(March 23, 2018 at 10:57 am)Shell B Wrote:(March 23, 2018 at 10:51 am)The Industrial Atheist Wrote: I read a book about CBT one time. Well I read part of it. But one of the main points was when you tell yourself "Stop thinking about that. Stop thinking about that." it doesn't help because when you tell yourself that, you are necessarily thinking about what you don't want to think about. It's particularly bad when you start feeling guilty about not being able to stop thinking about whatever it is. It's better to accept it and not judge yourself. When you do that, often those thoughts seem to lessen. I've had minimal or no intrusive thoughts for most of my life, but I've found this works well with other thoughts I don't particularly want to have.
But yeah you don't really have control over your thoughts.
It's actually what makes OCD so difficult. You have to learn to just have the thought. The more you try to fight it, the worse it gets.
I may not have experienced the exact same thing, but a few times the intrusive thoughts got bad. It must be very challenging and I can imagine, sometimes painful. You have my sympathies.