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No matter what the thoughts return again & again


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I know I sound like a broken record but every time a certain thought is gone or not bothering me much for awhile it ALWAYS pops back up out of nowhere to return. I'm dealing with the same thought for like a year & a half now or so. What if even not doing compulsions brings it to the forefront to bother me anyway. Like what if the thought just popping up itself bothers me. 

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Guaranteed the thought is coming back because you keep doing compulsions. It's not the thought that matters; it's that you react to it badly.

Have you ever reached out for help besides here? Gone to see your doctor? Asked about CBT?

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21 hours ago, NJ321 said:

I'm dealing with the same thought for like a year & a half now or so. Like what if the thought just popping up itself bothers me. 

Why are you 'dealing with' the thought at all? What you're aiming for is to ignore it, to let it come and go at will and not give it any meaning or credence. 'Dealing with it' suggests you're doing compulsions to negate it, counter it, prove it false etc. You're latching onto it and giving it an importance it doesn't deserve. So little wonder it keeps coming back.

Thoughts are just thoughts. They don't mean anything by themselves. We put meaning onto them when we pay attention to them. As long as you continue to fear the thought popping up then the thought is likely to return over and over. 

Shrug your shoulders at it and it will no longer bother you. 

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You need to think of it as literally being "just a thought". You shouldn't be "dealing with it" at all, but instead you should be paying it no more attention than if for example you noticed that there was a rock on the ground in front of you - you would think "oh there's a rock" and get on with your day. You wouldn't walk up to the rock and be like "right rock! I'm going to deal with you now!" and proceed to get all worked up about there being a rock in front of you, and stand in front of it staring at it for 12 hours before you could do anything else.

Bit of a silly analogy I know but I think the meaning comes across. This is how we should be dealing with those thoughts that pop into our heads.

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The name of the game is to leave intrusions be - they can only cause a problem if we give them belief, connect with them, allow ourself to worry why we have them. 

Each time we do that, the thoughts get stronger. 

If we leave them be without giving any belief to them or connecting in any way with them, they die of inattention. 

And, when they have been seen through CBT to be OCD and rendered benign, we can respond to them as a non-OCD person would - simply observe them then allow them to resolve away. 

My wonderful therapist told me to consider intrusions in the same way that I see things. A non-OCD person sees them in his field of focus, then lets them slip into peripheral vision, then away. 

In OCD intrusions stick in our field of focus, don't move into the peripheral or resolve away. And when they do go peripheral, they can slip back into focus when a trigger thought occurs. 

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