How to Overcome Toxic Thoughts With God’s Help
A dandelion releases her ashen fuzz to the sky, and I stand at the window to watch. The window is strong and clear, but a year ago, it was fractured into a dozen tiny lines. I’m not proud of the moment I shattered the window with my bare hand. Nevertheless, the incident eventually helped me learn how to overcome toxic thoughts with God’s help.
Maybe it’s taken a year for me to write about this because I was ashamed I had it in me.
Maybe you’ve been here, too.
Perhaps you’ve yelled just a little too forcefully at your kids, lashed out a little too ferociously at that guy who cut you off in the Wendy’s drive-thru, or thrown something across the living room when you were trying to put together the new bookshelf that surprisingly showed up on your doorstep in a box.
The Truth About Your Toxic Thoughts and Bad Moods
Usually, it’s not really about the kids, the guy in the Wendy’s line, or the bookshelf. Your anger was about something deeper than the incident that set you off.
This was the case with the shattered window.
We were about six weeks into a moth infestation that was starting to unravel me. Every evening, we killed every tiny moth in the house. Every morning, we woke up to two dozen tiny moths fluttering around the hallway light.
Moths flew in my ears as I sat on the couch. They landed on the screen of the computer as I typed articles. They infested the baskets lining the tops of the kitchen cabinets. There were just a few more every day.
The Day the Toxic Thoughts Overtook Me
One warm morning, I walked into the kitchen and encountered a moth on the window.
I smacked it.
Weeks of pent-up frustration came out in my smack.
The window immediately fractured with white lines that went in all directions.
In response, I did the only thing I knew to do to keep it from falling to the floor. I impulsively slapped neon green (because it was the only color we had) tape over the biggest cracks.
For two months, the broken window with the ugly green tape mocked me from the corner of the kitchen like a reminder that one angry thought really can affect your whole soul.
Several months later, on a cool September evening, we had mostly eradicated the moths. After bombing the house with pesticides shortly after the window-shattering, our moth encounters were limited to just one or two moths a week.
What Happens When You Don’t Eradicate Every Toxic Thought
As I pulled our box of fall decorations from the storage shelves in the basement, the kids gathered with excited hopes for decorative lights, pumpkin trinkets, and festive colored corn cobs.
I opened the box, and suddenly, dozens of moths fluttered free. In a moment of panic, I closed the box and ran outside with it.
Further evidence revealed hundreds of moths and moth larvae feeding on the decorative corn in the box.
It was disgusting, disastrous, and messy.
I trashed all but a couple of porcelain decorations and burned the box, which felt like redemption after the whole ordeal.
In the months since the moth fiasco all went down, I’ve often been reminded of a deeper truth: Just as one moth-infested box can contaminate an entire house, one toxic thought can cast a dark shadow over my whole soul.
How to Overcome Toxic Thoughts With God’s Help Click To TweetHow to Take Control of Toxic Thoughts
In Christ, we have renewed minds.
We are new creations.
The old has gone, and the new has come. However, we still make the choice to either take our thoughts captive and make them obedient to Christ or to let our minds run wild.
When I let my mind run wild, I quickly find myself embracing the following: worries about my kids, anxiety about the future, dozens of what-if scenarios, critical thoughts about myself and others, complaints, and more.
When I focus on taking thoughts captive and making them obedient to Christ, I am more likely to focus on the good in others, God’s promise to walk with me into the future, God’s provision over my kids and the people I love, the restorative work God is doing in my life, and what is pure, lovely, excellent, and admirable. (If you need a little help learning to look for what’s good in life instead of what’s wrong, join me here.)
Unfortunately, if we let even a little negativity creep in, negativity breeds negativity, and our minds are quickly overtaken by the invasive weeds of toxicity.
If you’re struggling with an ongoing area of toxic thinking, here are a few concrete steps to help you take back control of your mind:
1. Overcome toxic thoughts by paying attention to what floats through your mind.
At the end of the day, ask the Lord to show you times when your thoughts did not align with his thoughts. He will most likely reveal any thought patterns he wants to work on in your life.
2. Practice taking negative thoughts prisoner.
As you become more aware of your thought patterns, you will learn to catch yourself falling into toxic thinking. Imagine holding the bad thoughts captive in prison as you shine the light of God’s Truth on them.
3. Shrink the toxic thoughts in the light of God’s Truth.
It’s no easy feat to get rid of a negative thought pattern. Instead of ignoring your toxic thoughts, speak to them. Speak God’s Truth over them, and imagine them shriveling in your mind like withering weeds, getting smaller with each dose of truth.
4. Don’t stop speaking truth until you believe it.
It takes just over sixty days to solidify a thought so that it is a part of your mental hard-wiring. Speak truth into your toxic thoughts until you believe it.
Click on any of these links for truth to replace your toxic thoughts:
Negative or complaining thoughts.
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We eradicated the moths. The moths taught me quite a bit about life, patience, and even God. I’ve also learned to be careful with what I store in both my mind and in my basement.
A Free Devotional Book to Help You Shift Away From Toxic Thoughts:
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Calling All Moms and Daughters!
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