There was a film they played in classrooms in the 1970s, back when a narrator could say “the theater of the mind” without flinching. The premise was simple. Your mind is a stage, and whatever you let linger on that stage is what you become. Put the good things up there and rehearse them. Usher the bad ones into the wings.
William James said a harder version of it in 1890, before anyone had a diagnostic category for the thing I am about to describe. “The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will.” He was not promising it was easy. He called attention a faculty, something you have to exercise, and he set it at the root of character because he understood the people who cannot do it do not get to choose who they are.
Here is the take, and it is the uncomfortable one. Toxic is toxic whatever direction it runs. The brain changes from trauma are permanent, and the refusal to let toxicity, positive or negative, run your stage is not a cure. It is the only authority the damage never got around to taking.
What the classroom film left out, because the people who made it had tidy stages, is that some stages dress themselves. Mine does. I have complex PTSD, which is already on the public record, because I have written about where it came from. The origin is not the point here. The operating condition is. The curtain goes up on a scene I did not block, with cast I did not call, and the house lights come up whether or not I am ready.
A memory from 2003 will walk on in 2026 in full costume, original lighting, every line intact. It does not knock. It will not wait for a gap in the conversation, and it has no idea I am in the middle of a good day or a sandwich. It takes the boards and starts performing, and for a second the audience that is me forgets there was ever another show running.
There is a reason the uninvited cast shows up looking exactly as it did the day it was shot. Bessel van der Kolk described it in a 1994 paper in the Harvard Review of Psychiatry, the peer reviewed one, not the 2014 bestseller that borrowed its title and has since drawn fire over authorship and some of its bodily claims. Traumatic memory, he wrote, gets stored as affect states, sensations, and images that are “timeless and unmodified by further experience.” Ordinary memory ages. It gets re-narrated and filed with a date on it. Traumatic memory skips the aging, and the brain reshelves it raw at eye level, so it is always the first thing the hand finds.
That is the machinery. Now the part people get wrong.
Changing the channel is not positive thinking. It is a specific clinical move with a clinical name.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy calls it cognitive defusion, and a 2017 review by Bean, Ong, Lee, and Twohig at Utah State University describes it as weakening “the literality of thoughts” so you see them “for what they are, in lieu of what they say they are.”
The intrusive memory insists it is happening, insists it is now. Defusion is the half second where you answer, that is a thought arriving on schedule in a costume. Just a costume.
You do not argue with it. You do not perform it. You name it as stagecraft and let it finish to an empty house.
My own version is dumber than the clinical language and works better for being dumb. When the scene starts, I drop Wile E. Coyote onto it. Road Runner blows past, the ACME anvil comes down, and the painted desert where my intrusive memory was about to deliver its monologue now has a coyote shaped hole in it. That is the whole technique. An image loud enough and ridiculous enough to interrupt the one that showed up uninvited, held there until the first one loses the room.
It is not a cure, and the research is honest about that. The same ACT reviews that show symptom reduction also show high dropout, because defusion is a practice you run again the next time, and the time after that. James already told us. Over and over again. The faculty is the repetition, not a one time fix.
This is what the refusal actually sounds like, and I mean that literally.
https://open.spotify.com/track/2OjmXOwfH7XG3oBzuv54Dw
Julia Brennan’s “Inner Demons” is a slow piano ballad that opens with the advice to shut out the bad thoughts and then spends the rest of its length admitting how relentless they are. It is not a victory lap. It is a plea not to surrender, sung by someone plainly still in the fight. That is the honest register. Not healed, not fine, still holding the line.
I watched the other outcome up close not long ago. Someone I have known since childhood came to visit. It was a good day, right until it was not. Out of nowhere, mid visit, they reached back twenty some years, pulled a bad memory onto the stage in front of everyone, and set it down in the middle of the room.
I gave them the off-ramp. I said the feeling was real and the thing that caused it was sealed, that the past takes no edits and nothing any of us did now could reach back and change it. The exit was right there. They did not take it. They let the memory run the rest of the day, went back to their hotel, and sulked through what was left of the trip, which ended on a bad taste that did not have to be there.
I am not telling that to convict the person. Their stage dresses itself too, and the cast member that walked on did not ask permission, same as mine. I am telling it because it shows the cost from the outside, which the first person view cannot reach. The authority they declined to use was not only over their own afternoon. It was over mine, and everyone else’s in that room.
Performed damage does not stay contained to the performer. It has a body count, and the bodies are the people who loved you enough to show up.
Here is where the two directions matter, because it would be easy to read all of this as a case for forcing a smile, and it is the opposite of that. Forced brightness is toxic.
The relentless good-vibes act, the gratitude that papers over the wound, the person who will not let anyone say a true dark thing in the room: that is the same failure in nicer clothes. It is a cast member nobody called, only a cheerful one, and it costs the room the same honesty the sulk did.
Toxic is toxic in either direction. Performed misery takes the day hostage. Performed joy takes the truth hostage. Both forfeit the same vote. The only place left to stand is the middle, where you neither stage the damage for an audience nor stage its absence, and you let the real thing be exactly as big as it is and no bigger.
That middle is the authority. The rewiring is permanent. I will not say otherwise, and anyone who tells a trauma survivor they can think their way back to factory settings is selling something. The changes are real. The stage will go on dressing itself. What the damage never managed to take is the vote on what I do once the curtain is up, and that vote is the last thing standing that is entirely mine.
This is also the line between two kinds of writers, which is the only reason a craft publication should care about any of it. There are writers who use their damage and writers who perform it. The first kind put the operating system to work: the threat model, the texture nobody comfortable ever had to learn. The second kind drag the wound on stage and demand the audience watch it bleed, and call the discomfort depth. One is craft. The other is the sulk in the hotel room, with a wider audience.
I would rather use it. The cast still shows up without a call sheet. But I decide what runs.
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