How to Stop Replaying Someone Who Doesn't Deserve Space in Your Head - Breaking the Obsessive Thought Spiral

If you've ever laid awake at night replaying conversations with someone who hurt you, convinced yourself it was somehow your fault, or felt like your brain just wouldn't turn off - this episode is for you.

I'm sharing what obsessive thoughts actually felt like for me after betrayal and gaslighting, why your brain does this, and the thought containment framework I developed to get through it.

This is not about stopping the thoughts. It's about learning to contain them so they stop running your life.

Apply for 1:1 coaching: https://77z9uh9ts6v.typeform.com/to/p3IrXlMi

Follow on Instagram: @jessica_tiana_

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome back to the role model you never had. I'm Jess, trauma-informed strength and identity coach, former crisis counselor, and the woman who rebuilt her body and her life from the ground up. Your body is the foundation of your healing. And today we're talking about what happens in your mind and your body when someone has betrayed you, gaslit you, lied to you, or treated you in ways you're still trying to make sense of. We are talking about obsessive thoughts. The spiraling, the replaying, the 3M conversations you're having with someone who isn't even in the room. I've been there and I built a system for getting through it. That's what this episode is about. I want to describe what this actually looked like for me, because I think when we talk about obsessive thoughts, we can make it sound somewhat abstract, and it's not. It's very specific and it's very physical. For me, it was spiraling at night when I was trying to sleep. As soon as I laid down to go to bed, I would start replaying every conversation, every argument, every moment, and asking myself what I could have done differently. Convinced myself that if I had somehow just said the right thing or done the right thing, been a different version of myself in that specific moment for five seconds, the outcome would have been different. Except the outcome had nothing to do with me. In my abusive relationships, I was being gaslit, I was being lied to, I was being cheated on. And my brain was still sitting there trying to find the version of events where it was my fault. Because if it was my fault, I could fix it. And if I could fix it, I could have control and prevent it in the future. That's what obsessive thoughts are really about. Control. Your nervous system cannot tolerate the uncertainty of someone else's chaotic or harmful behavior. So it spins, it replays. It tries to find a narrative that makes more sense. Even if that narrative puts all the blame on you. Physically, it can feel like nausea. Like your skin is tingling, ringing in your ears, like you're carrying something heavy in your chest that you can't put down. I always like to describe this as the feeling of drowning. And if any of that sounds familiar, stay with me because there is a way through it. Here's what's happening in your brain and your nervous system when you spiral. And I'm explaining this because understanding it helps you to remove some of the shame, makes you feel like you're not broken. Because I always felt like I was broken. I was like, why can't I just turn this off? So when you experience betrayal or gaslighting or chronic manipulation, your brain gets stuck in a threat response loop. It keeps returning to the event because it hasn't been able to process it and file it away as resolved. The threat still feels active. And here's the thing about gaslighting specifically. When someone consistently tells you that your perception of reality is wrong, your brain genuinely doesn't know what to believe anymore. It keeps going back to the same events, trying to figure out what actually happened. Was it me? Was it them? What is true here? That uncertainty is one of the most activating things for a nervous system. We can tolerate pain much more easily than we can tolerate not knowing. So the brain keeps searching, keeps replaying, keeps asking what if. That isn't a weakness. It's not you being crazy or obsessive or unable to let go. It's just your brain doing its job. The problem with abusive relationships and manipulation, those situations don't make sense. That behavior is so beyond the realm of what you would ever do to somebody, which is why you also have a hard time rationalizing your experience and getting yourself out of these loops. Your brain doesn't know how to stop, and that's what we have to teach it. I want to give you the framework I developed for managing my obsessive thoughts. It's called thought containment. Not thought elimination, containment. Because the goal isn't to never think about it. The goal is to give the thoughts a container so they stop running your whole life and you can finally go to sleep. So step one, you're gonna set a timer and thought dump. Give yourself a designated time to think about it. Set a timer, five minutes, ten minutes, longer if you need to, whatever feels right. And for that window, you are allowed to think about it fully. You're gonna write it down, say it out loud, whatever comes up for you, swear if you need to, be angry if you need to, just let it all out. The key is the timer. When that timer goes off, you stop. You have given the thoughts their time, and now you are choosing to step away from them. This does something important for your nervous system. It creates a container. Instead of thoughts being able to hijack your entire day, they have a designated space. And over time, your brain starts to learn that there is a time for this and it's not all the time, because you deserve to have peace. Step two, I want you to label the thoughts. So