welcome to a brand new season of therapy and theology I’m so excited you’re here today and in today’s episode we’re going to answer a question about intrusive thoughts now before I get into the content though I have to let you know our team has put together a very helpful listener guide that you can download for free using the link in the show notes it’s a summary of our discussion and it’ll be useful for you as you unpack what we discuss and maybe take your own notes and it’ll just be a great reference even if you have conversations
with family or friends and want to refer back to something that was said on the show today now let’s dive into today’s content how do you combat intrusive thoughts all right intrusive thoughts how do we combat those how do we combat intrusive thoughts that’s the question that was submitted to us and I relate to this a lot now let’s define what an intrusive thought is and then we’re going to get right into your thoughts and your thoughts Jim Andel now intrin thoughts are according to this definition negative ideas and
images that are Uninvited and unwanted it’s not the positive side it’s not looking at something and go wow this might actually work out okay it’s looking at something and all of a sudden a thought comes to you that is negative it’s Uninvited and it’s unwanted now this can happen to me because sometimes I struggle with catastrophic thinking but even more than that just worst case scenarios and I’ll be looking at something and I’ll be thinking you know what okay this is what needs to happen and then I can do this and then I can do
this and all of a sudden it’s almost like this jarring feeling of this isn’t going to be okay things are going to fall apart things have been okay and now when is the other shoe going to drop and so that’s usually how it occurs to me so I want to hear from you guys about how do we combat those well first um it seems so simple does it as I like to say it’s simple but not simplistic and that is to pay attention to it just to notice it what is the thought and uh old Martin Luther quote that we’ve talked about I
believe here in the podcast before that just because those thought birds fly over your head doesn’t mean they get to make a nest in your hair so to notice it and say what is the thought that’s coming in it’d be great if you could know where is it coming from but often I go first to just to notice and say this is the thought thought that’s going on and quite frankly a lot of times I’ll speak that out loud see those intrusive thoughts they’re not out loud if someone was next to you they couldn’t hear them but there okay I think this is the
thought that I’m having right now I wonder where am I also feeling it in my body anxiety often people can feel that in their chest or they might in their head or you can see anger in eyes or flaring nostrils or something like that but the idea is where is this coming from and even to put your hand like on your body where am I feeling it right now or in your stomach or wherever you’re feeling that and how many times we’ve said here that if it’s hysterical it’s historical so I’d like just to at least contemplate and Ponder for me in
