Captive Thought Interactive
Aha, a lightbulb character
What are you hoping to get out of it today?

Your thoughts are not in control of you.
You are in control of them.

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Think of a cluttered garage

A garage full of junk cannot do the one thing it was built for. You cannot park a car in it. Everything in there had a reason once, and now none of it can be reached.

So you drag it all out onto the driveway. In the daylight you can finally see which of it is trash and which of it matters. Then you put back only what belongs.

A mind fills up the same way. This is the driveway.

Get it all out. Then put it in order.

Aha starts by asking what you hope to get out of it today. Then you get your thoughts out, one of two ways. Type them, or take a photo of a page you wrote by hand and each thought comes off the paper as its own card.

If you type, you tap the words that fit how you feel. Aha asks about each word you picked, reads your answers back to you, and asks if there is more. He keeps going until nothing is left.

Then you sort. Every thought is kept or cleared. What you keep is major or minor, gets a rank, and goes into a group you name. You say what each group is about and which one matters most.

At the end you get it all back in order, on one page you can save to Photos or send to somebody.

Why a mind gets slow

Like a computer with RAM memory, a mind is slow and unresponsive when it is cluttered. The defragmentation of a computer removes the clutter and orders the information correctly. Ryan Harrison, 2014

Confusion comes from a word meaning mingled together. Everything running at once, nothing separated out, and no way to tell the size of any one thing. Pulling them apart is the whole trick. Fission is what makes an atom bomb; the same is true of a mind.

Get out of the pit

Captive Thought Interactive started in 2014, built on 2 Corinthians 10:5 — taking every thought captive. There was a board, a thought prison, and the story of Joseph, who was thrown in a pit, then a cell, and read the dreams of the two men locked in there with him. One walked out. One did not.

Some thoughts are worth releasing and promoting. They will build you something. Others mean you harm and belong nowhere near you.

This app is the capture. Getting them out where they can be looked at, which is the part nobody can do for you.

What it will not do

It will not ask who you areNo account, no sign-up, no name, no email. That is the first question a prison or a VA program asks, and that is the answer.
It will not keep what you clearA thought you clear is gone. What you keep is saved as a page on your phone, and nowhere else. Nobody can read it, including us.
It will not grade youNobody is scored or diagnosed for what they say. Naming the thing exactly is the work. Grading it would only make somebody careful about what they name.
It will not read from a listAha asks about the words you picked and reads your own answers back to you. That is how a person gets from “tired” to the thing sitting underneath tired.

The one number that matters

Before you start, you say in your own words what you hope to get out of it. At the end Aha reads that back and asks how close you got.

BeforeYour hopeIn your own words, before anything else
After0–10How close you got to it

Both stay on the phone with the date, next to the page you made.

If somebody is in trouble

It stops, and it puts a person on the screen.

If a thought somebody types or photographs says they want to hurt themselves, everything stops and 988 goes in front of them. The 988 line is on the screen the whole time anyway. That is not what this is for and it is not what it claims to do. It is what you owe somebody who says it out loud.

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