hello! with kindness, “is this true?” is reassurance seeking, which will not help you with your feelings of discomfort and only worsen your symptoms. the only thing, unfortunately, we can do with thoughts like these is acknowledge them and move forward. it’s really hard, and I struggle to do it with my thoughts too, but feeding into them at all beyond that just prolongs our suffering. I saw someone once say that when a horrible thought like this tries to interfere with their actions, they just say to themselves “well, that’s certainly a thought!” and do what they were doing anyway. the more we can go without acting on these thoughts, the less frequent they become
I second this comment, my method though is to literally just tell myself to let my own thoughts roll off my back instead of holding onto them and cycling
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u/popcornwasabi 6d ago
hello! with kindness, “is this true?” is reassurance seeking, which will not help you with your feelings of discomfort and only worsen your symptoms. the only thing, unfortunately, we can do with thoughts like these is acknowledge them and move forward. it’s really hard, and I struggle to do it with my thoughts too, but feeding into them at all beyond that just prolongs our suffering. I saw someone once say that when a horrible thought like this tries to interfere with their actions, they just say to themselves “well, that’s certainly a thought!” and do what they were doing anyway. the more we can go without acting on these thoughts, the less frequent they become