So I feel really guilty about something. I don’t if I felt something from this thought but it’s scaring me. I feel confused. Idk if the medicine is helping with anxiety but it keeping me in control. I cried once yesterday and haven’t done compulsions for the last 3 days. Can’t jinx it. I’m just trying to stay strong. I hope this thought I had and feeling I got was just my ocd.

It’s just hard because people say ignoring it makes it worse so I try to accept the uncertainty but it’s scary

@TrinnyTrin Yeah you have to find a line between ignoring it and obsessing over it, where you let the thoughts be there but do nothing about them, don't try to solve them, etc. Analysing yourself to look for evidence is a compulsion but I understand it can seem like it happens automatically. Try to let OCD tell you whatever it wants. Instead of hoping it's wrong and just OCD, try to entertain the idea that it could be true (which will make you v anxious), without letting yourself start to debate it or get sucked in. Just "yep, might be true", without judging that thought and taking deep, slow breaths. Just let the thought and the anxiety be in your body, you can even focus on the parts of your body where you feel the anxiety. Don't engage with any thoughts you get or health worries etc, just breathe and let the anxiety be there. That's how you process a difficult emotion. Feelings are never wrong. Theyre just feelings. They don't have to hurt you and they don't have to be an indicator of what is true. If you can sit and breathe and let it be there and notice how it feels and not ruminate, eventually it DOES go away. Completely. I've done it hundreds of times before and once it's gone it feels REALLY good and the thought becomes much less of a scary trigger. Sometimes it can take as much as an hour for me to fully digest all the anxiety from a thought and be left with calm. The simple fact is that your brain and body can't hold onto one emotion forever. If you let yourself feel it all bit by bit and you can just be strong and sit with it and notice it in your body without wishing it wasn't there and without fighting it, you find the sensation actually isn't so bad. It's just combinations of physical feelings, and you're easily strong enough to be a little bit physically uncomfortable for a while. If you can do this, I promise you good things will result from it.

@TrinnyTrin By processing it this way consistently, over time the thought and concepts in it are no longer able to give you a bad emotional reaction. You just feel it until it ebbs away. This is how we ERP! It feels so freeing.

@Louw Thank you so much. I’ll try this

@TrinnyTrin A great guide book for doing it is Letting Go by David R Hawkins. I dealt with a whole massive backlog of repressed and avoided emotions from trauma using that book. It was scary but it felt great.