Does anyone have any tips for how to distinguish between thought suppression and stopping rumination? Struggling with rumination at the moment and trying to respond with "I'm not going to answer that" and not engaging, but feels similar to pushing the thoughts away? Any advice would be much appreciated!
I suffer from this as well. Well some of my thoughts are stubborn and they just dont go away & brings alot of anxiety with it. Some do go away depending on your response. So dont say "Im not going to answer or not engage" If you follow Nathane Peterson on youtube he will advice appropriately as well. Try to live with uncertainity and dont try to engage with those thoughts...it happens automatically but you have to come to realization and say..."oh im ruminating" you will have to do it for a while beacuse your mind is trained otherwise to engage with those thoughts overtime. Idk if this will help
If you suppress a thought through distraction or saying ‘go away’ there is an attitude of not allowing the first thought. Stopping rumination is just ‘I allow that thought, I even hold it, but I won’t think about it any further, I won’t engage, it’s allowed to be here while I go on with my day’ Engaging/ruminating looks like - answering the question, figuring it out, saying how bad that would be in your head, etc.
something like that - ignorance is like "forcing that thought out of mind" what is impossible...and non engagement is like accepting it, but not caring and refocusing on what you done before q thought came
@drak4 Thank you❤️
Thank you❤️
Thank you that is definitely helpful! I definitely need to practice it as at the moment I seem to be ruminating 24/7🙈
Need tips on battling intrusive thoughts.
Thought suppression is detrimental to recovering from ocd correct? Like say if my brain tells me to think of something, and I don’t want to, so I try to prevent the thoughts from entering. But then it does anyways, I end up feeling terrible. Or, even worse- if I just allow it, I feel guilty for allowing it, like I brought it on or didn’t do enough to stop it.
So I’m starting therapy this week but I’ve been trying to use ERP myself, my main compulsion is rumination which I wasn’t even aware was a compulsion. I’m trying to do ERP but when I focus on observing the thought it goes, I dunno if I’m focusing too much on actually how to follow ERP or is this normal? I feel like I might be subconsciously blocking thoughts because I know how bad it is when I go down the rabbit hole, but then I also worry that the anxiety goes too quickly and that I’m finding it too easy to ignore the thought?
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