Ruminations, often perceived as intrusive thoughts, may actually play a key role in our personal understanding. Far from being simple mental parasites, they offer an opportunity to decode our emotions and explore aspects of ourselves that we prefer to ignore.
When the past comes full circle
There are these moments that we would like to rewrite, these words that we would like to recapture. Rehashing is sometimes a way of reliving what we didn’t know how to say or do. But when this mental film repeats itself endlessly, it ends up taking a toll. For Amélie Boukhobza, psychologist, ruminations are not just a simple dysfunction of thought. They deserve to be understood rather than avoided. “It’s true that ruminations are generally seen as parasites, cumbersome thoughts that should be gotten rid of at all costs. And yet… what if they had meaning? What if instead of fighting them, we learned to listen to them?“.
These thoughts that come without warning
They appear without warning: a scene, a hurtful word, a forgotten promise. The ruminations cling, as if the mind refuses to turn the page. And it’s often a sign. “Ruminations never happen by chance. They are often an indicator of an imbalance, of something that is not going well. They come to say that an event is not digested, that a word has remained stuck, that a feeling still demands to be named. As if the brain was clumsily trying to metabolize something that still hurts.”. In these moments, it is not about “thinking too much”, but about listening to what our mind is trying to say.
When ruminations become an internal signal
Some thoughts loop not to punish us, but to help us understand. “Ruminations are also a form of self-scanning: we replay a situation over and over again – not just for the pleasure of suffering, no – but to try to understand what has escaped us. And above all, to try to find a way out of it. What we should – or could – have said, done, avoided. Like a brain desperately trying to regain some control after all.”. Ruminations then become a kind of inner mirror: they reveal what has not yet been accepted.
What if they had something to tell us?
To ruminate is also to have a presentiment. Sometimes, deep within these mental loops, lies a buried intuition. “There is sometimes, in these looping thoughts, an intuition. Something that wasn’t said. A little something we didn’t want to see. An anger that we have contained for too long. So yes, they can become invasive. Exhausting even. But their primary function is not to harm us.”. Listening to his ruminations means agreeing to revisit what is still stuck. “Ultimately, ruminations serve to bring us back to where things are still stuck… so that we can finally make sense of it. Like we go back through an old trauma to overcome it, like we pick up the thread of a story, to be able to write it differently”.