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Some people wonder if intrusive thoughts should shock you to a certain level or have a fear of what if it's not shocking or upsetting enough, does that mean that they secretly agree with it or that they've wanted it or something like that? Let's talk about that today. I'm Dr. Patrick McGrath. I'm the Chief Clinical Officer here at NOCD and. And we talk about OCD here all the time. Right. And OCD can create fear around emotional responses, intrusive thoughts, intrusive images, urges. And people might think, ought I be more upset than I am about having these? Or why am I not reacting to them the way that I think other people would react to them? Does this mean that I like this in some way? And am I a bad person for that? You know? You know, let's say somebody has some. Some kind of taboo intrusive thought and they would normally feel really upset by it, but instead of feeling panic, now they're feeling numb to it or tired. OCD will say, well, see, that must mean that you secretly agree with it, that you must like it, that you want it. We even see this happen after treatment where people are a little distressed after therapy because they think, oh, no, now I don't have the reaction to it that I do or that I did in the past. What does that say about me that I'm no longer bothered by that? Well, it says that you're probably like everybody else who just really doesn't give it the time of day versus think about how much they are bothered or are bothered by something so intrusive thoughts and images and urges. They're unwanted. They're what we call ego dystonic. They're against our values, our identity and our intentions. But the presence of them does not necessarily equal a desire for them. It's just what OCD does. OCD attacks the things that are important to you, and then you start to have these kind of unwanted, ego dystonic experiences around them. And that can lead to people then experiencing what? Well, compulsions. What are compulsions? Mental or physical acts that people do in a way to try to neutralize whatever the thoughts and the images or urges are. So they may spend time doing things like checking to see if they're disgusted enough, or testing whether the thought makes them anxious enough, or replaying these things over and over again to analyze their reaction to it? And might they? Have they reacted differently in the past or maybe they will in the future than they do now, trying to figure all that out? They may try to prove that they do or don't like something, and they may even argue against the thought in their head. None of this is very helpful whatsoever. But it is the very stuff that keeps OCD around longer and longer. And that's why we see people suffer more and more. If you want help with this, the most effective treatment for OCD is going to be something that we call exposure and response prevention therapy. Really the key element in this is helping you to do what we call habituate to these intrusive thoughts or learn to be with them. Recognize that you can handle them. Watch the feelings and reactions you have to them typically decrease over time. That's kind of happened for almost everybody now. There's a small, small subset of people that don't really habituate. And every time they have the thought or image urge, they still find it really uncomfortable and distressing. But even with that, they can still learn that they can live with it, that they can be with it, and that it doesn't have to mean anything about them. So even if you don't have the habituation which OCD will then look at and go, oh, my gosh, you habituated that. That must mean now that you don't care about it anymore. And that care that OCD says is a different than care of what we say from a therapy. When I say that, I hope you don't really care about it. I hope you can go, yeah, well, whatever. Moving on. When OCD says, oh, you don't care about that, it means you're a careless, awful, horrible person to even allow something like that. Notice the difference there between those two things. But we hope that when people do get less distressed, that they realize that they can handle living with a thought. That feeling less distressed doesn't mean that we want it to be there. We want it to be true that we've desired it or anything like that. It just means that we've learned to be with something, right? And I'm going to bet all of us live with things every day that we wish weren't there. Be the actual things going on in our life or things that we're worried about or fearful of, but we can allow them to be there without having to spend the entire day on them. If you're looking for help for this, if this is something that's really interfering in your life, well, our NOCD therapists are here. They're trained in exposure and response prevention therapy. They know that intrusive thoughts and images don't represent your character or your desires or your intent. They understand all the aspects of ocd, including this fear of liking or wanting intrusive thoughts and images and urges and thinking that they might be representative of you. We can help you work through that. If you want help with that, check us out@nocd.com that's N O C d Com. You can go online and in the upper right corner you'll say, book a free call. There's a button right there that you can click on it, and you could do that, and you could speak to our care team, and they will be there to assist you to. To get you set up with a licensed therapist who can help you on your way to living the life that you want to live and not the life that OCD wants you to live. Hope to see you soon.