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Thread: Challenging your thoughts

  1. #1
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    Challenging your thoughts

    Is anyone else scared of admitting and challenging your worrying thoughts, incase doing so will trigger something bad to happen? Like imagining it's effecting something bigger or whatever? I started writing my troubling thoughts down, and ended up writing 'feeling that admitting and challenging your thoughts wont work!", and it felt so weird, like I was scared to write it, if you get me. Always expecting something to go wrong, I felt kinda guilty challenging my negative thoughts.

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    Hi Alex

    I should think everyone here knows exactly what you mean. I have spent most of my life not facing up to things and thinking I know what other people are thinking and saying. I have been given the task by my psychotheralpist of having a worry half hour each day. I have to set a time and be alone not disturbed by anything. Then I have to concentrate on all the things that worry me. But at the end of half an hour i have to stop worrying and not start until the next worry session. I have found this very hard. I have had 3 weeks to try it and have only done 2 sessions. I am afraid if I let the worries surface they will take over and I will not be able to stop them. I know this is not the case cos after the 2 sessions I have been fine, but I am still scared. I feel comfortable with the way I have buried my head in the sand and am scared to face my thoughts. My therapist is very good though and I am sure with her support I will be able to see how worry is sooo destructive when it is in control. Hopefully you are having support from someone to help you face your thoughts! I wish you well in your journey,
    TC xxxx
    sorry if i have rambled on a bit.

    "Be the change you want to see in the world." GHANDI

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    Hey,

    I know what you mean. I seem to know whats going on but when I try to write it down I sort of come to a dead end. I dont know if it's because I'm scared of what I'm going to write but sometimes I know things seem so massive and so scary that it's hard to break it down into something concise that you can write down. You never know where to start! Don't feel guilty challenging the thoughts though, they are what's holding you back after all. My advice would be to try and break them down as simply as you can to give you a starting point. xxx

    *I think, therefore I am.*

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    Thanks for the replies. After writing some of my fears down, I do feel a bit better, but there is still the nagging doubt in my mind that something is not 'right'. IE - I could be at the centre of the universe and not realise. In a way I guess that is exactly what OCD is about, and just something that I will have to accept and move on with.

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    <b id="quote">quote:</b id="quote"><table border="0" id="quote"><tr id="quote"><td class="quote" id="quote">Is anyone else scared of admitting and challenging your worrying thoughts, incase doing so will trigger something bad to happen? Like imagining it's effecting something bigger or whatever? I started writing my troubling thoughts down, and ended up writing 'feeling that admitting and challenging your thoughts wont work!", and it felt so weird, like I was scared to write it, if you get me. Always expecting something to go wrong, I felt kinda guilty challenging my negative thoughts.

    <div align="right">Originally posted by Alexocelix - 10 December 2006 : 19:23:06</div id="right">
    </td id="quote"></tr id="quote"></table id="quote">
    I don't challenge the thoughts, and that is the only thing that has given me any relief. I tried the writing it down tecnhnique, but I just started worrying that I hadn't written anything down, and it meant paying too much attention to the thought as well. The writing down technique became an obsession in itself.
    Before I started using CBT, I would obsess over horrible thoughts for ages. I don't now, I have fleeting thoughts and I let them sit there. Allowing them to be there and not attemtping to justify, reason or convince myself that dreadful thoughts need to be addressed. They don't. We try to control our thoughts, and that is the root cause of all the anxiety - the reaction to them. Try as you might you will never be able to block thoughts of any kind from your mind. You CAN though control your reaction. I had horrible thoughts of 'what if I harm someone' - and I used to try and convince myself that I would never do that, I was a good person etc etc etc - no matter how much I challenged it, I always found a thread of doubt.
    The classic example is the instruction - DON'T picture a giraffe - you're already picturing it, eh.
    It's not the thought, it's the reaction that matters, the secondary thoughts. It took me a bit of time to get comfortable with it, I just wanted a quick fix and there isn't one. It takes time and effort, and the effort needs to come from ourselves.

    Nel xxx

    ___________________________________________
    "At the end of a storm, there's a golden sky..."

  6. #6
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    I dunno, I guess maybe this idea is better suited to working on depression rather than OCD type thoughts. Sometimes its hard to differentiate.

  7. #7
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    <b id="quote">quote:</b id="quote"><table border="0" id="quote"><tr id="quote"><td class="quote" id="quote">I dunno, I guess maybe this idea is better suited to working on depression rather than OCD type thoughts. Sometimes its hard to differentiate.

    <div align="right">Originally posted by Alexocelix - 11 December 2006 : 16:47:30</div id="right">
    </td id="quote"></tr id="quote"></table id="quote">
    Well I DID write some 'evidence for and against' stuff down, for the likes of 'I'm scared being alone' or 'what if my anxiety gets worse'. I never wrote down the OCD thoughts though. My most distressing obsessive thoughts (I won't go into details as I don't want to have you obsessing) invovled harming people I loved, I never EVER wrote down evidence for and against those type thoughts - as I say, you'll always find a thread of doubt. I used the method in my previous post for those thoughts. I never found it difficult to differentiate between the thoughts, and my therapist did say that was vital.

    Nel xxx

    ___________________________________________
    "At the end of a storm, there's a golden sky..."

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