Does the stop sign technique work to brush off the intrussive thoughts? I have intrussive thoughts when using markers or pens an inmediate rush of fear hits me and it feels like i wrote something very inapproriate, the fear that i wrote and posted something bad on paper or on the internet in comments,, it feels real like it actually happened, the psychiatrist diagnosed me obsessive compulsive disorder , and i started zoloft today

Overleaf is a list used in an important research study by S. Rachman and P. De Silva on OCD, in which ALL kinds of people, NOT just people with OCD, recognized experiencing the following kinds of NORMAL (if not always pleasant) thoughts: 1   Impulse to hurt or harm someone 2   Impulse to say something nasty and damning to someone 3   Thought of harm to, or death of, close friend or family member 4   Thought of acts of violence in sex 5   Impulse to crash car, when driving 6   Thought, ‘Why should they do that? They shouldn’t do that’, in relation to people ‘misbehaving’7   Impulse to attack or strangle cats or kittens 8   Thought, ‘I wish he/she were dead’, with reference to persons close and dear, as well as to other people 9   Thought to harm partner with physical violence 10   Impulse to attack and violently punish someone, for example, to throw a child out of a bus 11   Impulse to engage in certain sexual practices that involve pain to the partner 12   Thought, ‘Did I commit this crime?’, when reading or viewing reports of crime 13   Thought that one might go berserk all of a sudden 14   Thought of wishing and imagining that someone close was hurt or harmed 15   Impulse to violently attack and kill a dog that one loved 16   Thought, ‘These boys when they were young . . .’–i.e. mechanically repeating a particular phrase 17   Impulse to attack or harm someone, especially own son, with bat, knife, or heavy object 18   Thought of unnatural sexual acts 19   Thought of hurting someone by doing something nasty, not physical violence, ‘Would I or would I not do it?’20   Impulse to be rude and say something nasty to people 21   Thought of putting obscene words in print 22   Image of mental picture of stabbing a passer-by 23   Image of mental picture of stripping in church

I'm on 100mg Zoloft and it helped me a lot with compulsions. You can do ERP on your own by actually writing nasty things down on paper (a**hole, etc) and slowly learn that nothing happens from it, you control the text and also accept uncertainty that you can't remember everything you ever noted.

Read this book: "The Complete Guide to Overcoming OCD: (ebook bundle) (Overcoming Books)" by David Veale, Rob Willson.

Do you recheck what you wrote, posted earlier etc. ? That are compulsions. I need to cou t to get over my fears for example.

The writing notes with nasty words is explained in the book btw.

It feels very real sometimes its hard to process mentally what just happened cause the ocd feels like a volcano eruption of immediate stress and fear in my mind and body, at work when i write down with a sharpie on the board on the stand i write down what clients are on property once they arrive and immediately i have thoughts visions they feel very real that i wrote down dangerous threats on paper and i hid it in the drawers and its scary to think about going to work because of this fear that i wrote down dangerous threats behind the board , like i will be writing down clients that are on property and i get immediate fear / mental imagery mental visions that i just wrote down violent dangerous harmful threats behind the board and signed my signature at the end of the threat and when they find it one day i will be fired and sent to prison for it ,, how do i recover from this i almost quit work because of this fear

Exposure and response prevention (ERP) This occurs when a person with OCD repeatedly confronts the situations or activities that he or she has avoided without doing a compulsion (technically called ‘response prevention’ or sometimes ‘ritual prevention) until the anxiety has subsided. This is the cornerstone of psychological treatment and the process of letting the anxiety reduce is known as ‘habituation’. It also helps you to find out whether what you expect to happen does in fact happen and to learn new ways of behaving by acting against the way you feel.

You have to start ERP therapy which you can do on your own. I will get better and you learn to manage your fears. Stay strong!

4   People with OCD are often the safest people in the world. They are driven by a deep moral compass and worry excessively about bad thoughts becoming a reality, but are overtly conscientious, sensitive and worried about harming anyone. He added that he would not think twice about asking me to babysit his kids and he was confident that I would look after them as well, if not better, than anyone else. 5   The physical effects which I experienced whilst having intrusive thoughts were not representative of sexual arousal but came about because of my association of the intrusive thoughts with danger, i.e. my body instinctively reacts as though I am exposed to danger, explaining the excess saliva, constricted throat and hairs standing on end. 6   He said that I needed to ‘get a life’, that I needed to spend less time concentrating on the ‘irrational workings of the mind’and instead pay more attention to the outside world. I needed to refocus on tasks, hobbies or just the smell, touch and sights of the environment around me.

1   Research has found that almost everybody has frequent, disturbing intrusive thoughts; the difference between those who are OCD sufferers and those who are not is that people with OCD attach responsibility to their thoughts so that the moral nature of the thoughts is seen to be a personal reflection on them (a case of ‘thought action fusion’, as it is known). The OCD sufferer therefore attaches meaning to thoughts which a ‘normal’person would treat as passing traffic. He gave a dramatic example of this when he said that at that precise moment he was thinking that he wished his children and his wife would die in a car crash on the way to the cinema tonight. I was amazed, he was completely relaxed, he had absolutely faith that a thought was really just that and that it had no relationship to reality. It resonated with me as I knew that I, of course, placed way too much importance on the content of my thoughts. By the way, as far as I know his kids are fine! 2   People who suffer from disturbing intrusive thoughts tend to have unrelenting moral standards (verging on intolerance) and the content of their thoughts tends to be the complete contradiction of these standards. 3   People with my form of OCD require certainty, i.e. they realize that thoughts don’t necessarily cause actions but they want certainty that their intrusive thoughts would never play out to be correct. OCD sufferers lose a massive amount of energy in searching for this certainty, which simply cannot be found. It remains the case that to the best of his knowledge no convicted child abuser in UK prisons has ever been diagnosed with OCD. Does that mean it might never happen in the future? Of course it doesn’t because the future is inherently uncertain.

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