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Bonus Ep: How to FORGIVE Yourself for Intrusive Thoughts: Self-Compassion for OCD Shame & Guilt
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You're making dinner and out of nowhere there's a flash of thoughts across your mind. Maybe they're violent, maybe they're sexual, maybe they're blasphemous. And it is completely against your values. In that moment you are completely in shock. You think, why on earth would I think that? You put down your knife and from there you start to ruminate and judge yourself. You are criticizing yourself just like you're in a courtroom, defending yourself and defending your character against your mind. You are overwhelmed with guilt, shame, nausea and disgust. And if that is you, I want you to know you are not alone in this video. You are going to learn exactly how to forgive yourself for your intrusive thoughts and how to practice self compassion for ocd, shame and guilt. Hello, my name is Kimberly Quinlan. I am an OCD and anxiety specialist and I am on a mission to help equip over 10 million people this year. That is my goal. I want to provide them with evidence based, science based skills because I know so many of you are here trying to manage this on your own. And I'm going to make it my mission to hopefully help you with really effective skills that can help you along the way. Now, in order to forgive yourself, you are going to need to understand some things about OCD intrusive thoughts. Number one, intrusive thoughts are unwanted. Number two, they are repetitive. And number three, they cause a significant degree of distress. And once you can understand that, you will then understand that they are not your fault. The intrusive thoughts that you have are not your fault. Now, given that fact, you are going to have to understand, and according to what I believe and what I have seen clinically, there is actually no forgiveness needed for intrusive thoughts. This is not something you asked for. You wouldn't wish it on your worst enemy. And therefore, because it's not something that you did on purpose or you want, there's really nothing for you to forgive. However, now I know what you're thinking. Your thoughts feel so real. Maybe you have had people make you feel bad for the thoughts that you've had, or maybe they've judged you. Maybe your thoughts make no sense to you and maybe you desperately want them to stop and you can't figure out why they won't. And lastly, you might feel like you need to be punished. Often people with intrusive thoughts then have another intrusive thought of what if you want these thoughts? What if you like these thoughts? What if you actually want them to happen? This is the nature of intrusive Thoughts, they make you question yourself and your character and your beliefs and your values. That is the way in which they keep you engaged with them. And so what I will offer you for today is a plan, and we're calling it the four Step Forgiveness Plan Plan. So that if you're feeling any of these things and you actually do believe and feel that you need to forgive yourself, let's talk about this plan. So step one of the forgiveness plan is to understand that thoughts are not facts. One of the reasons that you have struggled to forgive yourself up until now, probably the reason you're listening to this, is that you believe that if you think something, it must be a fact about you. It must mean that you wanted it. It must mean that it means something about you. But you will to understand and acknowledge that thoughts are not facts. They mean nothing about you. When you can really land on that and acknowledge that, it allows you then to move over to step two in the forgiveness plan. Step two is that feelings are also not facts. Just because you feel shame, just because you feel guilt, just because you feel bad about these thoughts doesn't mean you are ashamed or that you are guilty for having them or that you are bad for having them. Your feelings about things doesn't mean that as a fact either. So often that people have a really difficult time with this. They might feel shame and guilt and therefore feel like they have done something wrong. That requires forgiveness and resolve. But that is actually not the case. Once you have recognized that, you can then move on to step three, which is to drop the tug of war, though what's happening here is the reason you haven't forgiven yourself is you keep fighting back and forward on what these thoughts mean, what these feelings mean. And you are committed to getting certainty and understanding what these thoughts actually are here for. And the truth of the matter is, you will not win this. We all have intrusive thoughts. We do know for folks with ocd, the brake systems of thoughts is a little bit weak. So you are going to have more intrusive thoughts than people who don't have ocd. Now, your attempt to try and figure out why you're having them is going to fall short. So we must drop the tug of war of trying to figure out what it means and why you're having them and all those things. And then you have to let go, go and let them be here. Now, I'm not talking about easy peasy, joyful, let it go. I'm talking about you accepting that you will have these thoughts and not giving them Any meaning that is going to be a practice of forgiveness for you. You will have to do that in order to stop punishing yourself for the thoughts that you're having. A lot of the time people can't forgive themselves because they believe they need to keep themselves on the hook, because for their thoughts, they believe they need to be punished and that there needs to be some kind of neutralization for that