Skip to main content

Intrusive Thoughts and The Emotions They Bring

From my experience with intrusive thoughts, the kind that go against what we value, they can cause so much anxiety, sadness and guilt. You may be feeling depressed because the thoughts that bother you so much are wearing you down. That's what happened to me. I bought into the thoughts and assumed that they had some value about who I am and because of that, buying into them, I'd taken ownership of them and they were no longer chemical reactions but something that I needed to be concerned about, to worry about, to fix. I grasped them so strongly in my hand and wouldn't let go. The ironic truth is that those thoughts are like hot coals that we hold onto. We try to fix them when what we really need to do is let go of them. Why would one purposefully hold onto something that hurts them so much? 

You are giving energy and power to thoughts that occurred in the past and projecting how they may impact you later, the future. All we have is the present, the now. 

OCD thrives and lives in the past and future but can be easily squashed in the present. I ran across the following quote by Eckhart Tolle that sums this up quite well. "Just as the moon has no light of it's own, but can only reflect the light of the sun, so are past and future only pale reflections of the light, power and reality of the eternal present. Their reality is 'borrowed' from the Now."

Being depressed feeds on how we perceive what happened or may not have happened in the past and what may or may not occur in the future. Typically through the lens of a cognitive distortion that makes us feel even worse and distorts our memory of events into monsters that they are not and never were.  

There have been times when an intrusive thought became an OCD obsession that pushed me into a deep depression. For that to happen I bought into the thoughts as real and worthy of my attention and my thinking. We are taught to think in terms of future and past and that our thoughts represent us and our ego; we have to unlearn this to get better because it was a lie in the first place.

Josh



Comments

  1. Hey man, I enjoy your stuff. Is there any way to reach out to you for questions? Thanks!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Awesome! The best to get in touch with me is at ocdhope@live.com.

    Thanks,
    Josh

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

ROCD (Relationship OCD)

Relationship OCD is the term given to obsessions that focus on: fear of getting in a romantic relationship, fear that you are in the wrong relationship, fear that you don't love the person that you are with, fear that having romantic feelings for someone other than your significant other means that there's something wrong with the relationship you are in. By no means is this a complete list of fears but I hope you get the idea. Relationship OCD is something that really bothered me at one time. It still bubbles up from time to time but not with the intensity or frequency that it used to. I remember experiencing a lot of sadness and pain with this obsession. When it first started bothering me, my fiance meant everything to me and I felt so alone and helpless because I had been able to talk to her about what was bothering me. This was so different than other OCD obsessions because I could at least talk to her about them or let her know what was bothering me. With ROCD I felt that

All Obsessions are the Same

The content of an obsession may be more or less fearful depending upon how it brushes up against what you value and/or what you fear. The level of fear you have of the content will result in a graduated experience of anxiety; how intensely and frequently you feel the anxiety. The intensity and frequency of the anxiety that you experience will result in the necessity of performing a compulsion. Mental compulsions are no different than physical compulsions.  How much you identify with emotions and thoughts and therefore how you experience them in your mind and body will be determined with the ownership that you take of the thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations.  How you relate to the thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations will always have a direct result on the intensity and duration of the OCD loop. When you are able to be the impartial observer vs. being and owning the thoughts and emotions then they become something completely different;difficult for the in