158. Thoughts Are Not Facts: New Relationship with Your Mind

In this episode of The Modern Creative Woman Podcast, Amy Backos explores one of the most powerful concepts in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT): cognitive defusion. What happens when you stop treating your thoughts like facts? What changes when you learn to observe your mind instead of obeying it?

Amy walks listeners through the neuroscience of memory, thought formation, and perception, using the metaphor of a beach visualization to demonstrate how vividly the brain can generate experiences that feel real — even when they are simply mental events. From there, she explains the difference between cognitive fusion and cognitive defusion, and why learning to “hold thoughts lightly” can dramatically improve psychological flexibility, creativity, and peace of mind.

This episode dives into the common fused thought patterns many women experience, including:

• Impostor syndrome and the “phony intellectual” narrative
• Upper limit thoughts that emerge when growth and visibility increase
• Time-based thoughts that delay meaningful action
• The deeply familiar “I’m not good enough” story
• How self-critical thinking impacts creativity and emotional wellbeing

Amy also explores how these thought patterns develop through childhood experiences, social conditioning, survival strategies, and the brain’s natural tendency toward comparison and prediction. Rather than trying to eliminate difficult thoughts, she explains how ACT encourages a different relationship with thinking altogether.

Throughout the episode, she shares practical examples from her work as a psychologist and art therapist, including how creativity and art-making can help people separate from painful thoughts and move into a more observer-based perspective.

You’ll also hear:

• Why thoughts are biological processes, not objective truths
• How creativity increases adaptability and resilience
• Why the brain prefers familiarity, even when it is painful
• The role of relapse and setbacks in real change
• How metaphors can help create distance from difficult thoughts
• Why observing thoughts creates more freedom than fighting them

Amy closes the episode with a powerful art therapy exercise from her upcoming book, The Art Therapy Toolkit. Using metaphor and collage, listeners are invited to visually explore the relationship between themselves and their thoughts. Whether your thoughts feel like weather, software, paint, or trees in a forest, this exercise helps cultivate perspective, insight, and psychological flexibility.

If you’ve ever struggled with self-doubt, perfectionism, procrastination, or the feeling that your thoughts control your life, this episode offers a compassionate and deeply practical framework for relating to your mind differently.

In This Episode

• Cognitive fusion vs. cognitive defusion
• Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
• Psychological flexibility
• Creativity and mental health
• Impostor syndrome
• Self-critical thinking
• Art therapy interventions
• Metaphor and visual thinking
• The neuroscience of memory and thought
• Creativity as a human need

Mentioned in This Episode

• The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks
• The work of Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes on impostor phenomenon
• Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
• The Transtheoretical Model of Change

Connect with Amy

• Instagram: @DoctorAmyBackos
• Website: The Modern Creative Woman

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with another creative woman who may need this reminder: your thoughts are not facts, and creativity begins the moment you create space between yourself and the stories your mind tells you.

Transcript

Pragmatism is a philosophy that focuses on doing what works, what's practical. What moves the needle forward? It's unlike essentialism, which is simmering things down to the basics. This is focused on taking effective action. And today I'm going to share with you some ways that you can relate to your thoughts in a different way, and a more pragmatic way that can give you a little bit better feeling as you move throughout your day. One of my biggest worries is that I won't take action when I can. And part of the purpose of this podcast is to share the information that I have from decades of working as an art therapist with you so that you can have access to creativity and the skills that will allow you to stay happy and also remain relevant. As technology is shifting because creativity is a uniquely human experience, and the more creative you are, the better able you are to adapt to challenges and to solve problems as they arise. So today, I want to walk you through one of the most effective strategies in acceptance and commitment therapy. And it's about cognitive diffusion. And so many of my clients are unsure about what it means to relate to thoughts differently. And over time, they start to understand that thoughts are just thoughts. We'll get into that in just a minute. T

