I can’t tell the difference between an intrusive thought and my own opinion anymore.

Do you guys want to talk about it?

@GJ7 How do you know it’s ocd?

@nmorrow27 Because it causes stress and anxiety and you don’t like the thoughts

@GJ7 So my thoughts would never cause stress and anxiety?

@nmorrow27 Are your thoughts repetitive and you can’t control them? Then it’s ocd.

Can you elaborate more on the false belief? Like how can one be ok with a false belief and how hard was it to change it with cbt?

@nmorrow27 @nmorrow27 It was so much less awful than the first false belief, and I had been doing a lot of work on self compassion. The first one was... More easily identified as not true, after doing ERP for it. The second one was a big more niggly, it had roots in a lot of places and I didn't have the energy to decide to fight it with ERP. It honestly was easier at that point for me to accept that it was true and just live my life through a philosophy of compassion. Embarrassingly, whilst for the first thought I claimed I'd done stuff I hadn't just out of sheer distress without fully believing it (constant OCD guilt and debate), with this second version of it I believed it and so I took sincere accountability for stuff I hadn't done. I suppose I'm lucky it was pretty much met with grace and understanding lol. I was able to be ok with it because I had gone "ok, if I did this lesser stuff then I must've been in a lot of pain", and I went back and thought about the state of mind I was in at the time, so with self compassion it was like... To understand is to forgive. I felt that I understood. I felt compassion for my past self who I believed had caused harm out of negligence and perhaps caused other harm through conscious choices and forgotten it. Yes, I know, clearly OCD. These days I know that I made small mistakes (talking about someone in a bad light even though I felt guilty and thus like a liar by doing so) but that the "harm from negligence" stuff wasn't my responsibility, and that I didn't do shit and forget it. So yeah with CBT and self compassion as well as finally sharing my story at that point, changing the beliefs wasn't difficult, it happened naturally. Things really do happen mentally in a much more normal way once you're not suffering with OCD about it anymore.

@Louw Thank you so much for replying, I feel so much less alone.

@nmorrow27 I'm so glad! I honestly originally thought nobody had a story anything like mine, especially the false confessing stuff and just all the guilt, but I've seen some kinda similar things on this app. It's been very validating and I feel quite safe here.