122. The $100 Experiment That Changed My Self Image

“It is only a thought and thoughts can be changed.” 
      - Louise Hay 

In this powerful episode of The Modern Creative Woman Podcast, Dr. Amy Backos dives into one of the most liberating concepts from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT): defusion – the skill of seeing your thoughts as just thoughts, not facts.

Using a personal story about flying first class for the first time, Dr. Amy illustrates how fused thoughts (like “that’s for other women, not me”) can shape our lives – until we challenge them. She explores why so many women get stuck in old thought loops, how to create space between yourself and your mind, and the surprising freedom that comes from simply noticing, labeling, and experimenting with your thoughts.

You’ll learn:

• What cognitive fusion is – and how it keeps you stuck.
• Simple defusion techniques you can practice today (like labeling, using imagery, and saying “thank you brain”).
• Why the goal isn’t to change your thoughts, but to change your relationship with them.
• How playful, creative experiments (even just buying a different brand of toothpaste!) can retrain your brain.

This episode is part inspiration, part practical guidance — giving you tools to step back, observe your thinking, and act from your deepest values rather than old limiting beliefs.

And if you’re ready to take this work deeper, Dr. Amy invites you to join her October 11th live retreat in San Francisco— a day dedicated to creativity, art therapy, and personal transformation. Podcast listeners receive a bonus month inside The Modern Creative Woman membership (a $97 value).

Transcript

“It is only a thought and thoughts can be changed.” This quote by Louise Hay starts us off today as we unpack the key to changing your relationship with your thoughts. 

