i notice i do this thing were my brain relates to ANY post then links it with “what if i did that? what if i feel that way?” to try to shift some kind of guilt or blame on myself random example: if i see a twitter post about how a person went to jail, my brain would ask “what if you went to jail before?” when i have no memory of it. I try to connect dots to make myself relate in any negative way. another example would be if someone were to say “i dont like my sister” and i would say “what if i dont like MY sister???” when i dont have any problems with her. does anyone please have advice on what to do about this?

i think my obsession is being a bad person, and my compulsion is responding to the thought that i did something wrong to try to reassure myself?

@Duck Bingo! You got it. What could you do to block the compulsion?

@NOCD Advocate - Katie ive been trying to not respond to the thoughts and try to just let it pass through, and sit with the anxiety of it. i also told myself to take a break from social media, because it seems like its were a lot of my negative thoughts stem from

@Duck What have you noticed since doing those things?

@NOCD Advocate - Katie since doing those things ive noticed my brain stopped caring about the other obsessions i had, but its now trying to latch onto something new since ive moved on from the other ones.

@Duck It's clawing to stay in control

@NOCD Advocate - Katie what advice do you have for that?

@Duck Stick to your guns and don't try to find answers to the questions. Response Prevention all the way

@NOCD Advocate - Katie thank you!

@NOCD Advocate - Katie wait, can i ask what response prevention exactly is?

@Duck Of course you can! When you ask questions to understand what someone means, that's active listening and learning :) Response Prevention is when we choose not to do compulsions (the compulsion is the "response" that we "prevent"). This let's our distress rise and fall naturally. It can be intensely uncomfortable, but is a cruciap learning experience. Some of the common things people learn are: -that the distress was not as intense as they anticipated it would be -that the distress faded away on its own -that they can handle more distress than they thought they could -that the consequence they feared didn't happen

@NOCD Advocate - Katie if i actively don’t respond to my thoughts, which im assuming is response prevention, would the obsession eventually go away or fade out? it has in the past for a couple months but then it came up again and i spiraled even harder.

@Duck The thoughts will likely decrease in frequency, but that's not universal. What will happen is that the intensity of emotion you feel when they occur will decrease. They become boring rather than scary