Replaying

For me the only way to stop ruminating (with varying success) is to decide with conviction that even if there is more information to be gathered/ understood about a moment, I am deciding that moving forward without paying attention to it is more important. For instance, thinking about how someone interpreted what I said used to burden me so much it became hard to function and I just withdrew from speaking as much as I could to avoid being misunderstood. I don’t know if this is a common saying but I had to force myself to comply with the ideal that “everything works out in the wash” in the end.

Ohhhh, that’s OCD. I get stuck on a thought like that. I can’t let it go. Interesting. I think part of letting things go is having compassion for ourselves. Because I was just feeling annoyed that I have another thing to figure out, annoyed that I have these thought patterns in the first place. I listened to a podcast today (11 Things I Tell My Patients in Their First Session of OCD Treatment Ер. 378 — Your Anxiety Toolkit) and she said, “There’s no such thing as bad thoughts.” I think it would be helpful to not judge ourselves so harshly. Why are you (why am I) replaying those bad moments? What are we trying to figure out? It seems like learning to sit with the discomfort and not ruminating is key. Not exactly sure how to do that… But I really did appreciate this post because I definitely do that too and didn’t realize it was an OCD thing. More insight…thank you. I have read things that say we can just choose to not ruminate but that’s proven hard for me. I can distract myself, but it just comes back. I’m missing something… if you figure it out, let me know.

I think it’s also if you have the choice to be present in the moment or think about the thing, you choose to be present in the moment instead. For example, I could watch Jimmy Fallon or ruminate on something my friend said to me. I choose Jimmy Fallon, even though my compulsion is to ruminate.