Therapy.

[peacealways]

I had my first therapy session today. About my intrusive thoughts. Does it sometimes feel like you like your thoughts or is that apart of them seeming real ? I'm scared. I feel like I'm scared I like them so my voice and thoughts tel me that I do. I don't know. Someone please help.

[MyNameIsTerry]

Yes, I can relate to this.

I have Magical Thinking as one of my forms of OCD and I frequently have images of family members when touching certain objects and feel that something bad will happen, maybe they will be hurt or die, if I don't cancel it out. Now on some occasions I have also had a strange feeling of liking this happening.

Others on here talkling about intrusive sexual thoughts have raised the same concerns so you are not alone in feeling that.

As you said on your other thread, you have no intention and have no desire to act on them. Remember that!

I wonder if its a feeling of stimulation that is somehow triggered hence the conscious mind sees it as 'liking' because of how it interprets such sensations. There are some on here who have mentioned how they feel compulsions to masturbate to these sexual thoughts which they do whilst feeling tremendous guilt & upset. So, perhaps its an automatic triggering of something like a sensation that feeds the compulsion?

OCD and anxiety disorders afterall are all about retraining the subconscious to see this as normal so that it keeps the behaviour going. If you react emotionally, it further reinforces this as the areas of the subconscious that store these behaviours look for emotional response and build their neural pathways based on it and link the two. On this basis, it could look for arousal and store it to be repeated again later so it becomes part of the OCD cycle.

[peacealways]

Thank you so much. I'm just a mess. I'm going to be seeing a psychiatrist to be put on medicine. I just want this all to go away. I know I don't like seeing the things I'm seeing..it's the excessive doubt that hurts and the loud voices that aren't mine. I just have to let go of the emotional responses even though it's hard to because the doubt feels so real.

[MyNameIsTerry]

Have a look at Mindfulness because it will help you with this. Also ask your therapist about this because they often tend to recommend it anyway so they may have some free resources for you.

Mindfulness is combined with CBT thesedays. Jon Kabat-Zinn has MBSR in the US and in the UK we have Professor Mark Williams from Oxford University (where Ruby Wax trained as a therapist) who co created MBCT. There are books on there on this and Mark Williams has a resource website for his book 'Finding peace in a frantic world' which is a really good book. He posts all his meditations from the book on that website except for a couple that were paper based. You could try them but I would also suggest reading the book as its very easy in explaining a lot of these things and Mindfulness itself.

Mindfulness should help reduce these thoughts and your reaction to them but it can also be used as a method of inspecting problem issues. I recently read an excellent article on Sensorimotor OCD (obsessions with body functions e.g. swallowing, breathing, blinking, etc) and due to its nature of these constant bodily actions it makes change hard. They were advising using Mindfulness by bringing in the obsessive bodily action so that you could change how you view it. I mention this because if you learn Mindfulness, maybe you could apply it as the thoughts come through?