You have to understand this one thing: It doesn’t matter if the thoughts are in your head or not.
You have to decide that you are not going to care if the thoughts are in your head or not. Tell yourself, “If the thoughts are there, that’s great! And if they are not there, that’s fine too.”
When the thoughts come, tell yourself, “Hello, intrusive thoughts. You are welcome to stay all day if you want!”
It sounds funny, but this type of attitude trains your brain to realize that the thoughts are no big deal. You have to get to the point where you don’t care if they are there or not. This is very important.
Here’s the other part. You have to let the thoughts run freely through your head without responding to them. You let them be like background music 🎵. It’s like the music can be constantly playing, but you are going to ignore it and go about your life as normal. I am going to paste something below that I have written to many people (which describes how to handle the thoughts):
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Don’t ever fight the thoughts. This is very important for OCD recovery. ERP therapy trains us to never fight the thoughts. If you try to fight them off, they’re just going to get worse. My therapist explained it like this:
Imagine a tree planted by river. The leaves from the tree fall off and float down the river. You watch the leaves fall, but you don’t try to stop them. You just let them float down the river.
This is the same with ALL intrusive thoughts. It doesn’t matter if these are bad thoughts about God, violence, sex, attractions, etc. All intrusive thoughts are the SAME. You just let them fall off the tree and float down the river.
Here’s another analogy: Imagine a swarm of angry bees around someone’s head. The bees can’t really bite or sting, but they are very annoying as they swarm around the person’s head. They’re not really harmful to the person, but they are disturbing just because they are there. This is the same thing as the intrusive thoughts. They can’t really harm anything, and they don’t have any real power. But they are distracting and disturbing because they are there.
If you take a stick and try to fight them off, they’re just going to swarm around even worse and get even stronger. It doesn’t work to try to fight them off with a stick. They will always keep swarming.
In the same way, we can’t fight off the intrusive thoughts. It’s impossible. Besides, the thoughts are meaningless, and they can’t hurt us anyway. So don’t try to fight them off.
Here’s one more analogy: Imagine your little brother is always saying mean things to you. Sometimes he shout means things; sometimes he whispers mean things; sometimes he shows you ugly pictures that he has drawn. He’s always trying to tease you and always trying to get you upset, and he’s always saying horrible things to you.
If you shout at him to stop doing it, he’s just going to do it more. You have to accept that you can’t stop what he says. But if you ignore him and don’t give him any response and don’t get upset , he will eventually get bored and stop trying so hard.
It’s the same with the intrusive thoughts. You can’t stop them. But if you get upset every time they come into your head, you are giving them power. You OCD (like a little brother) is going to feed you more of the things that “rile you up.” But if you don’t get upset and don’t care if these things are coming into your brain, then you can go about your life as normal. In this way, you are showing that these thoughts really have no power over you.
Your OCD will try to trick you into giving “meaning” to the thoughts by saying maybe you “like” them or maybe you really meant them or maybe they real this time—-blah, blah, blah, blah blah blah. Don’t listen to the OCD.
Practice strict ERP no matter how you feel and no matter how the OCD tries to tell you the danger you’re in if you start ignoring the thoughts.
The truth is the thoughts don’t mean anything, so you can ignore them. You can’t make them go away (like the bees), but you can give them no power by acknowledging that they are meaningless
