the heat. See how that moves for you. See if you sit with it for a while, what that does to the quality of your thoughts, or the busyness of your thoughts. Does it change anything? Does it move anything?

Or perhaps you actually start to feel the emotional content that you've been avoiding by excessive thinking. You might feel a bit of nervousness or anxiety coming in. And so you can switch between that — allowing yourself to be with the busyness of your thoughts but then switch again back to the feelings of thoughts themselves, the pressure in the head, the heat.

What Happens When the Thinking Slows Down

Identification and reaction seem to happen instantly when you are feeling depressed, angry, anxious, despairing, hopeless, or hypervigilant. It is reaction through choice, through rejection of pain, that helps you cope. That shift in focus caused by your reaction temporarily creates the illusion of separating you from your suffering; even though that very reaction is a way of coping, it also perpetuates a particular emotion or set of emotions that keep you from moving forward.

As you sit through the reaction, you can again move closer to what you initially felt — the original feeling, emotion, sensation that was most present for you. See if you can hold the space for that feeling — as it is — without falling into it and getting further overwhelmed by it, or getting pulled out of it into thoughts or memories.

If you are able to hold the space for that state of mind — that emotion, sensation, or feeling — you will allow that energy to flow into awareness and you thereby create more resilience and containment. You might notice that the intensity mounts for a while before it decreases and starts to integrate. From here on you can go deeper.