Early memories stick. I can still see my five-year-old self standing at the edge of the playground, watching the other boys play football. I wanted to join in, but I couldn’t move. What held me back wasn’t the game itself, but the narrative running in my head:
I’ll be rubbish. They’ll laugh at me. I don’t belong.
The story convinced me before I’d even tried.
Years later, as a shy, awkward teenager, I carried that same voice everywhere. It whispered in every social situation, convinced me of my inadequacy, and made me believe I was fundamentally broken.
When I discovered alcohol and drugs, they offered instant relief from that relentless inner critic. The voice stopped. The pain dissolved.
Until it didn’t.
On the surface, it might appear that drugs and alcohol were the problem. But in reality, it was my inner narrative — not the circumstances of my life, not other people, but the stories I believed about myself and the world.
The addiction was merely a symptom of a mind that wasn’t kind.
The mind as storyteller
Looking back, what strikes me most is how convinced I was that my thoughts were true. The playground narrative, the teenage self-loathing, the belief that I was broken; none of it was based on evidence. It was just thinking. But I never questioned it.
This is what the mind does: it creates stories and presents them as reality.
We’re programmed to interpret, categorise, and judge. Good and bad. Success and failure. Worthy and unworthy. The mind labels everything, then treats those labels as if they’re fundamental truths about the world rather than what they actually are – mental constructs.
Take the rat. We view it as bad because it spreads disease. But the rat is just being a rat, doing what rats do. The bacteria are just doing what bacteria do. There’s no moral dimension to any of it until a human mind enters the scene and starts applying labels. The judgement isn’t in the reality. It’s in the interpretation.
And yet we do this constantly, automatically, especially to ourselves.
I’m not good enough. I’m broken. I’m unloveable.
These aren’t observations about reality. They’re stories the mind tells, interpretations layered onto experience. But we believe them completely because we’ve forgotten the difference between what’s actually happening and what we’re thinking about what’s happening.
The problem isn’t reality. The problem is the constant mental commentary about reality, and our unconscious identification with that commentary as if it were ourselves speaking, rather than just the mind doing what minds do.
The spiral
Once the mind starts a story, it rarely stops at the first chapter.
Someone doesn’t reply to your message. Immediately, the narrative begins: They’re ignoring me. They don’t like me. I’ve done something wrong. Each thought builds on the last, gathering momentum like a snowball rolling downhill. Within minutes, you’ve constructed an entire reality based on… nothing. Just a sequence of thoughts that felt true enough to believe.
This is the thinking trap: you step onto a thought pathway and suddenly you’re not observing anymore.
You’re in it.
You become a participant in whatever the mind generates, rational or not. Even when some part of you knows it’s irrational, you can’t seem to stop. The thoughts pull you in.
I spent years caught in these spirals. Rumination about the past. Anxiety about the future. Resentment towards people who’d probably forgotten whatever I was obsessing about. The mind churns endlessly, creating suffering out of thin air.
The terrible irony is that we think we’re being rational. We pride ourselves on being logical, thoughtful people. But most of our beliefs don’t come from clear reasoning. They come from conditioning. Patterns laid down in childhood. Messages absorbed from parents, culture, experience. The mind isn’t a neutral observer; it’s running programmes written decades ago, many of which were never helpful to begin with.
We’ve forgotten how to distinguish between truth and the thoughts that happen to be running through our heads at any given moment. And that forgetting, that identification with the stream of thinking, is where the real suffering begins.
The story I believed
The most dangerous spirals are the ones we’ve been caught in so long we no longer recognise them as thought patterns. We mistake them for truth.
For years, I told myself a story about my father. He left when I was young to have an affair. Therefore, he didn’t love me. Therefore, he was selfish. Therefore, I was fucked up. This was his fault. Everything was his fault.
The story had a purpose: it allowed me to blame someone else for the mess I was making of my life. It was comfortable. It felt true. And I never questioned it.
Then I got sober and worked through Steps 4 and 5. Something shifted. The story began to crack.
I saw my father differently; a boy of four when his mother died, not allowed to attend her funeral. Twelve when his father died, sent to live with a cold, distant stepmother. A man who carried wounds he never addressed, seeking relief in affairs and alcohol.
The blame narrative dissolved. In its place came something unexpected: compassion.
I also saw my own selfishness in addiction. My entitled behaviour, the conviction that life owed me something, the way I’d used his story as an excuse to avoid taking responsibility for my own.
What enslaved me wasn’t the facts of my life. It was the meaning I’d attached to those facts. The narrative I’d constructed. The interpretation I’d mistaken for reality.
