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How do you start to see each intrusive thought/worry as 'just another OCD thought'?


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I've been doing quite well recently and managed a trip of hundreds of miles up to an Island in Scotland and lots of days out despite having loads of OCD fears about contamination etc. 

At the moment though I'm stuck obsessing that I have let my dog come to harm; which is an obsession I have a lot of the time. I was fixing the stair gate (said dog was eating some food that had got stuck under the gate so I wanted to vacuum underneath it) and a big plastic circular thingy fell off the gate. I then noticed that some of the other cylinders are missing so I've now made the massive jump to worrying that the dog has swallowed one-- that this means she'll develop an intestinal blockage and that this means she has a 50% chance of surviving! I'm also getting intrusive thoughts that I'm a bad person and that I deliberately let this happen. 

The dog does eat things- for example I've just stopped her chewing the skirting board but I'm arguing with my own logic and telling myself that she would have choked audibly if she'd tried to swallow some hard plastic or would have chewed it and spat it out. My mind keeps jumping to imagining her in an operating theatre at the Vets. Yet I should be able to recognize that I've had these thoughts for three years now and that this is just another worry! 

What should I do here? 

I hate jumping from one episode of feeling terrified to another! 

Edited by BelAnna
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 I’m so sorry you’re feeling bad, BelAnna. It sounds like you’ve been having some good times lately, which is great. My advice is always the same, and I struggle to take it myself, but I would say that mindful acceptance of the bad things you might have done and the other bad things that might occur as a result is the first step.  So I’ll just recognize that they’re coming up and get back to whatever you were doing before. I know that when my mind gets fixated on an obsession if I refuse to argue with it or even have a conversation in my head about it, I start to feel better quickly.  Later, if you’re working with a therapist, you can try exposure and response prevention to tackle these fears even more.  Hope this helps! 

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I think the important thing to remember is that you can't be *sure* that your thought is "just another ocd thought".  There is always that doubt, that possibility (even if slim) that the thought could be true.  If there wasn't, we could just dismiss it.

We have to learn to take that risk anyway. To do what feels incredibly reckless and irresponsible but is actually how the rest of the world lives all the time.  To take that risk we are ignoring something real and just get on with our day anyway.

You can't have certainty that it's "just ocd", none of us can.  That's the painful truth about the disorder :( 

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