Renaming the File
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But the mechanism isn’t about fighting the monster.
It’s about substitution.
Try this:
Don’t try to forget the poop monster.
Try to forget the magical bunny-like creature instead.
Carry something small that represents it — a keychain, a token, a mental image — and deliberately tell yourself not to think about it.
Watch what happens.
Your background monitoring system will begin scanning for the very thing you’re trying to suppress.
The attempt to forget activates the reference.
The reference keeps it alive.
That’s the architecture.
You don’t erase what haunts you.
You change what loads by default.
There is something mechanical about the mind.
The harder you try not to think about something, the more precisely it returns.
I didn’t need a textbook to learn that.
I ran into it directly.
It started with an experiment, as mentioned in my previous blog entry Waiting Room.
I tried a technique I discovered — focusing awareness on the back of my head. The reasoning made sense: executive processing is largely tied to the prefrontal cortex. Shift attention away from the “front,” quiet the narrative.
And it worked.
The internal monologue softened.
Then stopped.
There was silence.
Not dramatic. Not spiritual.
Just quiet.
And almost immediately, something else activated.
Are we thinking?
Is something missing?
Is this stable?
That reaction wasn’t mystical.
It was cognitive architecture.
Psychology calls it Ironic Process Theory, developed by Daniel Wegner.
When you try to suppress a thought, two processes begin running at the same time.
1. The Operating Process
This is the effortful system.
It looks for something else to think about.
It depends on working memory and executive control.
It consumes energy.
2. The Monitoring Process
This runs in the background.
It scans for the unwanted thought to make sure it isn’t present.
It is automatic.
It doesn’t tire easily.
Here’s the problem.
To avoid a thought, the brain must keep referencing it.
Under stress, fatigue, emotional overload, or disrupted sleep, the operating process weakens.
The monitoring process does not.
So the balance shifts.
You try not to think.
The operating process strains.
The monitoring process keeps scanning.
Scanning keeps the representation active.
Rebound.
Silence becomes something to monitor.
Monitoring reactivates cognition.
The loop forms.
Not because something is broken.
Because something is functioning exactly as designed.
But suppression alone doesn’t explain why certain material keeps resurfacing.
That’s where the Zeigarnik Effect comes in.
Bluma Zeigarnik identified that unfinished tasks remain more mentally active than completed ones.
Incomplete experiences create cognitive tension.
The brain flags them as unresolved.
Resolved experiences get consolidated and deprioritized.
Unresolved ones remain accessible.
This applies to emotional experience.
Grief is unfinished by nature.
So is trauma.
There is no clean “end” signal when an attachment ruptures or when psychological harm occurs.
The brain continues to revisit the representation because it is marked as incomplete.
Not to punish.
To resolve.
But some experiences cannot be resolved in a single cognitive pass.
They can only be integrated over time.
Until that integration occurs, the system keeps the file open.
And that persistence has structure.
1. Incomplete Narrative Encoding
The brain encodes experience as sequence.
Beginning. Middle. End.
When an experience lacks emotional integration, the encoding remains open-ended.
Open-ended encoding is easier to reactivate.
2. Prediction Error
Attachment creates long-term predictive models.
When continuity collapses, the brain registers error.
It reactivates the representation trying to reconcile it.
3. Attachment System Activation
Attachment circuitry is built to restore proximity.
When proximity cannot be restored, the system doesn’t receive closure.
Activation persists.
Now layer this onto ironic suppression.
Unfinished emotional material stays active.
Suppression increases monitoring.
Monitoring increases salience.
Salience strengthens neural representation.
The stronger the representation, the more suppression gets triggered.
The cycle tightens.
There is another layer to why certain material remains open.
The night my mother unexpectedly passed.
The full scene of what I discovered.
The shift from ordinary to irreversible in a single breath.
I lost my person.
My friend.
Our tight bond.
Shock narrowed perception.
My response became procedural.
Call. Assess. Act. Administer aid.
I moved.
But while administering aid, I dissociated.
Part of me stepped outside of my body while my hands kept moving.
I functioned.
But I wasn’t fully inside myself.
That night was the major trauma.
Not because it was dramatic.
Because it was foundational.
