Don’t think about a pink elephant. Don’t do it! Oh, you did. That’s okay, because you all should look up the Pink Elephant experiment done in 1987. It is a fascinating research study on intrusive thoughts and how, when you try hard to get rid of thoughts, feelings, and/or images, they come back even worse than before.

Yes, it was definitely scary. I remember a few months before I started doing ERP and jumping into the recovery process, my therapist tried to give me a little push. He said, “What if you agree with your thoughts? It’ll make them less scary eventually.” I said NOOOOOOPE I can’t, that’s impossible. But a few months later, it was possible. I was accepting thoughts that haunted me for 5 years. Then I realized I made *myself* sick for 5 years by fighting so much. My therapist was with me for 3 of those years (before I started in on recovering) but he knew he could only push so much or else I’d break. He’s very patient and was basically waiting for me to basically hit rock bottom hard enough that I said I wanted to get better. Fighting is futile against OCD. Or a pink elephant 😂