hank you so much for joining me here on the Modern Creative Woman podcast. And I'm really excited to bring you the art and science of creativity. So let's get into this. Let's get this started. I'm so excited that you're here today. The modern creative woman, as of the last check on the stats, is heard around the world in over 1200 cities. And this is so exciting. There really is such a strong urge in all of us to remain creative, to get out of the technology addiction and take action on what feels most important to us. Being creative gives us the nourishment to do what matters, and it gives us the insights that we need to tackle whatever comes our way. I know creativity is such a nourishing resource and it's an essential human need. It is not a nice to have. It really is a need to have. It's a human need to be creative. So I want to talk today about how you can think a little bit differently so that you can tap into your creativity. And this is all about being able to relate to your thoughts in a more healthy way. And this process of cognitive diffusion increases your psychological flexibility. It allows you to take action on what matters to you instead of just acting on old thoughts or feelings. So get comfortable and imagine yourself at a beautiful beach. Now, perhaps this is a beach you've visited before. Maybe it's one that you've seen in a movie. And in your mind's eye and want you to notice the blue colors in the sky, the water. You can feel those idyllic temperature breezes lightly blowing on your skin. You can feel the sand. You can feel the light spray of water from the waves. You hear the sound of the waves crashing onto the sand. And you also hear the sound of birds. You smell the briny air. You see the ripples in the sand that are made from the wind moving across the beach. Have you got all this in your mind's eye? Okay, good. While this beach exists somewhere, just us thinking about a beach does not constitute a fact. Now, these images and thoughts that you conjured up about your beach in your mind and all of its attributes the waves, the water, the temperature these stemmed from a biological process, and it's related to your memory. What happened when you were thinking of this beach in your mind is your brain was retrieving information that was previously encoded on the day you were there, or on the day that you saw it in a movie. So your brain encoded that information and that night consolidated it while you slept. And memories are consolidated after they happen during sleep. And that's when your brain kind of weeds out unnecessary things to remember. And it'll keep the things that your brain thinks. Well, you probably should remember now when you were visualizing the beach and the waves. Your brain was engaged in what's called reactivating a memory. And it was doing that by re firing the same neuronal patterns that were active in your original memory of it. To the birds, the waves. The sounds were experienced as neurons firing in the auditory cortex. That's the part of your brain that's most focused on what you're hearing. Meanwhile, the colors of the sky and the water in the sand, the textures that you noticed, all of that played out in your mind because of neurons firing in the visual cortex. Now, the experience of thinking of this pleasant beach is not a fact. Even if you've been to that beach before and you know that in reality it does exist. While it's pleasurable to recall our favorite beach scenes, believing our thoughts to be facts is actually an error in our perception. So believing these thoughts are true, or facts, or responding to our thoughts as if they were commands for how you should feel or act is called cognitive fusion. And you, like everyone else, can find that you feel stuck to your thoughts and believe them. And especially they're easy to believe if they're associated with strong emotions. In this case, the beach is associated with pleasure, enjoyment, maybe relaxation. Other thoughts. Like the ones that have self-judgment, they bring up really uncomfortable feelings, and that makes them seem even more relevant to your brain, because our brains are always scanning for safety and judgment. Now, it may be true that you're thinking self-critical thoughts, but the thoughts themselves get ready for it are merely thoughts, not facts. I'm going to repeat that. You may be thinking something self-critical, but the thoughts themselves are merely thoughts, not facts. So keep in mind thoughts are a biological process. They're not facts, and you are in no way obligated to believe self-critical thoughts. It's far easier to see this in others. And if I asked you, do you think my thoughts are facts, you would probably say no. But when we're inside our own head, we often believe our thoughts as facts. And if you've lived with self-critical thoughts for most of your life and believed them, you may find it difficult to believe that these are thoughts and not facts. After all, if we've heard the same judgmental thoughts for decades inside our brain, it makes sense that we would maybe come to believe these to be true. Who can really be quite dangerous to believe thoughts or feel like they're commands that we have to act on? And it's especially detrimental when someone has depression with thoughts of hopelessness or worthlessness. However, when you can hold your thoughts lightly, you can start to relate to them in a completely different way. You can come to see your thoughts as merely a function of your brain. And this is an incredibly powerful shift that allows you to observe your thoughts. You can look at them instead of looking through them. With practice, you can begin to see your thoughts as just thoughts