🧠 When Being Inside Your Own Head Is Like Getting Stuck Behind Enemy Lines...

Part 1: How suffering isn’t from life... it’s from believing your own mental propaganda. Written by Fred Ferguson - GeezerWise #Un-Learn

Some days, it can feel like you’ve woken up in a war zone

But the bullets?
They’re just thoughts.
And the enemy?
Well… he’s me.

If you’ve ever been trapped in your own mind, stuck replaying regrets, fears, worst-case scenarios, or self-loathing rants on loop — then you know what it’s like to be behind enemy lines without an exit strategy.

What Joseph Nguyen calls “thinking” isn’t just brain activity — it’s combat.

“We don’t live in the world. We live in our thinking about the world.”
— Don’t Believe Everything You Think

Most people never escape.
Not because the trap is real…
But because they never stop believing the thoughts that built the prison.

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🎯 The Real Enemy: The Second Arrow

Here’s the raw deal. Something bad happens — that’s the first arrow.
Painful. Sure. Unavoidable? Often.

But what happens next?

We fire a second arrow:

• I should’ve seen it coming.

• This always happens to me.

• What’s wrong with me?

• I’ll never fix this.

That second arrow is optional.
That’s the one that turns pain into prolonged suffering.
And we’re the ones pulling the trigger.

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🧠 Thought vs. Thinking: Know the Difference or Stay Stuck

Joseph Nguyen drops a truth bomb that ought to be printed on every damn coffee mug:

“We can only ever feel what we’re thinking.”

Think about that.

It’s not the divorce, the diagnosis, the job, or the jackass who cut you off that’s wrecking your peace.
It’s what your brain does with it after the fact.

Nguyen draws a line in the sand:

• Thoughts are raw — they just show up.

• Thinking is when we take those thoughts and build bunkers, booby traps, and entire doomsday scenarios out of them.

You don’t suffer because a thought showed up.
You suffer because you built a story around it and called it truth.

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🪖 The Mind as a Battlefield

Let’s get blunt.

If your mind was a battlefield, and your thoughts were enemy propaganda, how much of it would you believe?

Because let’s be honest — we believe some wild stuff when we’re in our heads:

• “I’ll always be this way.”

• “It’s too late for me.”

• “Everyone else has it figured out.”

None of it holds up in daylight. But inside your skull at 2:13 AM? Feels like gospel.

That’s the trick of the enemy.
He doesn’t need to defeat you — just convince you to surrender.

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🧘‍♂️ So How Do You Escape?

Nguyen says it straight:

“The moment we stop thinking is when our happiness begins.”

You don’t need to fight the thoughts.
You just need to stop feeding them.

Let the dirty water settle.
Let the noise pass through.
Let the empty boat bump into yours and don’t pick a fight with the wind.

The thoughts aren’t you.
They’re just weather.

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💣 Final Truth Bomb

You’re not broken.
You’re just believing your own mental propaganda.

You don’t need a better life.
You need a clearer mind.

Peace isn’t earned.
It’s remembered.

And the moment you stop thinking about how to find it?

You’re already there.