This is normal for OCD. In fact, OCD throws the ego-dystonic, disgusting thoughts at people 100% of the time. I know what this feels like. I remember the time when I never had a break.
It's important to know that you don't need to have certain emotions attached to the thoughts. You don't need to manufacture negative emotions when the thoughts come up.
This is a trap of the OCD. The OCD says that if you don't have a negative emotion to go with the thoughts, then you are somehow agreeing with the ego-dystonic thoughts. However, this is not true.
In fact, your response of "ughh, not again," is pretty much what you want. When the thoughts come up, just tell yourself, "oh, here's my intrusive thoughts again. That's fine. Oh well."
And then you can go on to tell your intrusive thoughts, "Hello, intrusive thoughts! You are welcome to stay here all day if you want to."
It's very important to change your relationship with your intrusive thoughts.
Your intrusive thoughts can't hurt you.
Your intrusive thoughts aren't dangerous.
Your intrusive thoughts aren't actually connected to anything real. They are just like wisps of smoke in the mind. They are meaningless, and it doesn't matter if they are there or not.
This is why you don't have to have any special emotion attached to them. In ERP therapy, we learn to just let the thoughts flow freely through our brains. We don't have to feel disgusted by them. In fact, it's better if we just feel numb about them.
My therapist described it to me like this: Imagine a tree planted by a river. The leaves from the tree fall off and float down the river. You don't do anything to stop the leaves. You don't push the leaves back. You just allow them to fall off and float down the river.
We need to do the same thing with the taboo intrusive thoughts. We can see them falling, but we need to ALLOW them to fall freely, and then just float down the river of our minds. We shouldn't try to fight them off. We shouldn't try to stop them. We need to just allow them to float through our brains.
In fact, the more you try to fight off the thoughts, the worse the thoughts are going to get.
In the same way, the more you feel like you have to manufacture negative emotions to match your intrusive thoughts, the worse things are going to get as well.
OCD is an interesting disorder in that you actually recover while you are doing NOTHING.
The OCD is constantly telling us we have to fight off the thoughts, or we have to fix some bad mistake that we did. But in OCD recovery, we learn to stop fighting and stop fixing. Instead, we learn to do nothing about the intrusive thoughts, and you continue going about our lives as normal.
This process is uncomfortable, and takes practice, because we are so used to fighting and fixing. But there is a lot of freedom in ALLOWING the OCD to run wild inside, while you REFUSE TO RESPOND to it.
That is why ERP therapy stands for exposure and "response prevention". Research has shown that ERP is very effective. And one of its main tenants is teaching OCD-suffers how to do nothing with their thoughts.
I highly recommend ERP. Have you ever wanted to try it?
I'm sure right now you have many objections, because OCD is always telling us we can't take steps like this because it is "not safe". But I am here to answer your questions, if you want. I really enjoy talking to people on this app. And I can tell you are really suffering. I'm here if you want to process through your questions. I know that this can take time, and is often a process, but don't be afraid to start that path:):)
