Everytime I’m not ruminating, my brain will sometimes tell me “hey, you haven’t been ruminating for a while, good job!” And my brain will keep checking to see whether I’m ruminating or not. How to stop checking if I’m ruminating? Help
I have this same issue. I’ll be chilling and happy and my brain goes “oh snap we haven’t had any thoughts that made us anxious or worry or question in a while…oh wait here they are”. Didn’t know this happened to others!
Happens to me too, feels like an endless loop that’s impossible to get out of!
It’s possible just bringing uncertainty in in regards to the checking might help. Something like, “I’m feeling anxious because idk if I can stop checking, I can’t be 100% I can, I accept the uncertainty and am willing to live with it happily.” Sit with the uncomfortable feelings produced. Over time with practice, I become less anxious about it kind of naturally lose interest for awhile. I hope that helps in some small way!
@Anon. what if my OCD tells me “if you don’t do this compulsion, you will regret about this forever.” The thing is, I only have the regret that I have because of OCD. If I didn’t have OCD, I would never have that regret. So should I do the compulsion which are correlated to the regret to reverse it? Or should I just get tortured everyday by my brain?
Feel guilty for not giving into compulsions like rumination and confessing? I feel guilt for having an intrusive thought, trying to shrug it off or just giving it a few seconds of thought and moving along. This sounds like improvement but I still struggle with the anxiety and the guilt. The shame. I’ll be okay and then I’ll remember I have OCD and my stomach will drop and I just want to curl up and cry.
Two things are happening: I get thoughts that just keep looping. They almost feel like song stuck in my head. Also, I’ll imagine something and I feel my stomach drop. Then as the seconds go by I keep getting fragments of the this thought but with different details. For example, it’s kinda like how a “vision” is portrayed. I’ll get a glimpse of the thought and then it’ll rapidly expand into something worse every few seconds. I don’t know if I’m causing this or if it’s just an automatic thing like any other intrusive thought. It feels unavoidable, idk if this is a compulsion or if it’s just another manifestation of an intrusive thought. Apart from that remembering an intrusive thought triggers the full thought again and then it just keeps looping or expanding. I don’t know how to stop any of this. Help?
OK, this might sound really dumb, but when you guys get intrusive thoughts, do they just come once and then go away? I’ve heard that repeatedly thinking about an intrusive thought is considered ‘checking,’ but it doesn’t feel like I have any control over how many times it comes up in my head. It’s not like I’m trying to check anything—it just keeps showing up, almost like it’s terrorizing me every time. I can’t seem to stop it from looping, stop remembering it, or prevent it from coming up. Every time it does, I feel horrified, and I already know it’s going to horrify me. I don’t think I’m actively trying to see if my feelings have changed, so is this still considered checking? How do other people get an intrusive thought and just move on? Doesn’t it pop up a million times for them too? I always thought that was normal, but now I’m hearing this could be a compulsion, and I feel really confused, scared, and lost. Is this why my OCD feels so extreme? Because I really don’t feel like I can control how many times the thought pops up.
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