Why We Ruminate and How to Stop

So, I’m an ex-expert ruminator.

The pattern became very evident after my third breakup (a platonic breakup). Following every breakup, I would spend at least a year ruminating over it. This means everyday for a year without fail, I would be overthinking or overanalyzing about SOME aspect of what had happened.

With all this ruminating under my belt, I have come to understand what it is at its core: the brain trying very hard to come up with a coherent narrative but being unable to, thus ending up in thought loops.

The thing was, I actually was able to come to key insights through ruminating, but it was just a highly inefficient and decidedly Not Fun way of doing so. So I write this post in hopes of sparing some of you from that hoopla.

Sub-point: Obviously ruminating a lot sucked, but what made it worse was The Second Arrow. This is a Buddhist concept that essentially means, the added baggage we put on ourselves when we have negative feelings about negative feelings. I judged myself for ruminating so much, and I was frustrated that I was not over things already. Clearly, this does not help. I needed to just accept the process without making value claims on it.

This post will explain about how rumination comes about, and then how to resolve it.

Part 1

So, what leads to incoherent narratives in the first place?

1. Gaslighting.

Gaslighting is when our experience is denied by others. i.e Say you say that you feel cold. Then someone says, “What are you talking about? it’s actually quite warm in here.” That is gaslighting because they are denying that you feel cold, goddamnit.

There’s the obvious kind, like that example, but there’s also not-so-obvious ones like shadow gaslighting—where someone’s unconscious behaviour is what is doing the gaslighting; they say and believe one thing, but your experience of them is another story—and self-gaslighting.

Because gaslighting is about quashing an experienced truth for another “truth”, it leads to incoherent narratives in the brain.

2. Trauma filters.

If I have a trauma filter on while I’m experiencing a relationship, I’ll be experiencing it without consciously having all of the information.

For example: I had patterns of codependency. My subconscious had a vested interest in seeing the other party as perfect because they are supposedly fulfilling me. So if there were red flags, they’d get filtered out.

As they say: red flags just look like flags when you have rose-colored glasses on.

The thing is, a part of our awareness IS aware of the red flags and filtered out information — so when this unfiltered reality finally has room to come up to the surface and have a voice, it competes with the filtered/edited reality and creates thought loops as the brain struggles to pick a truth.

3. Suppressed/demonized aspects of ourselves. Also the crux of shadow work.

For example, previously I had an association that being angry made me a bad person. The angry part of myself would be aware if someone was, for example, crossing my boundaries, but because this was the demonized part of myself, I would either suppress the anger, or gaslight myself out of it. #Notcool to myself.

In both trauma filters and suppressed parts of ourselves, rumination is a warning signal compelling us to believe in our own narratives that we are shutting down or ignoring.

Protip: What’s a trait that you consistently judge in others? This could be a big hint that this is actually a demonized aspect of yourself.

4. Attachment to right & wrong / Binary thinking.

For me, personally, I got trapped in rumination because I got caught up in right and wrong. I was invested in being in the right side and the other person being on the wrong side. Often, finding myself on the “wrong” side was a matter of a demonized aspect of myself. But with all the competing narratives, I couldn’t figure out which was right and wrong. Because my brain couldn’t neatly settle on a right or wrong, it got caught in an endless loop.

Binary thinking IS actually important in the beginning stages, which I will get to. But the problem with exclusively right and wrong and black and white thinking is that it is a wounded/traumatized way of looking at the world.

When we’re threatened, the most ancient part of our brain gets kicked in, and this part of our brain primarily wants us to survive. So it paints all X as causing bad thing Y, or all instances of P will lead to Z. It creates stories like, if I am an S then U will happen, so I must never be an S.

Nuance becomes threatening.

5. Getting caught up in the mental realm.

Also related to point #4. Any discussion on overthinking and ruminating is incomplete without discussing somatics. I had operated in the mental realm for the majority of my conscious life, I had no friggen’ clue there was also a gut awareness, a heart awareness, a body awareness.

I mean, this is the way we’re conditioned to operate, after all. If I had known this was a thing, it would have saved me a lot of hassle because whenever I caught myself ruminating too much, I could turn my awareness back into my body. (By the way, if you have no idea what the fuck I’m talking about here, that is probably a sign you are operating exclusively in the mental realm.)

Important note: if you’re someone who has experienced a lot of trauma, getting back in touch with the body is an intense process — there can be a lot of unprocessed emotions there, as well as generally just not feeling safe in the body. Somatic reconnection is a journey here, an arduous but worthwhile one, and I’d recommend hiring a somatic therapist/healer to help or save up to hire one <3

At the crux of getting caught in the mental realm is cut-off logic. No shade to lawyers here, but think of an archetypical defence lawyer who can twist anything into a truth, who slithers between ambiguities and technicalities. What they say logically “makes sense”, but you know it’s not the truth. If we’re cut off from our bodies, we’re cut off from this knowing. As Sarah Certa says—logic cut off from heart and context becomes perverse. Logicking our way out of our experienced truth is self-gaslighting.