rather than absolute truths. It sounds simple. It sounds sort of logical, but it's actually a profound psychological shift. And when the woman I work with kind of turned the corner on this idea and they see it for what it is, thoughts are just thoughts and they begin to relate to their thoughts as just thoughts. A lot of creativity flows in the release of beliefs, and tense relationship with thoughts starts to dissipate and creativity comes rolling in. When we're fused with our thoughts, that means we automatically believe them. We obey them and we start to organize our lives around them without much awareness or self-reflection. Many or all of us mistake our inner dialogue for reality itself. And as you begin learning to observe your thoughts, rather than just immediately identifying with them as true, you create more psychological freedom, psychological flexibility. And the best part for me is peace of mind. When I begin to understand that thoughts are just thoughts and they don't have to dictate my mood, so much peace came in. You can start to realize that just because your mind says something, maybe loudly or on repeat or so convincingly, it still does not make it true. Now, from my work as an art therapist and a psychologist, I have found that so many people share remarkable similar pattern of these fused thoughts. They're often repetitive, critical, fear based, and they're deeply pervasive. People think they're not good enough. People think that something's wrong with them. People think they don't have enough time. People think they should wait to act. These kinds of thoughts become so familiar that we can sometimes not even recognize them as thoughts at all. And sometimes people experience a thought as a fact. Maybe they believe it to be a personality trait. Well, that's just how I am. I've always been like that. Or they think thought so often that they believe it to be a permanent limitation on themselves. My advice is always the same just to be gentle with yourself as you begin to recognize your own fused thoughts. And they really do develop for understandable reasons. Most of our thought patterns originally were formed as an attempt to protect us, to help us belong or fit in. To avoid rejection or to try and predict what would happen next. We work really hard in childhood, especially to increase our chances of being loved or accepted. On top of all that, the human brain is constantly comparing. We're trying to predict, categorize and evaluate. It's part of our survival in our brain. And as kids, we learn very quickly what gains approval and what creates conflict at home or at school. We also absorb messages from family systems, from teachers, friendships, dating experiences, from the workplace, from culture. The good parts and the bad parts. And over time, all of our personal experiences in the wider world shape the stories we tell ourselves, both about who we are and what it is safe for us to attempt. Many women I work with learn to monitor themselves constantly to fit in, and there is social reinforcement for this kind of behavior. We want to perform well. Avoid criticism. Maintain a connection with someone. Now all of these thought patterns were your brain trying to help you navigate difficult environments or understand how you can survive stressful things at school, but believing them as facts over time into adulthood leads to our own psychological inflexibility. Now, fused thoughts, those ones that we think are true are really difficult to recognize because they disguise themselves as realism or responsibility, perfectionism, or even self-awareness. These kinds of thoughts can sound intelligent and convincing. I've met people who, when they introduce themselves, tell me their Enneagram or their Myers-Briggs. Sounds smart right? It is only a thought about how you have been in your life. It's a memory. Introducing themselves with these kinds of descriptions. Here's another example. If someone has ever told you that you are too hard on yourself, and I'm guessing someone probably has. Maybe they've told you you're too self-critical, or you're minimizing your accomplishments, or you doubt yourself too much. This kind of feedback was likely identifying your fused thoughts, and you might relate really strongly to some of the examples I'm going to give you coming up. Or you may notice your own kind of variation of these. I'm going to go over some of the most common fused thoughts that I hear in my work as an art therapist, and we really are able to use the art to overcome some of these thoughts. I want to remind you, the goal is not to try and eliminate difficult thoughts. I don't know how to do that, but what we can do is learn how to recognize thoughts for what they are. And you can get so much peace of mind when you relate to your thoughts as just thoughts. They no longer control your behavior automatically. They no longer control your mood when you relate to them for what they are. One of the most common fused thought patterns I see relates to imposter syndrome, and it was originally coined in 1978 as impostor phenomenon, and it was in studies involving high achieving women who were students at Harvard University in the US and the psychologists in this study. Pauline Clancy and Suzanne Eames coined that term, the impostor phenomenon to describe this inner experience. This is what they called it, feeling like a phony intellectual because they were at a university and the women were reporting feeling like they didn't belong there. They were having that inner dialogue, that critical inner voice. It's like you're a phony intellectual. You don't belong here. Was what was going on. And so it was first noted. And people