Grief didn’t just begin there.
It fractured there.
And when Leilani passed, that wound didn’t simply hurt again.
It reopened.
It wasn’t only her loss.
It was the original loss reactivated.
Loss layered onto loss.
The system doesn’t treat those as separate files.
It clusters them.
Unfinished grief doesn’t disappear.
It waits for reactivation.
I’ve seen this play out with the recent trauma of covert narcissistic abuse.
There are moments when I tell myself not to think about it.
Don’t replay it.
Don’t give it energy.
Don’t revisit the manipulation.
That’s the operating process.
But the monitoring process doesn’t respond to intention.
It keeps scanning.
Is it there?
Did we drift back?
Are we thinking about her?
Because it keeps scanning, the representation stays accessible.
Even if I manage not to think about it during the day, the system doesn’t always let it rest at night.
As recently as last night, I woke up startled from vivid images of her — intrusive, emotionally charged, and slow to dissolve.
Not romantic.
Not longing.
Unfinished encoding.
During REM sleep, the brain reactivates emotional memories while norepinephrine levels drop. This allows emotional experiences to be reprocessed with less physiological charge.
If integration is incomplete, those memories resurface.
Sleep removes executive control.
What was being suppressed has space to emerge.
This isn’t weakness.
It’s unresolved processing.
There was also a period where this escalated beyond thought loops.
I broke down.
Not theatrically.
Neurologically.
Shell-shocked.
Like a deer startled by the slightest movement.
Hypervigilant.
Even the blender running in the kitchen would set off a surge.
Not because a blender is threatening.
Because my nervous system was already primed.
When the amygdala becomes sensitized, it lowers the threshold for perceived threat.
Neutral stimuli feel sharp.
Ordinary sound feels invasive.
Monitoring doesn’t just apply to thought.
It expands outward into the environment.
Scanning increases.
Startle increases.
Muscle tension stays high.
Sleep becomes lighter.
Breathing becomes shallow.
That state can harden if repeated.
Repetition builds circuitry.
If hypervigilance becomes daily, it becomes baseline.
I’m grateful I didn’t stay there.
Sleep interacts with all of this.
REM is critical for emotional memory integration.
If REM is disrupted, emotional charge doesn’t process efficiently.
At the same time, sleep deprivation weakens executive control in the prefrontal cortex.
Which means:
The operating process weakens.
Monitoring continues.
Emotional intensity increases.
The rebound becomes stronger.
The amygdala tags emotional memory with salience.
The hippocampus encodes context.
If integration is incomplete, the amygdala keeps signaling importance.
The hippocampus keeps the memory accessible.
Suppression increases amygdala activation because attention remains tethered to perceived threat.
More attention.
More salience.
More intensity.
The loop strengthens.
Acceptance-based approaches interrupt this differently.
Instead of eliminating the thought, they remove resistance.
Less resistance reduces monitoring.
Less monitoring reduces salience.
Reduced salience lowers amygdala activation.
Lower activation decreases emotional charge.
Allowance is not surrender.
It’s regulation.
And then there’s substitution.
I think of it like renaming files.
You have a file called bad_thought.jpg.
That’s the active file.
You don’t delete it.
You rename it:
@bad_thought.jpg.
It still exists.
It just isn’t auto-loading.
Then you introduce a new file named bad_thought.jpg.
Now that becomes the default.
The original is not erased.
Not denied.
Just no longer the automatic load state.
The new file does not need to be profound.
It just needs to be less harmful when recalled.
Less charged.
Even trivial.
Trivial is safer than traumatic.
That isn’t suppression.
That’s deliberate substitution.
Over time, repetition teaches the system a new default.
And then there’s agency.
I am not an authority on this. I’m a traumatized human who has had to learn how his own nervous system works.
These frameworks — ironic process theory, the Zeigarnik effect, substitution, regulation — are tools.
They are among the tools in my toolbox.
If you’re interested in the psyche, or if you’re needing to equip yourself, dig deeper.
I am not prescribing.
I am documenting.
I am not new to trauma.
Which means I am not new to tools.
Breathing techniques.
Cognitive reframing.
Physical training to discharge stress.
Structured routines.
Sleep correction.
