As part of my current therapy I was asked to watch the following YouTube video:
Stopping spam from going bad | Blake Stobie | TEDxRoyalHolloway
It's only 15 minutes and not too arduous. I watched it a few times inbetween my therapy sessions and made the following notes. None of it was really new to me but it did help re-enforce the methodology of how i should be treating intrusive thoughts. What us OCD sufferers always forget is that we assign meaning to every thought and we treat it as fact and then try to do something about it by either thinking or action. The trap is so easy to fall into. We need to learn that most thoughts are spam and are best ignored.
My notes:
- Intrusive thoughts are normal and we all get them but where they become problematic depends on what we make of the fact that we get them
- The key really is to think about intrusions as neutrons: they're neither positively nor negatively charged up until the point that we start to attach a meaning to them
- One needs to think of the idea of a homunculus - a little person who sits in our brain and can step back from our thoughts and valuate them. This is also known as metacognition.
- The simplest starting point is to help people to realize that often most of our thoughts are just spam - they're just rubbish and if they are just rubbish the implication that follows from that is that they don't necessarily require any kind of action. Anxious intrusive thoughts generally try to get us to do things and they have a great urgency attached to them and often the best thing we can do with them is just to ignore them completely
- There's two different ways that psychologists can help people to notice their thoughts more and to be a little bit more in tune and accepting of the fact that we get thoughts and we're bombarded by the spam all the time and we run into trouble once we start trying to fight it off and repress them or try not to have them at all.
- The second way that we try to help is to get people to react differently to the internal intrusive thoughts and to not engage in rumination and worry over the intrusions which often are about really terrifying things - most of which have never happened and will ever happen and so by definition they can't be solved.
- What he urges us to do is when you have an anxiety induced intrusive thought is to be oppositional to it, so if it tells you to freeze or to run away from something you should move towards it unless the thing that you're afraid of is something actually dangerous like a bear in which case you should probably freeze.
