This just occurred to me... (my apologies to everyone who really understands computers...I'm sure I will really mess up on this analogy)

I was watching a TV show with my son and then having this intellectual/political conversation with him... and I realized how I stopped being involved in real life (outside of what absolutely needed to be done for my job or my family) and stopped thinking about things that really interested me in the last 10 years or so...

And its like I realized all of my life I've had these "programs running in the background" and then suddenly I had a glitch and these programs started using up all of my RAM and they took over more and more of my mind and energy and they stopped being "run in the background" and they became more of all that is running...

Recently I've had these advertising programs take over my browser... i can't go onto a retail site without all of these competing ads coming up. So i finally click on these ads and it actually told me the name of the program and what to do if you want to delete it. So I go to my uninstall programs and look in the list and the advertising program isn't listed there....yet it is still in my browser.... So I start looking at all the other programs that look like advertising ones or ones that installed recently and start uninstalling them to see if any of them will get rid of these ad pop ups and they don't seem to work... Or I find a program I want to uninstall and I highlight the program name and click on uninstall and nothing happens...

Its like the "programs running in background" are my past.... and its no longer in the background and its taking up more and more of my time and energy to keep it in the background... and therapy is like trying to unistall these programs... I think "this" is the problem so I work on that in therapy... its helpful but those damn thoughts (ads) keeping popping up and so then I start to work on "this other" issue and it seems like it just goes on and on...

I wish my brain was like a computer where I could just get it re-imaged all at once....

Not sure what I want to get out of this thread....maybe just not to feel alone in these thoughts...Anyone else feel like this? or maybe you have a different analogy you use for your journey you'd like to share?

[unaluna]

Good analogy. On a mainframe, a bad program running simultaneously with other programs can get stuck in a loop and next thing you know its taken over all the processing capability of the entire computer, but really nothing is getting done. All the lights go out. Its like its depressed and just ruminating. How did i never see this before??!!

I got something in the mail today that im afraid to look at, from my past. Im afraid its going tobruin my day, but its mere existence is ruining my day, but only if i let it. But there is no way around it, it feels like.

[Leah123]

I can relate, though at the moment, can't think of a clever analogy. I came from an abusive background, but I got help and I got out. I discarded much that didn't help, including a lot of what you could call malware, negative messages that had infiltrated from my parents.

I lived a relatively balanced, healthy life after that. I worked, was self-reliant, married well, enjoyed pleasures like travel and had a fairly balanced life; not perfect but comfortable.

Once I had a child, I began to lose balance: old subroutines from my parents were activated and I struggled to be the mother I wanted, feared to fail, but increasingly had the sense I was becoming like my own mother.

I lost my sense of balance: two family calamities compounded that, a life-threatening illness and a job loss, along with my husband and daughter having a difficult relationship.

By the time I made it to therapy, my affirming programs were in sleep mode: I had given up yoga, school (which I love), creative writing, even reading. I had no more pastimes, and no more time for myself whatsoever, I'd lost the sense of how important it was to take care of my CPU, was just running on backup battery.

My therapist helped me do a system refresh! We looked at what wasn't working, one element at a time, and began running apps to help me function more efficiently, prioritize the important things again and get rid of the pop ups telling me I had to spend everything I had on meaningless junk, like staying up hours late to clean house instead of getting the rest I needed. It's been a grueling process to go even further and start looking at the viruses themselves and slowly, painstakingly eradicate them. I'm still in the middle of that work.

So, you're not alone! (Also, I don't understand computers perfectly either, so... go easy on me you IT pros! )

Originally Posted by Leah123

I lived a relatively balanced, healthy life after that. I worked, was self-reliant, married well, enjoyed pleasures like travel and had a fairly balanced life; not perfect but comfortable.

Once I had a child, I began to lose balance: old subroutines from my parents were activated and I struggled to be the mother I wanted, feared to fail, but increasingly had the sense I was becoming like my own mother.

I lost my sense of balance

I also was from an abusive home. I've always felt really guilty of the fact that when Ts would ask me when I started experiencing problems, I would always say when I became a mother.

I think there is something about becoming a parent that brings up your past. Its like I was either trying to parent in a way to be "opposite of my FOO" or to be like the perfect parent I dreamed of having when I was little... either way I entered therapy because of an event that happened with me that put me in an immediate flashback to my mom... and i thought " s h i t... I've turned into my mother" and I called the next day to make an appt.

Thank you for sharing. I love my boys and I love being a mom but have always felt guilty that the best thing in my life is the thing that caused so much problems for me. even though I know its not being a mom that is the problem but that its the programs running in the background and the malware.

[CantExplain]

As for the pop-ups, try reinstalling the browser.

I don't know if we can do that for your brain, however.

[Nightlight]

I relate to that in a lot of ways. After all, right now in my life, it's really just thoughts and memories that are making me so miserable. Like I've realised that so much of my anxiety is linked to a single bad event (and all the positive experiences of the same type of event get discarded). In fact the computer has frozen and the bad event is stuck on the monitor and that's that.

Your analogy sounds very much like the way Russ Harris talks about thoughts. He wrote The Happiness Trap on ACT therapy, which seems to be largely based on moving these thoughts from completely obscuring the present moment.

[blur]

oh wow. your analogy is eerily similar to a spiritual dream i had recently. yes, we are trying to shut down those programs that are afflicting our minds (the computer). they have wrecked havoc on us but as we heal we close more windows and can get the dang thing uninstalled. in my dream i was trying to find out the name of the program that was causing it all. the root of it so to speak. i think i have recently figured that out. i was also shown that it is causing me a lot of emotional instability so am looking forward to getting rid of the goober.

as for your actual computer if you do a search there are free programs to test for malware & viruses and they can sometimes remove the ads too. i did this a few years ago on my mac and it was no problem. also, don't click on those pop ups again! that is just going to make your computer problem worse. it's interesting how things in our physical lives can mirror what is happening with us psychologically.