When we cling to our preferred version of the story, when we insist reality should have been different, we suffer. When we let go of that insistence, something opens. Not because the past changes, but because we stop being imprisoned by our interpretation of it.
A different relationship with thinking
Understanding that I’d been enslaved by a story raised an obvious question: if the story wasn’t true, what was I supposed to believe instead?
The answer, it turned out, wasn’t about finding a better story. It was about changing my relationship to the storytelling itself.
Most of us are completely identified with our thinking. We don’t just have thoughts – we are our thoughts. When the mind says “I’m worthless,” we don’t hear it as a thought; we experience it as a statement of fact about ourselves. We’re inside the mind, participating in its endless narratives, with no distance, no perspective, no breathing room. This is what it means to be living unconsciously.
This is what keeps us trapped: the restless monkey mind with its constant internal dialogue, judgment, rumination about the past, anxiety about the future, relentless self-criticism. It’s an exhausting way to live. And when it becomes unbearable, we look for relief through distraction, substances, compulsive behaviours, anything to make the noise stop.
But there’s another possibility.
When I got sober and began meditating daily, something became clear: I could shift my attention. Instead of being the Participant, caught up in the mind’s churning, I could step back and become the Witness. The observer of mental activity rather than the victim of it.
This shift was profound. I realised that thoughts don’t just appear fully formed from some essential “me”. They arise, like clouds passing through the sky. Feelings don’t come from nowhere; they emerge from thinking patterns, often ones I’d been running unconsciously for decades.
My sponsor’s crude analogy has stuck with me: thoughts are like mind farts – unpredictable emissions you don’t consciously choose. You are not the producer of these thoughts, any more than you are your digestive system.
You are not the mind. You are not your thoughts. You are the awareness, the consciousness, in which all these things arise.
And that changes everything.
What this looks like in practice
Recognising you’re not your thoughts is one thing. Actually living from that understanding is another.
The shift doesn’t happen all at once. It’s not like flipping a switch where suddenly you’re enlightened and the mind goes quiet. The thoughts keep coming. The stories keep spinning. But gradually, with practice, you start to notice them differently.
You catch yourself mid-spiral: Oh, there’s that story again about not being good enough.
You notice the interpretation layered onto events: That’s just my mind labeling this situation as bad.
You feel the space between what happens and your reaction to it: I don’t have to believe this thought right now.
These moments of recognition are everything. They create distance. And in that distance, choice becomes possible.
In practical terms, this means:
- Treating thoughts as events, not facts. Just because the mind says something doesn’t make it true. Thoughts are mental activity, no more authoritative than the rumbling of your stomach.
- Watching the stories without immediately believing them. Notice when the mind constructs narratives. See them for what they are – interpretations, not reality.
- Finding the pause. Between stimulus and response, there’s a gap. That gap is your freedom. In that space, you can choose how to respond rather than react automatically. This is the foundation of effective relapse prevention.
- Remembering what you actually are. You are the awareness experiencing thoughts, not the thoughts themselves. Expanding this awareness is the key to freedom.
The paradox is that you don’t gain freedom by controlling the mind. You gain it by recognising you were never the mind to begin with. You are what watches the mind. You are the consciousness in which thinking appears.
And that consciousness was never broken. It was never inadequate. It was never the stories it witnessed.
What you actually are
This isn’t about positive thinking or replacing bad thoughts with good ones. It’s not about fixing yourself, because the awareness that you are was never broken.
The thoughts will keep coming. The mind will keep doing what minds do – generating commentary, spinning stories, making judgments. That won’t stop. But you don’t have to be imprisoned by it anymore.
When you understand this, not just intellectually but experientially, something fundamental shifts. You’re still aware of the mental noise, but you’re no longer in it. You’re watching it. And in that watching, there’s a kind of freedom that addiction could never provide.
The playground narrative. The teenage self-loathing. The story about my father. The belief that I was fundamentally broken. None of it was ever true. They were thoughts, passing through awareness, mistaken for reality.
The solution to suffering isn’t fixing the mind or controlling thoughts or building better stories. It’s recognising what you are beneath all of that.
The awareness that was always free, always whole, always untouched by the narratives it witnesses.
Not a broken thing that needs fixing.
Not a mind that needs controlling.
But the consciousness itself. Unchanging, untroubled, always present, always here.
That’s what you’ve always been. That’s what you are right now. That’s what you’ll be when the last thought finally falls silent.
The only question is whether you recognise it.
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