Think I said something out loud about my intrusive thoughts?

[sadtimes]

So for ages i'd been totally over my OCD, not even worrying at all about my obsessions. I've had a few different ones over the past year ranging from slightly bad to oh my god awful.

I was on drugs on saturday night, which I am a lot of the time and never had a problem, when the guy I was with was saying 'what were you just saying about *insert intrusive thought*' and I freaked out...don't remember saying anything about it!

I'm panicking so much, cause this particular intrusive thought is horrific...like so morally disgusting, I dunno what to do. I don't even know what I said about it. I wanna cry it's my biggest fear for it to be said in my sleep or while I'm out of it. I thought I was completely over it I dunno.

[mindful anxiety]

Drugs can make your emotions unpredictable and put you in a vulnerable situation.

I am not going to give you the drugs are bad speech but we have to observe the obvious to get to the not so quite obvious.


This intrusive thought is really sticking with you for some reason. It is very hard to understand how to shake this thought without actually knowing what it has to do with.

There may be a root cause for thinking this thought and you may need to actually deal with the root cause rather than the act itself that your thinking about. Make sense?

I will not pry into personals but there are two ways to shake it. Either face it and move on, or forget it and move on.

Since you cant do the latter it leaves us with facing it. If its morally wrong to do then you need to create some mental thought capsules to store these thoughts in until you forget or are strong enough to put the thought away for good. Yeah - im saying suppress the thought, but in a creative way that tricks your brain. We need to reframe it completely so its unrecognizable to the subconscious. Because consciously you want to forget it, its the subconscious that is determined to remind you.

Your brain will get lazy and give up thinking about it after you do this. Kind of like when you try to understand a long math problem or read a novel. At some point you just cant focus and your brain refuses to care.
If you just try to forget the normal old way your subconscious will keep reminding your conscious. Intrusive thought loop 101 here.


For me, lets say I cant stop thinking about dirt bikes. The harder I try it keeps coming back. If I am watching a move, randomly my subconscious will keep sending thoughts of dirt bikes like constant pings to my conscious.

Ok, so lets reframe the thought a bit and see if it goes away.

I'm going to mentally associate dirt bikes with the letter "A". Every time intrusive thought pops up I will take mental note that im thinking about "A" not the intrusive thought itself. Im going to flood my mind with thoughts of "A".

Your brain is lazy so it will reframe the thought to "A" pretty fast.
Once I start getting pings from my subconscious telling me "A" over and over, I know I have outsmarted myself.

Now its time to take the boring plain old letter "A" and put it away. In a special mental capsule that is thought proof. All that i see when I think about this capsule is a giant steel lock. Now my brain has a capsule with a shiny new lock. This lock is what you want to think about now. Forget the letter "A". Its locked in the capsule.

Hopefully now the shiny lock and capsule will be all you see, and your brain will get bored with it thus forgetting it completely.

I know this sounds crazy or difficult but it works for me. I stole this technique from a book and tailored it to myself.

The first time I really tried this technique I was shocked. A month after doing this the intrusive thought came back out of no where. Except this time it was in the form of a shiny lock.
At that point I realized what happened and dismissed the shiny lock all together.


Word of caution here. Dont associate the thought with something you see everyday, or something that you like. You will surely associate or anchor them together.

With all the above being said its hard to say the best way to deal with this thought without more context. The above is just basic Jedi mind tricks.

[Kmac1286]

I agree with everything mindful said. Your brain has these random, sometimes TERRIBLE thoughts running through it all the time. The other day I was holding a very dear friend's six week old baby girl. Precious baby. I had this thought run through my brain, "What if you dropped her?" followed immediately by "What if you threw her?" I'm not a child abuser. Far from it in fact. I'm an adoptive mom with three children- two of whom I adopted from foster care who were in abusive situations! I have a heart for vulnerable and at risk kids. So yeah, not a dangerous person.

Studies show in fact that people with those dark intrusive thoughts that make you just want to die are more gentle people. You aren't indulging in those thoughts. You aren't ruminating on them. But if you cater to them and think "OH MY GOD! WHAT DID I JUST THINK!? I'M A MONSTER!" Your brain latches onto it, because now it's not just a thought- there's an emotional, endocrine, neurological response attached to that thought. So the brain thinks, "M'k... Guess I should hang on to that one then." It doesn't mean you'll do it. Your emotional repulsion of that thought actually means you WON'T do it, and the more you want that thought to leave, or the worse you feel for having that thought, the longer it lingers.

So you said it out loud. It still doesn't mean that's who you are, or that's how your brain functions normally. Your inhibitions were down. Drugs are bad dude. But a couple of beers could let your guard down too. I won't lecture you on that. You say things you don't mean to when you're under the influence of different meds, alcohol, drugs, or even if you're running on little sleep.

Think of your brain like a Netflix library. Have you ever stumbled into some of those movies low on the list? Some of that stuff is just garbage! At the top you have the Snow Whites and the Forest Gumps of films, and at the bottom you have borderline carnal porn that maybe never made it to theaters. That's your brain too. And those titles just race around in there constantly, grabbing from this corner and that corner, all around. It runs a thought past you, to be accepted or dismissed. If you can train yourself to dismiss it, the intrusive thoughts won't hold as much power.