Monday, June 22, 2009

OCD & Intrusive Thoughts Have No Power

Many people with OCD or other anxiety disorders are victims of Intrusive Thoughts, which are scary thoughts that seemingly pop into the mind randomly, causing intense feelings of fear, anger, or sadness. They always produce extreme discomfort.

The thoughts themselves are bad enough, but is the emotions that they produce that can be disconcerting and damaging. But we are being fooled by our minds- these thoughts have no power unless we allow them power. We become victims of these thoughts because we think that they are messages or omens. Too often, people take these thoughts at face value and believe them unconditionally. That is because we have trained ourselves to do this subconsciously

I believe that our brains, from childhood, create patterns which trigger certain thoughts regularly and automatically. An example of this is once when I was a child I got a new necklace. I put it on and 5 minutes later the phone rang and I heard bad news. From then on every time I attempted to wear the necklace I believed that something bad would happen. It was such a strong thought that I couldn’t wear that necklace anymore. In addition, every time I saw a necklace, I would become afraid, and expect bad news. Now I know my own mind created that pattern, but back then I didn’t realize this and the fear was very strong.

If you can logically look into your minds and see that the patterns of automatic thinking which have been ingrained in you since childhood are causing your Intrusive Thoughts, they will no longer have power over you.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Your blog keeps getting better and better! Your older articles are not as good as newer ones you have a lot more creativity and originality now keep it up!

selvan said...

clearly explained..thanks