Creative work.
Language learning to redirect focus.
Downsizing my environment to reduce cognitive load.
Deliberate habit rebuilding.
Understanding the mechanics is not enough.
Application is work.
Breathing when you don’t feel like it is work.
Training when you’re tired is work.
Redirecting attention instead of ruminating is work.
Regulating sleep is work.
Consistency is work.
New neural pathways don’t form because you understand neuroplasticity.
They form because you repeat behaviors that support it.
I pulled myself out before.
Through repetition.
Through regulation.
Through construction.
And I can do it again.
If you’d like to explore my experiences more deeply — the traumas, the breakdowns, the tools, and the methods I’ve used to pull myself back to baseline — you can find all of that documented in my books:
You’ll find:
The I’m a Traumatized Human trilogy — unpacking psychological injury and rebuilding in real time.
Operating Without a Manual — a six-book series on navigating life without a blueprint.
And The Book of Carlos — a testimony of my walk with God through trials, loss, and reconstruction.
They aren’t theory.
They’re lived documentation.
Suppression strengthens what is unfinished.
The mind loops not because it is broken,
but because two normal cognitive processes are interacting:
1. Ironic Process Theory — suppression keeps the thought active through monitoring.
2. Zeigarnik Effect — unfinished emotional experiences remain neurologically open.
Unfinished emotional material stays active.
Suppression increases monitoring.
Monitoring increases salience.
Salience strengthens the loop.
The mind repeats what is unresolved, and fighting the repetition reinforces it.
What you resist stays cognitively active.
The solution is not erasure.
You don’t eliminate the loop.
You reduce its dominance by building competing neural pathways through repetition, regulation, integration, substitution, and acceptance.
The brain holds onto what is unfinished, and trying to force it away keeps it alive.
Framework & Psychological Context
What I’m describing isn’t mystical.
There is precedent for this across established psychological models.
Attentional redirection — sometimes called attentional deployment — is a recognized regulatory strategy. It appears in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, mindfulness practices, and emotion regulation research. The core idea is simple: you can intentionally choose where to place your focus. Shifting attention away from distressing material toward something neutral or adaptive alters the emotional trajectory.
The “bunny” metaphor is a vivid, embodied form of that.
Where this approach becomes different is in the structure. The renaming of files. The somatic anchor — an object in your pocket or a deliberate mental image. And the instruction to try to forget something nonthreatening, not to avoid distress, but to demonstrate how the monitoring system works. Most models encourage redirecting toward something positive. This reverse-engineers the monitoring process itself.
Ironic Process Theory explains why that experiment works. The more you try not to think about something, the more the brain scans for it. If you try not to think about the bunny, your mind begins checking for the bunny. The act of suppression activates reference. That is not failure. It is architecture.
There are also parallels with cognitive restructuring and thought substitution in CBT — acknowledging a thought and replacing it with a more adaptive one. The difference here is that the substitution is behavioral and embodied, not purely verbal.
The “back of the head” focus overlaps with open-monitoring mindfulness. Instead of focusing on an object, attention shifts to awareness itself, reducing narrative dominance. That quieting isn’t mystical. It’s a change in network activation.
Even trauma therapies use forms of dual attention — holding a distressing memory while simultaneously focusing on a neutral stimulus to reduce emotional charge. Functionally, engaging the bunny while allowing the intrusive material to remain unamplified has a similar regulatory effect.
So no, this isn’t fringe.
It’s a behavioral innovation built on established principles:
Attentional redirection.
Ironic process awareness.
Cognitive substitution.
Somatic anchoring.
Competing neural pathway strengthening.
Habit reshaping.
It doesn’t appear in textbooks with the language of renaming files. That’s metaphor. But the underlying mechanics are grounded.
Attention is limited.
Suppression paradoxically activates what it resists.
Redirection changes priority in working memory.
Repetition strengthens alternative neural pathways.
Over time, emotional charge weakens — not through erasure, but through reshaping.
That is neuroplasticity.
There may not be a formal protocol that reads exactly like this.
But the mechanisms are real.
And sometimes the most powerful insight isn’t inventing something new.
It’s recognizing the architecture already there — and learning how to work with it.
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