Truman show theme and coincidences

@maxowens I completely understand this but the song one is just freaking me out. I’m not even looking for it and he just starts singing it. It’s getting ridiculous.

@Anonymous are you sure this song didn’t play out loud? if not, then we are accepting that a coincidence did happen. there is a vsauce video about coincidences i think could help you. if i remember it correctly, the weirdest things that could happen, is a day where NOTHING weird happens.

@maxowens Yes I’m sure the song didn’t play out loud. The thing that scares me is that it isn’t a coincidence so shouldn’t I sit with that instead, the fear?

@Anonymous well there’s a couple ways to do it that i’ve done. one way could be writing your worst case scenario out on paper. another could be accepting either possibility being true, coincidence or not how often do these thoughts pop up?

@maxowens They pop up a a lot, pretty much all day. I was getting a bit better but this scenario is starting to drag me down again.

@Anonymous okay well if you ruminate on it a lot i think a first good step would be to limit how much you allow yourself to ruminate. when i was at my worst and ruminated all day every day, this was one of those things that really helped me. as an example let’s say you ruminate 50 seperate times an hour. so instead of trying to completely disregard these thoughts, allow yourself to think about it once, and the other 49 times remind yourself you have already thought about this and going over it again would be pointless. you know your answer for this hour, and you can do it again once the next hour, and so on. it helped me get used to allowing thoughts to come and go

@Anonymous once you start to have more control over your rumination and get better at breaking those cycles, you could try sit with the possibility, but that never made much sense to me on how to do it, so i don’t have much tips on that. instead of sitting with that reality you could just accept that you trying to get a binary answer on it isn’t gonna work, and no matter which side you fall on will never feel good enough. so accepting both possibilities instead of one in other words

@maxowens Thanks you for the help, but what do you think would count as ruminating in this specific example?

@Anonymous i think anything where you are constantly thinking into something would be ruminating. ruminating isn’t always bad but in ocd it can be destructive

@Anonymous so thinking normally into something is fine, but when it is having a negative affect on your mental health it’s not

@maxowens Thanks, but sometimes I feel like it’s hard to tell whether or not I’m ruminating or if they’re just intrusive thoughts. Like I’ll get one what if after another, and just try to accept the uncertainty without trying to logic out of it or anything which is what I thought rumination was. When I get these thoughts, they make me uncomfortable so would it even be rumination? Because it thought rumination was a compulsion, which is something that would make you feel better, which when I have these thoughts I feel terrible.

@Anonymous sorry for the late reply, yes even if you do not go into your rumination or cycles, it’s not gonna feel good. atleast at first. but if you are not trying to logic or fight against the thoughts, i would say it’s simply an intrusive thought, not rumination. so if you can continue to fight against that rumination, the intrusive thought itself will become less frequent as your not giving it the power to have a hold on your emotions.

@Anonymous it’s never gonna be like a light switch that flips, i think we all wish it would be lol. it’s just more that the thought can still be around, but you learn how to deal with it. so while it does happen, and frequency of thoughts do go down as you get better, i wouldn’t judge your progress on if they are there at all or not. more so judge it on how it affects you mentally.

@maxowens No worries about the late reply man. Thanks a lot for the help, and ive been doing better since I posted this. Sometimes when I get really triggered it’s very easy to fall back into madness without seeing a way out. I am a lot stronger than I think I am during these times and as soon as I kind of just accept that I genuinely can’t be certain of what’s happening and stop trying to figure it out and find reassurance I start to feel real progress. Thanks again for the tips and I’ll definitely use them.