Keep the Faith: Getting trapped by sticky thoughts

I’d never considered a bee getting stuck in honey before I saw the video. Maybe I figured it was like fish in water or pumpkin spice in Starbucks; bees had adapted for such predicaments. Instead, my heart sank for this innocent bee, covered in honey, trying to move but overwhelmed and stuck, giving its life to, and now for, the very honey that it was sinking in.

My therapist once told me about “sticky thoughts,” those irrational thoughts we can’t stop ruminating about, the kinds that aren’t true, but because we obsess over them, they ultimately overwhelm us and sometimes lead us into a self-fulfilling prophecy by our own actions. Maybe we think someone’s cheating on us, so we become jealous to the point of pushing away the person we were so scared to lose — sticky thought. Maybe we think people don’t like us, so we gossip about them until it ends up getting back to them and burning those bridges of friendship and trust with them — sticky thought. Maybe we think people don’t trust our opinions, so we argue with them or withdraw from them, until we’ve prove they don’t trust us — sticky thought.

They’re often irrational or not based in the reality of the moment, but they’re very often based in the traumas of our past experiences. It’s a defense mechanism of our brains telling us we can only trust what’s happened in the past, because it hurt like hell and we don’t want that pain to come our way again, rather than trusting the unfamiliar safety of the actual reality in front of us. Something too good to be true probably is, or so we’ve been taught to believe.

Sticky thoughts happen to all of us, though not everyone experiences them exactly like I do (or my therapist) or how I’ve articulated it here. It’s annoying and frustrating when they occur, even more so when they seem to win and cause some of these kinds of complications. The remedy for sticky thoughts is maybe more annoying: you just acknowledge them. You don’t try to suppress them, but you also don’t give into them. You don’t chase them or let them pull you down, you simply name them — for me, I might even name it out loud to make it more real. It’s a way of putting our foot on the solid ground of reality, saying ah, that’s a sticky thought. We’re naming that it’s a thought, no more or less. It is only real in my mind, and the words spoken out loud are even more real now that they’re floating outside my head.

I’m not a mental health professional, in fact some might say I deal in matters of the heart. But I name my own experience with sticky thoughts to say that you likely have them, too. And that’s normal and okay. Where my work as a minister comes in is when those sticky thoughts lead us into isolation, withdrawing from meaningful relationships because they got more difficult for us (whether in reality or in our own minds doesn’t invalidate the difficulty to us). It matters to me when our sticky thoughts begin dragging us into complacency or consumerism or complaining or cynicism.

In my profession, clergy sometimes speak of the Seven Deadly Sins. One of my predecessors preached a highly popular series of sermons on them, but unsurprisingly, the same congregation 60 years later isn’t as keen on the concept. Rather, I’ve been thinking of the pandemic’s effects on all of us, some physical or financial or social, but also spiritual. How are our hearts doing after a global pandemic, ongoing wars, a looming recession, and political strife unseen since our pastor preached on deadly sins in the '60s?

I’m also asking myself and our congregation where God fits in our lives when they’re overflowing with everything else. What’s the point of a faith community if it doesn’t materially change my circumstances? What good is an attitude adjustment for one hour a month if the remaining time is an unending slog in the mud and quicksand of debt, diagnoses, and incessant division?

That’s where sticky thoughts come back into play. Again, I can’t speak definitively as any kind of mental health professional, but I have seen the benefit as a person who goes to therapy regularly. Sticky thoughts look like excuses, they look like justification, they look like well-reasoned arguments for ourselves to be right, or wronged, or safer. That in itself isn’t bad, as rational thoughts can also result in similar perspectives of ourselves or situations. But with sticky thoughts, the results are rarely positive for us or for our relationships with family, friends, or communities of faith we love. Instead of building bridges, we burn them out of some belief we were right, or wronged, or will be safer for it. Instead of deepening friendships with people we don’t know as well in our congregation, we resent their joy or leadership or sincere care for us.

I don’t mean judgment by any of this, but rather like your primary care physician screening for depression regularly, I’m screening for sticky thoughts of the spirit. Why do I care? Because I think that’s partly where God comes into the picture in all of these crises. It makes complete sense that we’d want to create as much safety around ourselves as we could after all we’ve bee through. But God is calling us to be braver than our reptilian brains of fight or flight or flee. God’s Spirit is daring us to risk being hurt in order to experience being loved and the joy of loving others. And ultimately I care about your sticky thoughts of the Spirit because that’s simply no way to live as a human being--if you can help it.

So ask yourself this: are you feeling complacent about worshiping your God within a community of faith? Don’t blame your pastor’s sermons right now, that’s an excuse. There’s plenty of other churches out there you can try. Why are you holding back? Are you complaining a lot more than you used to, or have people noted that about your personality? I know things aren’t running as smoothly as you think they were before the pandemic, but what solutions are you offering with your complaints? Are you harboring resentment, frustration, hatred, animosity, negativity, or cynicism in your heart about your congregation? Don’t blame others; that’s the easy way out. Why would God’s house cause you so much angst and anger? What is your role in the problem; do you really think it’s 100% everyone else’s fault?

You know what happened in that video with the bee who was drowning in the honey? Other bees came to the rescue and began cleaning off its wings and abdomen and legs until it was no longer stuck.

Our sticky thoughts isolate us; they evolved in our brains in order to protect us from external threats. The irony is that the threats are really from inside of us. We need each other. You need others. You need a community of faith, and we need you. No matter how sticky it gets.

The Rev. Brent A. Newberry is pastor of First Baptist Church in Worcester.

This article originally appeared on Telegram & Gazette: Keep the Faith: Getting trapped by sticky thoughts