Struggling

Nathan Peterson has a whole online course that I think would help everyone here. Here’s a link, one second

I’ve learned with this type of thing in therapy that you have to accept the thought. The longer you tell yourself stop thinking that or label it weird it’s gonna come up more. Just say that’s an interesting thought. Doesn’t mean anything. Thoughts are thoughts. We have so many a day. We as people with OCD tend to get stuck to certain thoughts. Try leaves on a stream technique it helps me. If it gets in the way of things maybe even exposures with a therapist that can help you envision these thoughts and eventually be able to have them and move on. Because you can’t prevent thinking or seeing something. The way the brain just works you just hear it/see it even more:/ hang in there and don’t be hard on yourself

Don’t close your eyes!!! This is a compulsion. The OCD wants you to close your eyes because it wants us to do socially awkward stuff and make us miserable. OCD is a bully. The only way to defeat it is to IGNORE it. Let OCD throw all the thoughts at you that it wants. Let it say, “Oh, you are a bad person, you saw someone’s privates. You are a monster because you looked!!” Your response should be, “Hmmm, that’s nice. Maybe I am a monster. Maybe I’m not. Oh well. Whatever.” Then you REFUSE to do the compulsion. This means you refuse to shut your eyes. This is what it means to practice exposure therapy: You expose yourself to the trigger (which is a person whose privates your OCD wants to scare you about). And then you refuse to do the compulsion (shut your eyes). You are going to train your brain that it can throw terrible thoughts at you all day, and you just don’t care. (That’s why you can respond with “Maybe I am a bad person, maybe not. I don’t know, whatever.”) Nathan Peterson does an awesome job talking about this. I’ll put a link below.

The more you practice responding to the thoughts with a non-caring response, the more your brain learns that it can’t bother you. Treat the OCD thoughts like a little brother who is pestering you, but will leave you alone if you don’t validate his behavior. Tell the thoughts things like this: “Hmmmm, whatever you say, my thoughts. You are welcome to yell at me all day. Glad you are here today, evil thoughts. Boy, I am glad my OCD showed up today.”

Watch this:):) https://youtu.be/KfN80nk0V6Q?si=7GqmtmUaJXSe9Zux