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

by Sally M. Winston PsyD

Helpful Fact: Contrary to common sense, reducing your effort to avoid intrusive thoughts will often lead to less distress.

Traumatic images and memory intrusions often happen when someone has PTSD, but they can also happen to someone with a sticky mind who is upset by a thought, a memory, or even an imagined image. These may be a sudden reexperiencing, as if the traumatic events are happening again in the present (usually called flashbacks), accompanied by fear or whatever emotion happened at the time. Or they may simply be vivid, fixed visual memories of real things that happened or were imagined at the time of the traumatic experience.

Hey guys, you are both listening to the junk channel.

Here is the really great news: you don’t! That’s right. Not only do you not have to fight these thoughts, but fighting the thoughts is a major reason why they become stuck and cause so much psychological misery in the first place.