There are two ways to really hurt someone, both of them target the mind. The first one is violence, for example if you walk on a dark alley and someone puts a gun to your temple, it does so to induce anxiety in order to control your mind to finally get control over your behaviour.
The second way to hurt someone is with lies, if I find the wright words to tell you I can basically make you behave like I would hold a gun to your temple. Words act on the same path as violence does, you first gain control over the mind and after you have control over the mind you can make that person behave in such a way that it is more beneficial for the abuser and detrimental towards the victim.
Words are for the most part harmless expressions of more complex things, they are really just symbols we use to exchange information with each others and ourselves. There is only one circumstance where words are dangerous, it is when they become lyes. A lie it is like being infected by a virus, it will take over your mind and make it serve someone else's agenda instead of yours.
When you control your mind you are lying to yourself, you are not giving yourself the honest information based on your reaction in the moment. Which is a form of self abuse, this is how we internalize external abuse. If you are trapped in a situation where you are going to be constantly abused, it makes sense that if you control your own mind instead of letting other control it, you will receive less abuse from the outside.
Thoughts can be scary sometimes, all kinds of things will go through your mind, without having any concern about morality or ethics. You could be fantasizing about hurting, or taking advantage of someone, just thinking about it doesn't have any negative impact on reality.
The thoughts in your head are like a simulation of reality, not reality itself, thinking about how you want to kill someone it is more like killing someone in a video game rather than actually committing a crime. But there is the concern of someone negative thoughts actually leading to enact them.
The same way people are concern that, violent music, video games or movies instigate people to become violent. Well not really it is pretty clear that in order to enact things that you hear or see in art you need to have a certain type of background, like for example a traumatic childhood.
This is why we have the capacity to self suppress, because we shouldn't act on all our instincts or thoughts. The problem is when people suppress themselves in a way that let other benefit from it.
There is no noticeable benefit i can found from self controlling my mind, as far as my negative thoughts are like clouds on a sunny day, they come and pass, the therapeutic benefit is from knowing your mind not controlling it, control is just another way to say abuse.
A lot of the therapeutic techniques for mental illness, are in fact self suppression techniques. A few years ago when my depression was at it worse, I went and visit a therapist, he sent me home with a worksheet where I was supposed to write down my negative thoughts that supposedly caused my depression and replace them with positive ones.
There was very little effort made to understand cause and effect, or to see if there are other external causes, as depression is a pretty vague symptoms and can be caused by a lot of things including non psychological causes, like a concussion. Sadly this is a pretty common approach to treating symptoms like this.
