The Reverse Carwash

Themes: Rumination, coping skills
Helpful for: Anxiety, stress, OCD, trauma, depression

When struggling with many mental health concerns, individuals often find rumination to be a problem. Rumination involves thinking or dwelling on negative feelings or distress and their causes or consequences. In other words, it happens when we’re stuck thinking about a particular thing or event that occurred. When we’re “stuck”, we’re not moving forward or finding our way out of a situation or helping ourselves. Instead, all of our energy goes to continuing to do the same thing over and over again… and then we wonder why nothing is changing. Rumination of thoughts is what I call a “reverse car wash”. Let me break it down:

Running a Reverse Car Wash

When you work at a car wash, you see a lot more than the average person driving their car through does. Water in a car wash is reprocessed between cars. It cycles down into a pit and that pit has to be cleaned out - but it always houses water. Reprocessed water is disgusting. It smells and unless you add the solvent into it all, it will always be gross. So, one of the jobs of a car wash attendant is to make sure those solvents get added. If you don’t, then the cars going through the car wash are being cleaned by dirty water…. Which means that they’re not getting cleaned at all. Instead, they’re getting a reverse car wash by being covered by dirty water and just getting dirtier than when they arrived.

How to Break the Cycle

You might see where I’m going with this - but if you aren’t cleaning the water in a car wash, you’re just tossing dirty water on a vehicle and saying that it’s clean when it’s not. Rumination is kind of the same thing. If you continue to just toss the same thoughts (aka the dirty water) around a situation instead of looking at it with a new approach (the solvent and clean water), then you’re not going anywhere. You’re just doing the same thing over and over and keeping that car dirty. You’re running what I call a reverse car wash. Nothing is going to change because you’re continuing to pour that dirty water all over the already dirty car. But - there is a way to change this process! We can choose to drive through that car wash and use the dirty water - coming out the same way, if not worse, than we came in. Or, we can find new ways to look at our difficult experiences or thoughts, we can learn new coping skills, and we can work to deconstruct the negative emotions/thoughts/feelings we’ve got. Now you’re working with clean water. New coping skills are the solvent that we need to get clear water. By equipping ourselves with the skills to re-evaluate a situation or break down negative thoughts, those words or situations we’re hung up on won’t hold power anymore. No more running through the reverse car wash. The bottom line is that we can’t expect to use the same experience and have different results. Rumination often occurs because we don’t know how to find a new way of thinking or experiencing the world around us. Through therapy, individuals can learn new coping skills and how to manage the thoughts and moments that trip us up. No more running a reverse car wash!