in these like high professional academic achievement environments and the original study, the the people reported feeling that they would be exposed as frauds. Despite this strong evidence, they were admitted to Harvard of their competence and their success. And at first, the researchers thought this was primarily a problem experienced by these accomplished women, sort of this inner experience that only belonged to them. But guess what? Later research showed that this pattern of thinking is just a pattern of thinking is widespread, and it cuts across gender, age, profession, identity. There is so much evidence of this that it's not really a syndrome. It's just a category of thinking that most human brains have this kind of category of thinking. Now, many people who experience these imposter thoughts are dismissive of praise. Oh no, not this old outfit. No, it's nothing. Or oh, it was easy or I didn't really do anything. Does this sound like you? I used to dismiss praise. And then I realized it's. It's not good for my brain. And it's awkward for the person you're refusing. People who are experiencing imposter thoughts also are attributing their success to luck, instead of their contribution as part of the process. These people over prepare excessively, and they have thoughts that everyone else is more competent and more confident than they are. So they're constantly thinking about other people and how other people are better than them, even after major accomplishments. When we have these imposter thoughts. Our minds quickly move the goal. And we don't even celebrate our success. So having a little celebration for yourself when you accomplish small things and big things can really help you with dealing with these kinds of thoughts. Now, more recent research shows that hostile work environments, including things like discrimination, exclusion, sexism, all kinds of systemic bias can really intensify imposter thoughts, and especially for women of color, for marginalized groups whose work environments may actively reinforce this self-doubt through things like microaggressions or blatant discrimination. Another fused thought pattern that I see frequently is upper limit syndrome. And I first read about this in a book by Gay Hendricks in 2010 called The Big Leap. As people began growing, healing, changing, or moving toward something meaningful. Their inner critic becomes louder and more reactive. Has this ever happened to you? I know it happens to me. The closer I get to deadlines on my writing, the louder my critic gets. And I was so relieved to know that this is just a category of thought. It's not me. Like failing. It's not actually happening. It's me having these kinds of thoughts. So the greater the possibility for growth or visibility creativity, the more the mind will generate fear and doubt. Confusion. We can start to procrastinate or even self-sabotage. I see this happen a lot when people are thinking about doing something like getting married, or starting a business, or making a career change. Maybe they're contemplating becoming parents or thinking about returning to school. For artists, this definitely shows up when they think maybe they're ready to share their artwork publicly, or even if they're just trying something new in their art, changing their style, or trying a new genre. The fear that we have often gets interpreted as evidence that something is wrong. But in the examples I just gave you. The fear really appears because something important is being thought about. Remember, your mind always prefers what is familiar, even when what is familiar feels painful. Or even if we're actively working on outgrowing old habits. Your mind really likes things to be the same. The next fews thought revolves around time, and I know I've talked about this here. It's using thoughts about time in a way that interferes with how you use your time. And part of this relates to looking to the past for evidence. I'll give you some examples. Thoughts like I don't have time or it's not the right time are often experienced as unquestioned facts. Well, it's not the right time because and we can list five reasons why we shouldn't start that business now, or why we should delay starting school. But these are just thoughts and they're a category of thoughts. The time thoughts really function as protective thoughts. They're just not an objective truth. My mom would always say time's gonna pass anyway. Might as well do what you want to do. And making decisions based on time can just really be our brain. Avoiding important dreams or rationalizing our goals. And sometimes what people mean is I'm afraid of failing or I don't trust myself to follow through. Have you ever said, well, once I finished this project, I'll take on that interesting art class. Or once I just get through this semester, I'll have time to see my friends. When we live our lives like that. We end up just not doing the things that we really want to do. Have you ever stacked up memories of past disappointments or abandoned attempts at change? And then, in your mind, used this pile of memories to convince yourself not to try again? Change usually has quite a process involved in it. Things don't just change because we try. We have to try a lot. We don't go to the gym once and say, oh well, didn't work. I'm not strong. Then you go for a week. We don't say, oh, I didn't work. I'm not strong. No, we understand it takes time. But the mind loves searching the past for evidence. And it wants that evidence to support why you should just stay the same. I think the antidote here is to really remember that change always, always, always includes setbacks and failures and relapses. The Trans Model