Are any of your intrusive thoughts just constant? Like I’m latched on to the sucididal ocd and every time I do something to distract myself or continue working it’s always just lingering there 🥺
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@bekind94 Yes a ever lasting headache that I’ve had for a week
Yes. And if I feel a moment of relief, they come back harder and feel more real.
@Catlove9 I feel that cause when I feel normal for a slight second I get more anxious on why they stopped
@secretlyobsessed2012 Yup. And then I feel guilty because I question “why do I even have them in the first place.” And then the cycle starts again.
This is where the sitting with those thoughts, using an ERP message, and sitting with the (sometimes truly awful) feelings that those intrusive thoughts bring about comes in to play. It is the hardest thing to do, and it is the most necessary thing to do in order to shut those thoughts up. The thoughts make you anxious. You have to ride out that anxiety. Then those thoughts chill for a bit. Then they come back. You sit with them and ride out the anxiety again. Those thoughts chill for a second time. They’ll probably hover in the background each time, but they won’t be as loud each successive time you sit through/with the anxiety. You have to do this over and over until at some pint you realize “oh, I haven’t thought about X for a while!” Then you’ll probably get anxious and the thoughts will come back for a bit (it’s at this point I usually feel like I’m doing something”wrong” by not worrying about such “important things”, but then I have to ride out that additional anxiety as well) and you have to ride things out again. And eventually those thoughts kind of die off or at least aren’t as distressing. Over and over and over again. It’s exhausting, yet it’s critical. You do it enough times and it becomes more habitual. For example, I woke up in a fright this morning just thinking about current events. It’s been a simmering anxiety all day. But when I take the time to sit with and acknowledge my core fear - that I might not be able to get to my child if she needs me- eventually I calm down enough to carry on for a while. I’ve had to stop what I’ve been doing and do this sit in anxiety/work my ERP message (“I might not be able to get to my kid if things go south”) several times today. Each time, I eventually end up calmer than the time before. It sucks. I HATE thinking these thoughts. But I have to. Otherwise I won’t be able to function. I’ll get to the end of the day, curled up in a ball on the couch stuck in “freeze” mode from fight/flight/freeze because I’ll be so scared. So I sit and work my message and wait out the worst of the fear before moving in with my day. TL;DR you HAVE to do ERP to get the thoughts to shut up, and it sucks. But you can do it! 💪
Yes I have them 24-7 no matter what I’m doing, and it freaks me out because I worry ocd thoughts are not meant to be constant but more coming and going. I don’t know, but the thoughts seem impossible to shake off x
@Lizzie Yes !
@Lizzie What kind of thoughts are they
Starting in high school, I became very suicidal, and it became my “safety net” of all went wrong. I know it’s dark, but I was in a really bad head space and I saw suicide as my escape if I couldn’t fix my life. It got to the point where I was constantly thinking about suicide (literally every day, multiple times a day). Over the last year, I’ve gotten better and I think about it less. But then my OCD grabbed hold of it…. Now, if I do something wrong or embarrassing or if I struggle in a social situation (which is often 😅), my mind says “kys”, “jump off a bridge”, and so on. It’s like an automatic response with my OCD and it makes me so uncomfortable… I’m trying to get better. I don’t want to die. Sure, I still get pretty low, but I always push the thoughts away now instead of welcoming them like I used to. But with the intrusive thoughts being nearly constant now, it’s kind of scary. I dont know what to do to make them stop since the intrusive thoughts are just so automatic at the slightest feeling of discomfort. I have a therapist, but I dont know how to bring this up with her. I’m too nervous to even admit to suicidal thoughts, not to mention the intrusive thoughts they’ve turned into. It kind of feels like it’ll never go away.
So with my theme of ocd, ( hocd ) I get persistent intrusive images, and thoughts. It’s not like one or two a day. Like if I’m out for the whole day they’re constant. I feel I can’t even look at a girl now without her intrusive thoughts about her or about me fancying her and even sexual intrusive thoughts.. It’s awful. It’s everywhere I look. Is this common with ocd with any themes? Like is it constant for you guys too?
Any one else deal with this? Like from the moment they wake up to the second they fall asleep, the intrusive thoughts are there?
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