Welcome to the modern Creative Woman, where we are talking all about the art and science of creativity. I'm Doctor Amy Bakos. I am your hostess on this audio creativity journey. I'm so glad you're here. If you have yet to sign up for the October daylong retreat in San Francisco. What in the world? It is time for you to set aside a day to spend with women, feel supported and learn all about the ways that you can reveal your natural creativity. There's nothing wrong with you. There's nothing missing. It's simply the keys to tapping into your creative self that so many women are missing. Especially these days. Many women I know are feeling tension and fatigue and even that dreaded oh word that I don't like to say because research shows it increases our blood pressure when we say it. If you have struggled with what's been happening the last year, this is about deepening your relationship with yourself, and I'll be teaching all of those tools that can enhance and design your identity in a way that's just right for you at whatever stage of life you're in, managing your worries and your concerns so that you have that experience of peace of mind, self-acceptance, and listening to your own true voice instead of the old soundtrack of social pressures and the things that we say on repeat to ourselves. I'm so excited about this retreat, because I've seen women take these exact materials and change how they experience their day to day life. And I'm not talking about making huge changes in your life. I'm talking about just feeling better day by day. And we'll be doing our therapy. We'll be using watercolor, which I love drawing, of course, neuro graphic visualization and so much more. So the retreat is October 11th. It starts at 9 a.m. we're in San Francisco live. And remember, if you're here listening, you can have the added bonus as a podcast listener. When you sign up, you can receive one month Inside the Modern Creative Woman membership, and that's a $97 value. Which is worth so much more when you apply the teachings to make your everyday more relaxing, more fun, and of course, more creative. You can click the link in the show notes. You can find me on Instagram and I am so looking forward to meeting you in person. I wanted to share with you what I did this weekend, and it feels incredibly awkward to share. And on the other side of it, I had a different sense of myself, so that's why I wanted to share it with you. I flew down to LA from San Francisco. It's about a 45 minute flight, and I flew something I'd never done before. I flew first class and it always felt like something that was not for me. That's what other women do, not me. And I had it in my head that that's for some people who have a lot of money. And I just had this story in my head of that's not for me. And over the last 20 years, practicing acceptance and commitment therapy on myself, as well as using it with all of my clients, I'm always a little dumbstruck when I realize that I'm fused with a belief or an idea that something is true or a fact, even though it's just a thought. And when I'm fused with these thoughts, I fully believe them to be true. They're facts. And I had the idea in my head that it's a fact that flying first class is for other women, not for me. And I made that up somewhere along the lines, just for perspective. Maybe this is irrelevant, but it somehow justifies to me it was only a $100 more to fly first class to LA, I guess because it's such a short trip and it was hard to. It was difficult to push the button to add that in, and it just had the idea of let me check and see how much it is. You know, I, I had not looked before to see how much it was. And I know it's very expensive to travel across the country or to another country in first class, and I don't have a credit card with points or anything like that. So I imagined it was going to be a lot of money, and it was only $100 more. And I hemmed and hawed quite a bit about should I do this? And I had all these thoughts of I could spend that hundred dollars somewhere else, etc. I could save it. Mhm. But the strongest thought was that's for other women, not you. And when I recognized that I was fused with this idea, I thought it might be worth the investment to try and see what it would be like to make that purchase and see myself as a woman who did spend the extra $100 to fly first class. And I felt excited and delighted as I was on the way to the airport, and I felt a little awkward and maybe even guilty for doing it as well. And I did my best to balance my emotions that all those thoughts and feelings were welcome, that it was merely a part of my experience in that moment of doing something brand new. And I reminded myself why I'm doing this. The goal for me is to defuse from my thoughts that I recognize thoughts as thoughts and not facts. I had the $100 in my account. No problem. I could buy it if I chose. There was only the thought that was stopping me. And so I got on the airplane and I sat in the first class seat, and I was so excited I didn't get on the Wi-Fi. I didn't look at anything. I just looked out the window and thought about what it takes to defuse from old beliefs, or more specifically, old limiting beliefs, self-limiting beliefs. And I thought this was maybe the best $100 that I had spent to remove an untrue thought from the category in my head of fact to the category of oh, I'm having a thought. So undoubtably I will have this thought again next time I purchase a ticket that other women fly first class and I don't. I'll have that thought again, because I've been thinking it since the first time I flew at the age of 15. That thought will be allowed to come, and I will be able to see it as a thought rather than a fact. So for me, this $100 was a delightful experience. It felt thrilling to do it, and it moved a thought from the category of true fact into just a thought. There are many times when it does not require cash to change our thinking. But in this one example, it was going to require me to sit in a first class seat at some point, and now I will choose how to buy my tickets. I'll just fly the regular seats most likely. But now I know it's a choice. It's an option. Do I want to spend extra money or not? And I wanted to share this with you, because there are so many thoughts that we believe to be factual and real in a way that we don't even look for evidence against it. Most of the time I don't even look at the first class prices. I just like Skip by that. I don't even look and I've certainly never clicked on it. It just opens up my world in a different way. If you can relate to this kind of experience where all of a sudden you've opened up your thinking so that you're no longer believing thoughts as facts, I would love to hear your stories. I love, love, love when you send me a message either on Instagram or in the show notes to tell me how you relate or don't relate to any of the things that I'm talking about. So please let me know some of your own examples of when you stopped believing a limiting belief by taking action, by recognizing it as simply a thought in acceptance and commitment therapy. We have a value and a committed action, and we act on those with psychological flexibility. We're not obligated to do one thing or another. We're flexible. I hope this story gives you an example of one of the keys to having a little more ease, and being more flexible and less rigid in our thinking, and it's a process over time of recognizing our fused thoughts and then taking a step back and deciding if we want to continue believing it. And persist in that direction. Or if we want to back off from thinking that way and acting that way and try something different. If you're curious about how to do this yourself, we spend a lot of time in the modern Creative Woman membership. Of course, in the retreat, working on our fused thoughts, you can ask yourself, how can I try something different today? A different behavior and it might be practical. Go to a different grocery store. Drive a different route. Something that takes very little effort to do. Yet it requires you to think differently about the experience of shopping or commuting. These little experiments really add up when you arrive at the grocery. You can try a different brand of toothpaste. You can pick up a different type of yogurt or cereal. There's so many ways to just experiment with trying something different, and it gives us a little more confidence for taking bigger or different actions. Let's take a deep dive into what fusion and de fusion really is, and how you can use this to feel better about pretty much anything and everything. So fusion is that state of feeling stuck to or entangled in your thoughts. And what happens when we're fused with our thoughts is we start to believe that our thoughts are the literal truth that dominates our behavior. So we may have a thought that doesn't really impact our behavior, but most of the time it does. If I have a thought that something is not for me, then I will gauge an engage in behavior that avoids that thing or takes me away from that thing, or proves me right. That in fact, that thing is not for me. The goal, however, is to diffuse from our thoughts, and that's when we can step back from our thoughts and see them as just thoughts, not facts. And we use it to create space between ourselves and our thoughts. And that gives us the time to choose our actions that are aligned with our values. So instead of being controlled by our mind, we get to decide what our values are and take action based on what's important, not just what we think we can see in American politics that people become wrapped up in particular thoughts and beliefs and assume that that's reality, and they're unable to separate themselves from their thoughts. So it becomes extremely difficult to take in new information, take action or not take action because they've already decided how it's supposed to be. That's fusion. You might notice you're fused with thoughts. If you feel like you're lost in your head somehow, you're feeling consumed by thoughts and losing contact with the present moment. For example, if you are wrapped up in thoughts about, oh, I wish I would have said something differently or not done something, but now you've lost contact with the present moment and you're fused with these thoughts that somehow it's true. You should have behaved differently than you did. There are a lot of women who think that they're terrible people. Not because it's true, but there's a thought that they got from somewhere, and they believe it completely, and they become fused with it, making it their entire identity that something's not for them, that they're a bad person, that things are their fault. They needed to always try harder. You may also notice it in thoughts related to perfectionistic thinking I need to do better. This needs to be right. I'm not going to try if I can't get it perfect. Those kinds of thoughts are fused thoughts that stop us from acting on what is really important to us. I want to talk a little bit more about diffusion, and that's separating from our thoughts to observe them with curiosity and self-acceptance, allowing them to be there without believing that they are facts or that there's something so true about our thoughts. I say this over and over inside the membership. Thoughts are not facts. Thoughts are merely a biological process of one neuron firing across a synapse to another neuron and then spreading out in a predictable pattern across the brain. That is what a thought is. Therefore, they are not facts. Remember, if I ask you to think of a polar bear, you can conjure that up. And yet there is no polar bear. There are polar bears that exist. But your thought does not exist as a polar bear. It's a mental representation has nothing to do with facts. Once you can wrap your head around this idea, then it becomes so much easier to observe your thoughts. You might have a negative thought of I don't belong here, I'm not good enough. And then if you're able to diffuse from those thoughts, you can say, oh, I'm aware. I'm having lots of self-judgment. I'm aware that I feel a little uncomfortable walking into this room. That's awareness and that's diffusion. Diffusion happens in the present moment. There is simply no way to do it in your thoughts. It requires contact with the present moment and then observing your thoughts like a curious scientist noticing them for what they are. All my brains having these thoughts again. Oh, here comes that thought again. Being in the moment means we quit trying to push thoughts away or cling to different thoughts. We can simply observe them and allow them to move through our brain. The goal of cognitive diffusion is not to change your thoughts. The goal is to change your relationship with your thoughts. Let me repeat that the goal is not to change your thoughts. The goal is to change your relationship with your thoughts. However, the byproduct of engaging in a kind, compassionate relationship with your thoughts is your thoughts will change. You'll start having better, more quality, more enjoyable kinds of thoughts. When we relate to our thoughts as thoughts, we realize we don't have to act on them. We may feel frustrated in a moment and want to act out to get rid of that feeling. However, when we're diffused from the thoughts making us frustrated, we can choose how we want to respond. Someone cuts you off in traffic. You can say, oh, someone cut me off in traffic and just keep moving. Or you can have thoughts about they shouldn't have done that. Why did they do that to me and start to take it personally? Develop frustration and act out. There's plenty of frustrated drivers in the world. There are ways of simply allowing a thought to move through your mind without struggling with it. And over time, the thoughts become less troublesome, less upsetting, and it leaves way more space for thoughts that you want to think. Self-directed, value based thinking. 