when the thoughts come up outside of your designated time, label them. That's a spiral thought. That's catastrophizing. That's my nervous system trying to find control. One thing that I personally like to do with clients when I worked in crisis work, and also with my clients now, is to give it a funny name. For example, one of my clients called hers Harold. Or sometimes she uses squirrel brain because the obsessive thoughts are running all over the place. Labeling helps you to create distance. You are not that thought. You're just the person noticing the thought. That shift is small, but it does change things. Step three is let yourself be angry. This is one of the most important, and it's often skipped because sometimes we feel like we don't have a right to be angry or like there's something seriously wrong with you if you're thinking of all the karma that you wish upon somebody else. I'm telling you, there is nothing wrong with you. That anger is not a problem to manage, it's information. It's a sign that your boundaries have been crossed and the emotions are moving through your body, and you need to let yourself feel them. Something wrong happened to you, and you deserved better. So let yourself be angry fully. Without making it pretty or spiritual or evolved, just be fucking angry because minimizing that anger or rushing past it is often what keeps people stuck longer than the anger itself would. Anger that is felt and expressed moves through you. Anger that is suppressed stays in your body and it comes out sideways. I swear a lot when I'm frustrated because my anger needs a place to go. Or I go for runs. At one point I was doing kickboxing to help myself process the sexual assault I had been through because I knew that there was never going to be any justice for that. I didn't have support from my friends, and I was fucking angry. And I was already lifting, I was already running, I had nowhere else to put this. So I put it into a punching bag, and it did wonders for me. And that brings me to step four, which is redirecting to physical processing. So when that timer goes off, I want you to do something else. Move your body, go for a walk, go for a run, go to the gym, do something physical. This is not a distraction, this is physiological. When you're in a stress response, your body is flooded with cortisol and adrenaline. Physical movement helps to metabolize those stress hormones. It releases dopamine and serotonin, and it shifts your nervous system out of that state. You cannot think your way out of a physiological response, but you can move your way through it. So contain the thoughts, label them when they pop up, let yourself be angry, and physically process it. Now I want to say something that took me a long time to accept. The obsessive thoughts, the replaying, wishing you had said something differently, convincing yourself it was somehow your fault, none of that is going to give you the answer you're looking for. Because that answer does not exist. So again, somebody who has manipulated you, cheats on you, gaslights you, lies, their behavior is not something your logic can understand. It's not something you could have prevented by saying the right words. It's not a reflection of your worth or your value or whether you're enough. And if you're sitting there thinking, well, in this one conflict, maybe I could have said this differently or changed my tone. Well, I want you to ask yourself this. Was I acting or was I reacting? Because if you're dealing with somebody who's narcissistic, toxic, and abusive, you are reacting to the situation that they created. They are actively trying to make you crazy and lash out. So try to ask yourself that question to help reframe your thoughts. That one made a big difference for me. Their behavior is about them. Full stop. And the sooner you stop asking yourself why and start asking what do I need now, the faster you move through it. You are not trying to make sense of someone else's chaos. You're trying to find a way back to yourself. And to be honest, I still use these tools now. Not because I'm still stuck in the thick of it, but because life keeps happening and there are moments that try to pull me back into the spiral. And I know running a business and supporting other women, I can't have my thoughts derailed like they have been in the past. I cannot lose my entire day to stuff like that or lose sleep to stuff like that. The difference now is I can catch myself faster because I've been able to practice this. I can name it faster, I can redirect it faster. The spiral that used to derail my entire day now lasts maybe 20 minutes max because I have a system and I use it. And I know something that I didn't know then. The obsessive thoughts were never really about him. They were about me not yet trusting myself enough to believe that I would be okay without the answer, without the resolution, without the thing that was never going to come. The healing was learning to trust myself more than I trusted the spiral. So your homework this week, next time you have obsessive thoughts come up, try one of these things. Set the timer, give your thoughts 10 minutes. If you're having trouble facing the thoughts head on, try five minutes or even two minutes. Let them fully exist, and when that timer goes off, go move your body again, even for five minutes. See what happens repeatedly over time. And if you want to go deeper on this work, the link to apply for my one-on-one coaching is in the show notes. This is exactly the kind of work we do together. And I help hold you accountable and help you debrief after. And remember, every no to what drains you is a powerful yes to yourself. Your body is the foundation of your healing. I'll see you next episode.