How can you stop yourself from having the thoughts that you don’t want?
Well, the short answer is you can’t.
In the vicious flower diagram one of the things that I talk about with my clients is the idea of trying to push your thoughts away and I always say how that doesn’t work and it just contributes to the problem.
I want to show you a little experiment that demonstrates this:
I want you to find a door.
Get to a door and imagine that there’s stuff the other side of the door that you really don’t want to get in the room.
We need to close the door and push really hard against it to make sure that the stuff that’s the other side doesn’t get in the room.
So push really hard okay?
Now, I want you to ignore the door.
What most people do when I say to do that is they let go of the door. But what I want you to do is to continue to push the door, making sure nothing gets through the other side and at the same time I want you to ignore the door.
It’s not very easy and in fact it’s virtually impossible to ignore the door and to not have the door bother you if you’re pushing against it.
So what’s the point of me showing you this?
This is just to demonstrate that this is what you’re doing when you’re trying to push your thoughts away.
When you’re trying to have them not come into your head, or you’re trying to get rid of them by pushing them, you’re actually remaining more in contact with the thoughts.
What we want to do over time is to get you to do differently:
Stop ignoring the thoughts, stop pushing away the thoughts and allow the thoughts to “be there” without pushing them away.
It’s not about trying to stop the thoughts, that’s not the goal of therapy, the goal of therapy is about learning to live with the fact that you have intrusive thoughts and that they really don’t matter. They’re just thoughts or images or urges that’s all, and they don’t have to mean anything whatsoever.
One goal of OCD therapists is to work with patients on being able to sit with whatever those intrusive thoughts are, and not act out those compulsions.