of Change by Patricia and Di Clemente have outlined this, and we've been using this for decades and decades. Relapse is always a part of change. Any kind of change you're making will include setbacks. So instead of imagining that setbacks are a good reason to abandon your goals. It's essential that we remember setbacks and relapse are just a natural part of change. And so these category of thought around time and looking to the past. It's just a category of thought. They're not facts. They're thoughts that everyone has. It's just a category of thinking. And the final fused thought that I think is relevant to share with you is the ever present in everyone I've ever met. A story that I call the I'm not good enough. Sorry. This category of thought can become just this familiar inner soundtrack. It becomes so familiar. People don't even notice how harshly they speak to themselves. Next time you look in the mirror, listen to what your thoughts are. You may not even notice that you're being critical. And if you catch yourself being critical, you can do an autocorrect and say something better. The I'm not good enough story can sound like I'm too much. Who do I think I am? What will people think? Any category of judging your exterior appearance? It all is the I'm not good enough. And many of us are walking around all day listening to this internal mean girl voice that criticizes our appearance, our creativity, our intelligence, our worth, our productivity, our personality. I really noticed this one after I became a doctor, and I still had thoughts of not being smart enough to handle particular problems, and I thought, wow, that's just a thought. Because I'm now a doctor in clinical psychology, I am trained and I am really experienced in handling certain problems, and yet that thought persists. I recognized it couldn't be true. So if you search your mind for things you know that you're good at and recognize that sometimes that mean girl voice still exists around that category in which you are fully competent. You'll start to see what I mean about these thoughts can exist even when all of the evidence stands against it. Now, over time, this constant self-criticism can really erode our confidence, our creativity. A mentally freeing realization comes from recognizing that what other people think about you is none of your business. We don't even need to wonder what other people think about us, because we're never going to know what they think about us. People interpret the world through their own projections. After all, if you are thinking about what others think about you, you're really just sitting there thinking about yourself. I'm going to repeat that one. If you're sitting there thinking about what others think about you. All you're doing is sitting there thinking about yourself. If you end up making decisions around what you think other people might think, you're fused with these negative thoughts about yourself. You're just assigning the criticism to someone else in your mind. Now, in case you're thinking of a time when someone told you their opinion of you, that's a memory which is also just a thought. It's a category of thought called memory, and it is not a fact, so you can relate to it as a thought. Remember, the goal is not to eliminate difficult thoughts. We're always going to have fears and stories and comparisons. This is about changing your relationship to your thoughts. Art is one of the most powerful ways to think about this. You can separate from your thoughts by writing them down and looking at them. You can find collage images to represent different thoughts and step back and observe them. Observing your thoughts, looking at them instead of through them as if they were like sunglasses you put on and you had to believe them, can have a huge impact on giving you a more positive mood. So remember, diffusing from your thoughts is learning how to relate to each thought differently so that thoughts and feelings are not dictating your behavior, or you don't have the sense that you must respond to each, but like automatically. And you know this is true. In other circumstances. You might be thinking about purchasing something online and you don't. So the thought happened and you did not feel you must act on it. It was not a fact that you had to buy that thing. You might walk by your favourite restaurant and think, oh, I really want to go get some food. But you just ate and you'd maybe want to go eat next weekend with a friend at this restaurant so you can have the thought and you don't have to take action on it. You don't have to believe it at all. You can just notice a thought without obeying it or treating it like it's a fact. You can hear your inner critic without giving that critic authority over your feelings and actions. It's completely possible to experience uncertainty and self-doubt and still move towards your creative and meaningful goals. Think of all the times you tried something different. Think of all the times you started a new school, a new job. Talk to someone you never spoke to before. You can have all of those feelings and still do the thing. To wrap things up, diffusion means taking perspective on your thoughts. And noticing and observing your thoughts is a far easier way to relate to your thoughts, instead of believing them as facts. Diffusion gives you the freedom to look at your thoughts with curiosity and creativity, rather than through the perspective of your thoughts. I want to leave you with an art idea and this will come out in my upcoming book, the Art Therapy Toolkit. So you get a little sneak peek. Think in terms of metaphors, and if you remember from school, there's similes and metaphors, and