There are several ACT based interventions that allow you to shift from uncomfortable thoughts to awareness. One is saying thank you brain for that interesting thought so you can just thank your mind. Another thing you can do is labeling simply acknowledging a feeling or a thought. Saying it out loud can have a tremendous impact on us. It allows us to engage in acceptance. If we label a thought, say it out loud and we label it as. This is a thought, I am aware that I'm thinking about whatever the thought is. Then you can label the feeling. When I think this, I feel frustrated or sad or happy or uncomfortable, whatever it is. You can also use imagery. And here's where creativity makes a huge difference. You can imagine that thought, the repetitive thought perhaps, of I'm not good enough, or some variation of the mean girl story in your head. Imagine what color that is. What shape is it? Is there an object that represents that thought, and it's allowing your mind to associate to this thought in a way that relieves you. It gives your mind something to do. It allows you to direct your mind, to reflect on these thoughts in a way that serves you. And all of this changes your relationship to thoughts. Not changing the thoughts, changing your relationship to the thoughts. Remember over time when you change your relationship to your thoughts, you have a lot more space for more comfortable thoughts and thoughts that you want to think that lead you to pursue your values and take committed action. Here are some examples. When you have the I'm not good enough story going through your head, you start to believe that you don't belong where you are, or you don't deserve to apply for a promotion or go invite someone for coffee. The I'm not good enough story interferes with our behavior. The more you attend to these thoughts, the more you believe them. You repeat them in your mind. 

One creative way to interrupt these thoughts is to label them. You could give it a name like Herbie. You could call it a stink bug. Thought you could pick it. Animal that you dislike. You could choose a color that you find unattractive. The idea is to break up the automatic movement from thought to feeling to behavior, and interrupting it in a playful way gives you a chance to slow down and make a bit of a different choice in how you choose to proceed. Each time you do this, you're strengthening a new pathway. So instead of cruising down the Audubon Highway at ridiculously high speeds through your brain, you can imagine creating a new pathway that's running parallel. You can take the exit ramp and run a new path that's parallel to this superhighway. The superhighway is allowed to be there, and these other paths exist and are available for you if you decide to create them. So now that you know all this about diffusion from thoughts. I want to encourage you to do something. What will you do? Let me know. You can message me in the show notes or on Instagram and take really good care when you start unpacking these thoughts. Make notes on them. Write about it in your journal. Assign it the colors, the shapes. The animals. Allow it to be fully expressed outside of your head, and that puts you in the metaphorical driver's seat instead of the passenger seat, and you can drive a different route. 

I would love to see you inside the modern creative woman this month. And if you are in the San Francisco Bay area or you would like to be our modern Creative Woman retreat in October is coming up and spots are limited. So I am excited to talk with you in the next episode.