"That's Just a Passenger": A Simple Guide to 'Unhooking' From the Bully in Your Brain

Amelia was in the zone. As a graphic designer, she lived for the rare, quiet afternoons when a project clicked into place. She was working on a major rebrand for a small, independent record label, a dream client. After a morning of frustrating false starts, she’d had a flash of inspiration. The colour palette was suddenly, obviously right. The typography felt fresh and alive. A warm current of creative satisfaction flowed through her, the unmistakable, deeply rewarding feeling of competence, of flow, of making something good out of nothing. It was a fragile, precious, and all-too-rare state. Then, a thought arrived. It came uninvited, not as a shout, but as a quiet, venomous whisper that seemed to materialise from the air-conditioning hum in the back of her mind: You’re a fraud. The thought was followed, a millisecond later, by its accomplice: You’re just copying other people’s ideas, and any minute now, they’re going to find out. She didn’t just notice the thought. In an instant, she became the thought. It wasn’t a passing piece of mental noise anymore; it was an undeniable, objective truth that landed with a sickening thud in her stomach. The warm current of creativity didn’t just stop; it flash-froze. The satisfaction evaporated, replaced by a dull, cold dread. She stared at the screen, but her design, which had seemed so promising seconds before, now looked derivative and clumsy. Her fingers, which had been moving with graceful precision, flew across the keyboard in a frantic, clumsy panic. She began undoing her work, deleting elements as if they were contaminated evidence of her inadequacy. The internal argument began, a familiar and pointless courtroom drama. “It’s not fraudulent, it’s just influenced by…” the rational part of her mind, her defence lawyer, feebly suggested. The bully’s voice, now the prosecuting counsel, just laughed. Pathetic. You can’t even come up with one original idea. Within ten minutes, the battle was over. The prosecution had won. She slammed her laptop shut. The silence that followed was heavy with failure. Her evening was ruined. Not by her work, which was good, but by a single, fleeting thought that she held onto too tightly. She had allowed a bully in her brain to hijack her entire evening. But what if you didn't have to argue with the bully? What if you could learn to simply let them shout, and keep going?

The Futility of a War Against Your Own Mind

If Amelia’s story feels familiar, it’s because you have likely been fighting the same war. For years, when a self-critical thought has shown up—a thought about your competence, your worth, your likability—you have probably deployed one of two main tactics.

Tactic 1: The Counter-Attack.

You argue back. The thought says, "You're not good enough," and you immediately marshal the evidence to the contrary. "Yes, I am! Look at this project I completed! Think about that compliment I received!" You get into a furious debate with the voice in your head, a debate you can never seem to win.

Tactic 2: The Suppression.

You try to force the thought out of your mind. You tell yourself, "Just stop thinking that! Think of something else! Be positive!" You try to suppress it, push it down, or distract yourself from it. Both of these tactics seem logical. Both are utterly exhausting. And both, paradoxically, make the thought stronger. When you stop everything to argue with a thought, you are sending a clear message to your brain: "This thought is incredibly important. It is a genuine threat that requires our full, immediate attention." You are, in effect, putting a giant spotlight on the very thought you want to get rid of. When you try to suppress a thought, you trigger a well-documented psychological phenomenon known as the "ironic process theory"—try not to think about a pink elephant, and your mind will be filled with images of pink elephants. The very act of trying not to think about something guarantees that you will think about it more. This war is unwinnable. As long as your goal is to control, change, or eliminate your thoughts, you are doomed to fail. But what if that was never the right goal in the first place? What if there was a third option?

A New Strategy: Introducing the Passengers on the Bus

To understand this new skill, we will use one of the most powerful metaphors in modern psychology, developed by Dr. Steven C. Hayes, the founder of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). Imagine you are the driver of a bus. The bus represents your life. It has a steering wheel, an accelerator, and brakes—these are your choices, your actions, the things you can directly control. The bus is on a journey, and you are the only one who can drive it. Your destination is whatever matters most to you in your heart—your values. Your thoughts, feelings, memories, and physical sensations are the passengers on the bus. They get on, they get off. Some are quiet and pleasant. Some are neutral. And some are bullies. These are your ‘Second Darts,’ the self-critical thoughts we identified in our last discussion. They are loud, obnoxious, and they like to stand right behind the driver’s seat, loom over you, and shout unhelpful and often cruel advice. "You're a fraud!" "You're going to crash!" "You're a terrible driver!" "You're not good enough to drive this route!" Faced with these bully passengers, you have a few options.

Option 1: Cognitive Fusion (The Common Mistake).

