Danielle Thornton, an anxiety and OCD recovery coach, explains intrusive thoughts: unwanted, often disturbing thoughts that anyone can have. People with OCD obsess over them and perform compulsions in response, while others let them pass. Recovery uses exposure and response prevention, plus ACT and mindfulness.
Foreign.
Welcome back. My name is Danielle Thornton. I'm an anxiety and OCD recovery coach who has recovered from OCD and has been helping others do the same since 2018. So today I want to talk about intrusive thoughts. And intrusive thoughts are thoughts that you get that are unwanted and somewhat disturbing. Now, you can get intrusive thoughts if you don't have ocd, too. But intrusive thoughts are one of the basis for ocd. And when we get these thoughts, they can be very, very disturbing. And what happens is we then tend to obsess about these thoughts. We latch onto the thought, we hook in, we believe it, and we feel like we have to do something about it. That is the compulsion now at the beginning of getting ocd, and then if you're also going untreated, intrusive thoughts can be very disturbing. They can feel very real through the recovery process. When you're getting the right recovery tips and help, which is exposure and response prevention at the foundation, there are some other things that I teach, but ERP is crucial. Through the recovery process, these thoughts aren't going to feel as intrusive. If you're doing the right recovery skills, the anxiety is going to reduce with the thoughts over time, so the anxiety can turn into just discomfort, and that discomfort can reduce into kind of a numbness. So the feelings with intrusive thoughts is not always anxiety. Sometimes the feelings don't even really feel like they're there. So when OCD wants to pop up back in my life, which is pretty rare, but when it does it, I don't feel like I get intrusive thoughts. I don't even feel like the thoughts cause discomfort. It's just that my mind might want to hyper focus on something that isn't perfect. It's thundering outside. Or my mind will want to kind of obsess about something, right? So it doesn't feel uncomfortable anymore. And that's what it feels like with the recovery process, usually as you're getting treated, but sometimes when you're not. But essentially, we're talking about negative thoughts that we don't want to be having or that we latch onto or obsess. We have a hard time of letting these go. Okay. So regardless of the feeling that comes with the thought, we're still talking about thoughts that we're obsessing about and then doing compulsions.
Now, sometimes you might notice intrusive images that pop in your head. Okay. These are still kind of thoughts, but it feels like an intrusive image. Sometimes you Might get intrusive feelings. Essentially, there is a thought that precedes the feeling. Our feelings are created by our thoughts, but some people aren't quite aware of what their thoughts are. Some of us are more conscious of them than others. So it can come in the form of a thought, a feeling, an image. There are all different ways that our brain can try to get our attention. Okay, but the most important thing to know is what do we do with intrusive thoughts? Okay, now, it's important to remember intrusive thoughts are actually quite common. Let me use the example of that almost everybody has had. You're driving over a bridge, right? And you think, what if I just drove off the bridge? What would that be like? Right? And most of us think, oh, that was a weird thought. And they keep driving and they don't give it any more attention. Okay? This is an example of an intrusive thought somebody without OCD would get or what they would do with that intrusive thought. Somebody with OCD is going to be like, why did I think that? They're going to feel a level of anxiety with it, and they're going to start to really latch onto it and analyze it and obsess about it. And what if I actually do it? Right? So it's not that we're trying to completely get rid of intrusive thoughts, because weird, strange, negative thoughts are part of life. What we're trying to do is reduce them down to a normal level and not react to them, not participate in the obsession and the compulsions. The way that we do this is with exposure and response prevention. Now, I also use some ACT or acceptance work, a little bit of cbt, Although, remember, some CBT techniques can become very compulsive. So ERP is the foundation. Mindfulness is also very important, but there are very, very specific techniques that you need to be learning if you want to get to the recovery stage for ocd. It doesn't matter what the topic, right? It could be harm ocd. It could be relationship ocd. It could be somatic ocd, which I've also struggled with. It could be pedophilia, ocd, contamination, health. Again, there are subsets of OCD that aren't even named yet. I've had clients with different intrusive thoughts about things that don't have a name yet. All we're doing is creating these names for different ways that OCD can show up. The name doesn't matter, the thought doesn't matter. It can be about anything. So if you want help to get to the recovery stage for ocd, please check out the link in the description below and also make sure that you like or comment here. Let me know what your intrusive thoughts are about what types of subjects bother you when it comes to your OCD or intrusive thoughts and let's have a discussion about that. But like, subscribe for notifications on all of my videos and we'll talk to you next time. Have a good day.
