Trouble with intrusive thoughts anyone?

[legowelt]

It's been close to a year since I've began experiencing really bad anxiety and I continue to struggle with feelings of impending doom as well as intrusive thoughts. There's been a lot of ups and downs, and I now can recognize the biological effects of anxiety, but my thoughts continue to frighten me. I'm always thinking about dying, but I really don't want to. I've also become infatuated with people who've taken their own lives and the possibility that I could do the same. I know this stuff is common for anxiety havers but I worry the morbid and severeness of my obsessions means I'm on the brink of collapse. I wouldn't consider myself depressed, just a week ago I felt like a million bucks, but after one episode of anxiety and feelings of doom I've been on an all too familiar spiral.

[tailspin]

Hi legowelt. It's great you've learned to recognize the physical effects of anxiety and accept the symptoms for what they are.

I know this is way easier said than done, but it kind of seems that, in the same way you learned to lessen the power of the physical symptoms caused by anxiety by recognizing that it's just anxiety causing them, so you could perhaps also learn to lessen the power of your intrusive thoughts by seeing them for what they are: just thoughts.

Or, alternatively, it might work to use a CBT type approach to your intrusive thoughts. Have you had any therapy at all? Either CBT or talk therapy? That could really help you with thoughts too.

[sweetypie]

I don't know if this will help, but you are probably not seriously suicidal. Everyone (especially those of us with mental problems) have fantasies about committing suicide on occasion. They scare me, too. But they aren't necessarily serious.

I knew I was seriously suicidal the times I withdrew from everyone, wrote a suicide note, and also started to make detailed plans about how I'd kill myself. And I was crying hysterically every day in private, basically.

I'm very frightened of my thoughts as well. I'm so scared they will destroy everything I have and everything that I am. I feel helpless against them.

[legowelt]

I was in therapy about a year ago. Most of the time I would talk and my therapist would listen, I feel I found more help looking around online so I stopped seeing him. In guess my anxiety is mostly mental, I've never had the physical symptoms too much, my anxiety mostly revolved around unpleasant obsessions.