Dealing with Negative Thoughts

We all know that negative thoughts are extremely unhelpful to us, but what can we do to stop them? The first thing to do, as soon as the discouraging or negative thought comes into your mind, is to immediately derail it. Tell yourself: "This thought is not from G-d! G-d, please lead me on Your path, and show me what's true. I want to go in Your way, G-d so please have mercy on me and help me to break free from these discouraging, depressing thoughts once and for all. Master of the Universe, I’m begging You, please give me the tools to free myself, when I get stuck!"

All of us meet forks in the road, and come up against situations where we simply have no clue what is best for us. Whether to take that new job, or not to? Whether to move to a different community, or to rebuild where you are? Whether to marry a certain person, or not to?  Whenever you get to a fork on your own personal road, G-d is more than happy to tell you which direction to take. You just need to ask Him.

This is a great tool you can use for overcoming negative thoughts. Again, as soon as the thought surfaces in your mind, you grab it and say: "You’re negative so you’re not coming from my Father, my King!  G-d, what doYou have to say about this? How can I feel encouraged and hopeful again?"

This is the point where a lot of psychoanalysts might start jumping up and down and saying that this solution is just “thought suppression.” They will quote the studies on “thought suppression” and tell you that if you just ignore negative thoughts without analyzing them to death they will only come back and bite you harder next time.

According to the laws of the natural world, and the strictly scientific way that experimental psychologists look at things, they could be right. According to the tests that they carry out it certainly is very difficult to successfully suppress negative thoughts for long. But we're not limited to natural world, psychology lab solutions. We're going way above natural law in order to get G-d involved in the healing process.

When a person says to G-d: “Master of the Universe, I know that thought is coming from the Dark Side and not from You, therefore it can’t be real. I so much need Your help right now because I want to believe in You and not those crazy thoughts!

Remember that G-d is the only reality here, and He can make thoughts vanish into thin air.  Now you’re not “suppressing” anything; rather G-d just relieved you of that troublesome thought and it’s gone for good. It's not buried somewhere deep down in some hypothesized place in your mind ready to attack you again even harder the next time – it's been nullified. It’s gone.

The poor guy whose therapist doesn’t believe in G-d still does have a problem with “thought suppression,” because he's still looking at dark-side thoughts like they’re real. Since he has no G-d to turn to for help and since he really believes that he has a real “mental demon” that he has to contend with on his own, then that’s exactly what he gets.  If he keeps pushing forward without Divine blessing and Divine protection to deal with that demon then the demon will come back; and when he does he’s going to bring his big brother with him.

But we must be grateful even for all of the falsehood we encounter. Remember, G-d's seal is truth. The more we uncover truth and get close to truth, the more we get closer to G-d Himself. If we weren't continually tested and challenged by falsehood, then we wouldn't be trying to search for what's true in our own lives. We would never do the necessary work to come to learn how to come close to G-d and enlist His help to differentiate what is coming from Him and what isn’t.