- Date posted
- 4y ago
- Date posted
- 4y ago
You might live with the thought forever, but you might not live with the *feeling* Remember, intrusive thoughts are normal and everyone gets them. OCD is an anxiety disorder, not a delusional disorder. Our problem is that we have a strong and persistent fearful reaction to our intrusive thoughts. The *feeling* is what makes the thought grow into an obsession, which in turn intensifies the feeling. The point of therapeutic intervention isn’t to control our thoughts, which I’m pretty sure is impossible anyway. It’s to ease the anxiety. Our emotional being need to be trained to witness an intrusive thought, say “yikes,” and move on with our lives.
- Date posted
- 4y ago
We focus on the “content” of intrusive thoughts, when we should really be focusing on the way we process the thoughts. Those thoughts scare us and activate the flight, fight or freeze response in our bodies. We react by doing some type of compulsive behavior to get relief. So, it’s not the “content” of your thoughts that mean anything at all but how you process and react to them. If you process them as true thoughts and spend energy on the reactions, you will perpetuate the vicious cycle of OCD.
- Date posted
- 4y ago
I have this exact same feeling. Lime even when I start to feel a little bit ok, that doubt and anxiety is still there and I sit depressed thinking I cant change anything that I've done and if anyone knew the real me but like you say we just have to accept it.
- Date posted
- 4y ago
I feel like it's so unfair!!! I told him that I don't want to feel like this for the rest of my life... I know that, once I accept it, I'm more likely to move on and will not have the thought for the rest of my life, but this wouldn't be accepting to have the thought...
Related posts
- Date posted
- 24w ago
I am wanting to go to therapy to hopefully lower my OCD symptoms but I am terrified to tell anyone else, like a therapist, about my intrusive thoughts. Has anyone else had this experience and if so how did you get over it?
- Date posted
- 23w ago
my therapist suggested that some of my less bad rocd intrusive thoughts are actually mine, and not intrusive. She ended up taking it back when she saw the alarm on my face and saw how panicked I got. I feel really freaking anxious. We were only talking about it because I mentioned a lot of doubt surrounding those less bad ones, but it only filled me with more doubt. I don’t want those thoughts to be mine. I really don’t. I feel scared and so discouraged after this session. I feel scared about the worst thoughts, what if those aren’t intrusive. I feel so much doubt.
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- Date posted
- 13w ago
So, I know my capacity to get fixated on things. And it's normally something that's relatively remote but, my latest issue is really getting to me and I was wondering if people have any advice. I'm avoiding getting too into specifics, as I don't want this to get reassurance-y but, in essence.. I came to the realisation recently that people who I'd been "friends" (feels like the wrong term now) when I was younger were not very nice people, and normalized a lot of very unpleasant behaviour towards other members of the group. They really normalized it, sold themselves as figures of authority, as older and more responsible and grown-up than others, and looking back, they acted horribly. And coming to this realisation, that I'd been manipulated into just accepting their behaviour has just... broken me. My OCD has latched onto it and I can't stop feeling irreversibly tainted by it. I've talked to others about it, and they've reassured me, told me it's not a big deal and that I hold myself to too high a standard, but none of that sticks. I feel better for a bit, then think 'Maybe when you told them you were skewing it to make yourself look better' or 'Did you leave out a crucial detail'. I keep ruminating over and over, trying to remember exactly how everything played out, trying to figure out if I fed into the behaviour, if I did something bad myself (because y'know, I feel like I was accepting of it at the time, so what does it say about my own values?). I know I need to stop doing all this if I want to improve, but then some part of me keeps saying 'So, you're just going to let yourself off the hook then?' Normally, I can rationalize my own fears to some degree, assure myself something won't happen, but the realness of the situation, and the fact I only came to understand the reality of it because the thought had been bothering me means it feels so much more all-encompassing. I know confessing in itself is a compulsion, but I keep feeling that if I'm not I'm somehow concealing what I 'really am' from others around me, and any positive interactions are me deceiving them in some way. I feel like I can't enjoy anything in life right now, and a good part of me feels I should not enjoy it ever again. If anybody has any advice on it, I'm all ears. Or even hearing if you relate to these feelings, I might appreciate the solidarity at least.
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