as simile is that figure of speech that compares two unrelated things, and it uses a word like, um, he is like a bear in the morning. Um, a singer with the voice like an angel. Or that child is cute as a button. These comparisons help our brain really bridge concepts very quickly and vividly. You get what I mean. If I say the kid is cute as a button. A metaphor, by contrast, shows this same kind of likeness between two unrelated things. It just doesn't use the word like or as, um. And so in the case of metaphors, we're just allowing our brain to link concepts rather freely. It becomes he is a bear. In the morning, we might say it is raining cats and dogs. There's nothing literal about cats and dogs coming down from the sky. We all know what it means in the rain. It means that it's falling really heavily. You might think of other metaphors that are very descriptive, like her voice is silky or traffic is a breeze today. And these kind of metaphors really just allow us to close the gap between an idea, and it allows for much easier insight and understanding. So these kinds of metaphors and similes can help you diffuse from these unhelpful thoughts that I mentioned. And it shows you that thoughts really are just words or images. They're not facts. So let me give you a few examples. And you can use this to make art in a metaphor. Your experience of software versus a software programmer. Live in San Francisco. We're the epicenter of all of the technology in the United States, so software programmers are everywhere. Your thoughts and emotions and sensations are like the software. They're just constantly updating. Sometimes they're glitchy. There's always changing. But in this metaphor, you then you are the programmer. You're the one who notices, chooses, directs, changes, corrects the software. Here's another example. Paint versus the artist. Your thoughts are the paints, the color blending, the texture, the brushstrokes. And you are the artist who holds the brush. You get to decide what you create with your paints. How about a book versus the author? Your thoughts and feelings are like the words and sentences and chapters in a book. There's details, information, nuance, motion. But you are the author and you can step back. You can consider the story, choose what comes next. And finally, the tree and the forest. Your individual thoughts are like individual trees. They're living, they're growing. They're changing in the seasons. However, you have the perspective of the forest. From a distance you can see the whole perspective. And in our therapy we use metaphors a lot. Act also loves metaphors. It really brings things alive visually to draw, paint, sculpt, make collage. Using metaphors lets you step back and have a look. So I want you to select one of the metaphors, or write your own and see what you can do with it to understand your relationship with your mind. So of the examples I gave you, my thoughts are the paint. I'm the artist. My thoughts are the software. I'm a computer programmer. How about this? My thoughts are the weather. I am the sky. I want you to go find two images that reflect each side of the metaphor that you choose. It can be very literal. If you choose weather and sky, you could find pictures of weather and pictures of sky, or it could be much more of a metaphor in terms of an abstract image. But I just want you to find two images. And glue them on your paper. Don't add anything else. Just two pictures and I want you to step back and reflect. You can prop your collage up or pin it on the wall, and I want you to create some distance between these two images so that you, as the observer, can diffuse and reflect. When you look at the page as a whole, you're standing in that observer perspective. You're seeing both your thoughts and the person who is experiencing the thoughts. I always ask the people I work with to give their images a title, and write three words or phrases to describe them. So I want you to do that for both of the pictures that you find and sit down with pen and paper, not computer, and start writing. What do you know about your thoughts when you step back and observe them? What are some of your really painful thoughts that it's time to let go of, to relate to differently? And then you can have space for figuring out how to let some of those uncomfortable thoughts go. And put yourself in the observer position more and more often. And in the thinker position less and less often. So you're looking at your thoughts rather than through your thoughts. I would love to see your artwork. See what you come up with. I'm super excited about this art exercise. It's been really, really helpful for me and for a lot of other people to think in this visual way about how you relate to your thoughts. You can send me a message. There is a link in the show notes. You know I love to hear from you. You can always find me on Instagram @dramybackos where I share a little bit about art therapy and a little bit about psychology. So you've got the creativity and the science. Thank you so much for joining me here on the Modern Creative Woman podcast. Be sure to subscribe and you will never miss an episode. And if you leave a review, I would be most appreciative. Those five star reviews really do go a long way in making the podcast more available to more women. And as you notice, I don't have commercials, so I'm relying on the very generous women who sponsor this show, just 3 or $5 a month, and it offsets the cost of operating all of these platforms and subscriptions. And it just lets the podcast continue to be free and also ad free. Have a wonderful rest of your day, and I look forward to speaking with you in the next episode.