This is what most of us do. We believe the passengers. We treat their shouted opinions as objective truth. We fuse with them. This happens in two ways:

• You Stop the Bus to Argue: You put the bus in neutral, get out of the driver's seat, and get into a fight with the bully. While you’re back there arguing, what’s happening to the bus? It’s going nowhere. You are no longer moving toward your destination.
• You Take Directions from the Bully: The bully screams, "This road is too scary! Turn left!" and you listen. You yank the wheel and drive down the easy, boring, safe-looking street of avoidance. You have made the bully shut up for a little while, but you are now driving your bus in the wrong direction, further and further away from what matters. In both scenarios, the bully is driving the bus. Your actions are being dictated by your attempt to control them. This is Cognitive Fusion.

Option 2: Cognitive Defusion (The Skillful Path).

This is the skill we are learning today. Cognitive Defusion is the radical choice to acknowledge that the noisy passenger is on the bus, but to keep your hands firmly on the wheel, your eyes on the road, and to continue driving your bus towards your chosen destination. The goal isn’t to kick the passenger off the bus. Trying to do that just leads to another fight. The goal is simply not to let them drive. Defusion is the practice of letting the bullies rant and rave in the background, without taking their directions or stopping the bus to argue. It is the simple, profound act of remembering that you are the driver, not the passengers. This is how to unhook from thoughts.

The Science: How 'Unhooking' Rewires Your Brain's Language Game

Cognitive Defusion is not just a clever mind trick; it is a way of intervening in the very process by which your brain processes language and creates meaning. Your brain is a context-making machine. The same piece of information can trigger vastly different responses depending on the context. The word “Fire!” shouted in a crowded cinema triggers a full-body, life-or-death panic response. The same word, “Fire,” read in a book about the history of the London Fire Brigade, triggers no response at all. The word is identical. The context is everything. For years, your ‘Second Dart’ thoughts—thoughts like “I am incompetent” or "You're a fraud"—have been experienced in a context of absolute, threatening truth. Your brain has learned to treat them like the shout of “Fire!” in the cinema. The thought and the feeling of threat are completely fused together. Cognitive Defusion techniques are designed to deliberately and systematically break this habit. They work by changing the context in which you experience the thought. They are rule-breakers. They take the thought out of its old, serious, threatening context and place it in a new, strange, and often ridiculous one. You are teaching your brain a new rule: just because the bully passenger is shouting "Fire!" doesn't mean we have to evacuate the bus. We can learn to hear it as just a noise. This is how you stop believing negative thoughts.

A Simple Phrase to Create Instant Space

This week, we will practice the most foundational defusion technique. It is a simple linguistic trick that creates immediate distance from a difficult thought, allowing you to move from a state of fusion to a state of defusion.

Your One Commitment This Week: Practice 'Unhooking' One Thought

The Drill: The "I am having the thought that..." Technique

1. Step 1: Bring a common self-critical thought to mind. Let’s use Amelia’s thought: "I am a fraud." Say it to yourself silently, in your normal, serious voice. Notice how it feels. It probably feels heavy, significant, and true. It feels like a fact about you.
2. Step 2: Now, let's add a simple phrase to the beginning. Say to yourself: "I am having the thought that I am a fraud." Say it a few times. Notice the small but significant shift. The thought is no longer a statement of fact about the world. It is now an event happening in your mind. You have created a tiny bit of space.
3. Step 3: Now, let's add one more layer to increase the distance. Say to yourself: "I am noticing that I am having the thought that I am a fraud." Repeat this a few times. Can you feel the difference? You are no longer the thought. You are now the observer of the thought. You have moved from being in the middle of the storm to watching it from a safe distance.

Your Practice: Your only job this week is to become a 'thought-spotter.' When you catch a 'bully passenger' thought—a familiar self-criticism or a catastrophic worry—simply practice this technique silently in your mind. The goal is to practice looking at your thoughts, not from them.

From Unhooking to Driving with Purpose

You now have a simple but profound tool to stop believing negative thoughts. This skill of ‘unhooking’ is the key to taking back the steering wheel of your own mind and ending the unwinnable war with the bully in your brain. But taking back the wheel is only half the journey. A skillful driver with no destination is just driving in circles. The next, and most important, step is to get crystal clear on where you actually want to go. What is the destination that makes it worthwhile to ignore the bullies and keep driving? This is the work of connecting your new skills to your core values. This complete journey—from calming your body's 'Faulty Smoke Alarm' to unhooking from your mind's 'bully passengers' and connecting it all to a life of meaning—is the subject of my book, The Faulty Smoke Alarm. To take the next step, I want to send you the first three chapters of the book, absolutely free. In them, you will master the foundational 'Anchor' skill that creates the stability needed to do this deeper work. Enter your email below to receive your free chapters and learn to become the driver of your own bus, not a hostage to its passengers.