Part 2

So, if rumination is a result of incoherent stories—either from gaslighting, trauma filters, suppressed aspects of ourselves, binary thinking, and disconnect from the body—how do we get a coherent story?

Through 1) validation, which begets 2) story building blocks, which leads to the last step 3) letting go of the story.

1. First and foremost is validation.

The more a story is mirrored back to us, the less nebulous and more solid it becomes. Nebulous narratives beget mental loops, solid ones end the loop. I once had someone ask me, So what if someone has to validate something that’s blatantly untrue? A: The point is not objective truth, the point is mirroring feelings and experiences.

In essence, healing the story is healing the mental realm. I once went to a clinical therapist who also integrated somatics (it was why I hired her), and it was 100% unhelpful because what I really needed was to heal the story.

You can get validation from yourself or others. This is why the bitching to girlfriends post-breakup phase is important! And I think the reason platonic breakups can be harder is because there aren’t cultural scripts for grieving them and having others hold space for it.

The other thing is, if you’re getting validation from others, make sure they are trustworthy. Some of the people you think are trustworthy are actually going to be shitty validators and can make things worse. So just make sure they aren’t judgmental people, or are going to instill doubt in yourself during this vulnerable period of time.

I was once doing an exercise specifically for listening and validating (great exercise in itself by Rainbow Bear Healing Portal) and during the mirroring portion, my exercise partner said to me,

“So, x happened…

Or: you *perceived* x to happen…”

Ugh. That one word was so damaging and made me doubt myself so much in an exercise that was supposed to be affirming. So, just beware of this. (I did bring up this fuckery a year later and the person kinda apologized, though!)

2. Story building blocks.

I like to think of healing the mental realm as a process that unfolds multidimensionally, and I’ll use a computing analogy (credit to Jamie for making the connection between right and wrong thinking and 0s and 1s).

In this analogy, the quantum perspective = love and light perspective where all sides are considered equally, individual responsibility is acknowledged, the other party’s responsibility is acknowledged, & deeper understanding leads to compassion for all involved.

Essentially, the quantum perspective is x AND y as opposed to x OR y. Okay?

Regular computers use 1s and 0s for ‘on’ and ‘off’. Quantum computers use transistors that can be simultaneously on (1) and off (0) at the same time, leading to exponential speed of processing.

Before the quantum computer could be built, we had to build regular computers with regular 0s and 1s.

—-> Before you get to the nuanced quantum perspective, get the 1s and 0s in order first. Trying to get to the quantum perspective prematurely leads to system failure, aka mental loops & excessive rumination.

What does that mean in practice?

Be on your own goddamn side first. Trust yourself, trust your experiences, give yourself the benefit of the doubt. For people on the empath spectrum, and for people on the feminine spectrum, we tend to blame ourselves first before looking at external things.

So reverse that pattern! Blame the fuck out of other people and situations—it’s okay, it’s the initial stage! (And if you’re the type to tend to blame others first already, maybe the medicine is actually doing the opposite i.e drop the protective ego and look at yourself. Since I tend to blame myself first, though, this isn’t my area of expertise.)

Once that is in order, THEN we can start to consider the other side’s perspective.

Integrating our story and the other party’s story is what creates the quantum perspective.

And it’s not a linear process – personally I go between binary and quantum perspectives all the time, until the majority of the time I’m in the quantum perspective.

3. Letting go of the story altogether.

At a certain point in my journey, I became pretty savvy with the ruminating. I knew that if I thought about something for long enough, no matter how unpleasant the process was, eventually I could come to a key insight. It was a double-edged sword. And I was confused whether ruminating was helping or hurting me at this point, so I consulted my tarot deck. I pulled the nine of swords.

People. The description for this card is: “emotional addictions and self-destructive thought patterns that must be clarified”.

So I took this counsel from Spirit to heart: Whenever I caught myself ruminating, I would stop. It wasn’t always easy to stop the habit but I was able to do it—and I could viscerally feel the shift from attachment to the story to detachment. Just straight up stopping ruminating wouldn’t have been possible earlier on, but because I had a majority of the processing in place I was able to do it at this point.

Practicing not analyzing helped me to understand experientially that stories aren’t real, they are just structures we use to make sense of the world.

And I did return to mentally processing the event after this break—but this time I knew I could wield the mental sword without cutting myself in the process.

Letting go of attachment to the story is also not linear — it is normal to go back and forth between letting go of the story and processing another layer of it.

In summary, how to heal rumination is basically getting a coherent story through all the incongruent pieces (that got fractured through gaslighting, trauma filters, suppressed aspects of ourselves, binary thinking, and divorced logic). Making a coherent story through all these pieces is done through validation and moving through the stages of the story by being on your own side first and then integrating more nuanced perspectives. The final step, is to let go of the story altogether. And although I’ve laid it out in a step-by-step way, the process is more of a spiral and going back-and-forth between the steps is normal.