Controlling Our Thoughts

Prairie gal wrote: If I don't really want to fantasize about sex with married men, why should I? You might call it repressive; I would call it wise

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It's greatly easy to resist thought you don't want to think. Do you mean that it arouses you but you don't want it to arouse you? Then it makes sense to avoid it.

I cannot agree with the statement "Thoughts don't matter, only actions." While actions definitely do matter, and one's thoughts are not punishable by society, they definitely do matter. If one has a negative self-image, for instance, one is almost certain to struggle with low self esteem, feelings of inadequacy, self-hate and so on. Believing that one is not adequate can lead to eating disorders, self-shaming, self-harm, antisocial behavior and so on. So thoughts definitely do matter.

In my opinion, positive thoughts lead to a positive well-being, and dark, negative thoughts lead to a lack of well-being. Choose the better path. Reject harmful, negative thoughts.

I agree with you BrotherHobo that positive thoughts lead to a positive well-being, and dark, negative thoughts lead to a lack of well-being. Choose the better path. Reject harmful, negative thoughts.

I think mental health is linked to a preponderance of positive thoughts.

What I'm hearing is a lot of people do not even want to monitor their thoughts,
much less control them.

-- Tue Jan 13, 2015 10:56 pm --

Yes to your question Maligan.

You still haven't given me a good reason I should want to "monitor" my thoughts.

Frankly, I'm much happier and healthier now that I've accepted that my sexual interest in young children and infants is a part of me than I ever was when I was afraid of myself and treated it as pathological.

YouthRightsRadical wrote:You still haven't given me a good reason I should want to "monitor" my thoughts.

Frankly, I'm much happier and healthier now that I've accepted that my sexual interest in young children and infants is a part of me than I ever was when I was afraid of myself and treated it as pathological.

To play devil's advocate, surely you've arrived at this state by means of a process of controlling your thoughts (the self-loathing ones).

Well, I'll tell the story and let it speak for itself.

My internal debates tend to take the form of actual debates. I present myself with arguments and evidence for one course of action or another. Back in the day, when I was sure I would be tempted to rape a child (because that's what society had told me was my destiny), I went out looking for evidence to use against myself should such an impulse crop up.

So I scoured every source of information I could lay hands on, looking for the evidence I could use to appeal to my own compassion against such a hypothetical impulse. In the process, I found out that I was being lied to. I learned that we aren't child molesters in waiting, and that none of the evidence supported the existing narratives. It certainly wasn't for lack of trying to find supporting evidence, since again, that search was motivated out of a genuine fear that if I didn't locate it, I might do something terrible.

I'm still searching for the evidence, more out of habit and belief in the constant quest for knowledge than out of any real expectation of finding it, or any real pressing urgency these days.

Basically, as soon as I learned the truth, the self-loathing went away, since the self-loathing was based on a hateful lie. Maybe you can call that policing my thoughts, but that phrase brings something very different to my mind.

There must be a lot of crap 'evidence' out there too, though. I remember watching a UK documentary on paedophiles, in which a policeman in the paedophile unit stated that the science confirmed that those who view CP invariably go on to commit a contact offence, and I thought that if there was such a study it must be utter crap, because CP viewing rates are through the roof, at least according to other (possibly spurious) studies and because an awful lot of people who view CP are just people with porn addiction seeking out taboo stuff to give them a kick.

Yeah, there's a ton of the stuff out there. Fortunately for me, I'm actually pretty good at reading scientific writing and am prone to poke holes in bad methodology.

Shame a lot of the scientists themselves don't have those skills. Studying paedophiles on the basis of sex offenders only, for example. Or producing simplistic characterizations of paedophiles that comprise little more than a litany of ad hominem-style put-downs. I was banned from editing Wikipedia due to criticising the critiques of Kinsey, which were not methodological but personal. The world is full of f***ing idiots.

Prairie gal wrote:What I'm hearing is a lot of people do not even want to monitor their thoughts,
much less control them.

People will kill themselves before they'll give up their "self", so you can bet there's going to be a fair bit of resistance to mindfulness.