“Out out out, damn thoughts!” is always my first and overwhelming response to intrusive thoughts.

I wrote about this experience with intrusive thoughts in my book Easy Street: A Story of Redemption From Myself, where I described it as feeling like “I was under assault from within, both the perpetrator and the victim of a mental crime .” The more I tried to make the thoughts stop, the tighter they clung. The trick, I eventually discovered, was not to tighten but to loosen. Not to control but to allow.

And recently, a Dutch word has helped me remember that.

Uitwaaien

I first learned the word uitwaaien on the Dutch episode of my podcast Fifty Words for Snow , which I cohost with Emily John Garcés. Each week, we explore words from around the world that do not have a direct Engl

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