Ramblings and Musings and Wibblings

You've pretty much come up with the central tenets of a book called "How to tame to gremlins". Conversation is good. It's like being your own therapist. A further technique I learned from my own counselling is that sometimes brainweasels are in fact helpers gone bad, and you can recruit them back to being useful. They're *trying* to help you, they're just going about it arse-about-face. So if you can figure out why what they're doing is supposed to be helpful, you can ask them to do something similar that actually *is* helpful. :)