Overcoming Unwanted Intrusive Thoughts: A CBT-Based Guide to Getting Over Frightening, Obsessive, or Disturbing Thoughts

by Sally M. Winston PsyD

Because you worry about it, reject it, and try to push it out of your mind, it pushes back and becomes a recurring thought or image. After a while, it starts to redirect your attention: It starts arriving with a “whoosh,” and feels awful, disgusting, or dreaded. It contains an urgent feeling of needing to get rid of it. The content of many unwanted intrusive thoughts is aggressive, sexual, taboo, anxiety-provoking, or self-derogatory. An unwanted intrusive thought sometimes feels like an impulse to perform an unwanted action. Other times, it feels impossibly stuck in your head. Your efforts to deal with it become all-encompassing and take up so much time, mental energy, and focus that your quality of life is degraded. Unwanted intrusive thoughts tend to recur repeatedly and seem to increase in intensity over time. Eventually, along with an increase in the frequency and intensity of the thoughts themselves, you might start to doubt and fear your own safety, intentions, morality, self-control, and sanity.