thought. And so therefore, they cannot allow themselves to have pleasure and joy and ease in their life. Now we're going to move over to step four, which is to practice self compassion. Now, I understand here that you're probably thinking like, that's it. What about this aha moment, this joyful moment we're going to have? The chances are your forgiveness for you might feel like a sense of peace and joy that you might have seen on the movies. And that's because you're still going to have these thoughts. You've already practiced step three of accepting that they're there and you're going to be giving no meaning to them, no importance to them, no danger, and no urgency to them. Then we can move on to practicing kindness for when that discomfort and uncertainty is there. Now, we have a couple of ways we can do this. Number one would be to acknowledge the thought by noticing, okay, there it is. That's the thought that I'm having. Whether that be the intrusive thought or the, the critical thought. The second step is to validate the pain, but not the content. So I'm going to say that again. You're going to validate the pain that you're feeling, but not the content that you're. You're feeling or experiencing. So what that means is you might say, wow, I am really noticing a lot of guilt right now that is really hard. Or wow, I'm noticing a presence of guilt. And I notice that it's telling me that I deserve to suffer. But I'm only going to acknowledge and go, wow, my love, it's so painful for you to have this guilt in your body. I'm so sorry that you're going through that. How can I support you? You're not engaging in the what if thinking. You're just acknowledging that right here and right now you have some discomfort. And then the last step is proceeding with radical nauseating kindness. Now, I know that might sound a little silly, but let's break it down. You're going to proceed, which means you're not going to sit there and just wallow in how painful it is. You're going to proceed into your life. Move forward. A lot of the reason that you're getting stuck in forgiveness is you think that you need to feel positive feelings to move forward. And that is not what this is about. You are going to proceed, move forward with the discomfort, but you are going to practice radical nauseating kindness. I want you to be so kind to yourself that it feels a little sickening to start with. Now, I'm not actually wanting you to feel nauseous, but you get the point here. I want you to push so hard with the kindness thing that it feels a little awkward and cringy. That cringe worthy compassion is something that I'm constantly talking about in your compassion toolkit. Now this is a course that we have where I walk you through specifically how you can learn to be more kind. And one of those components going back to the last point, is we talk about cringe worthy compassion. Now you don't start there. That's like one of the last steps. But what we're going for here is up until now, you've been really careful about kindness and you've been really careful with this idea. It feels dangerous and it feels not right to be gentle and kind to yourself. But what we want to do here is we want to proceed with radical nauseating kindness because you deserve that. The more intrusive thoughts you have, not the more critical you're going to be, the more kind you're going to be. Think about it. They're really uncomfortable, they're really painful. And the more pain you have, the more kindness you need to meet yourself with. Because it's not easy having these intrusive thoughts. It's a lot of work. Having OCD requires you to ride a lot of waves of discomfort. So if you want and you're ready to proceed and really do a deep dive with your compassion practices, head on over to CBT school or check the links in the show notes and I will direct you to that course. I put my whole heart into it. It's exactly the practices I teach my clients. There's a toolkit workbook for you. You are going to love the exercises in that course. Now, of course, if you have ocd, we also have your OCD toolkit. That is a different course completely, but it will walk you through start to finish the steps that I take with my clients to help them move through exposure and response pre for their specific OCD obsessions and compulsions. So that's there for you at CBT school as well. All right, so let's get to the conclusion here. Your thoughts mean nothing about you. Really let that sink in. Your intrusive thoughts mean zero, zip, nada, nothing about you. That forgiveness doesn't mean you approve of these thoughts. But really, what we're doing here is forgiveness is you acknowledging that your thoughts, meaning mean nothing about you and that there is really nothing to forgive anyway. And it also means that you get to stop treating yourself like those thoughts are so important. Now, as always, I always say it is a beautiful day to do hard things. In no way am I saying that this is going to be easy. So I want you to take it very slowly. Practice, practice, practice. It always wins. And if you need more support, do keep going over to cbtschool.com we have so many resources there for you now. I hope that it was helpful. Thank you so much for being here. Go ahead and practice forgiving yourself because you deserve it. Thank you so much for being here. It's an honor and I'll see you in the next episode.
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Please note that this podcast or any other resources from CBTSchool.com should not replace professional mental health care. If you feel you would benefit, please reach out to a provider in your area. Have a wonderful day and thank you for supporting CBTSchool.com.