How do I stop intrusive thoughts about embarrassing memories?
I have a lot of them as I've wandered around in a fog of subclinical mental illness for a lot of my time, much of it brought about by periods of extreme stress, and I'm afraid I've generally fallen within the range of "avoidant" to "socially awkward" to "openly frustrated/passive aggressive cunt" over the years. This goes especially at my old workplaces.
My life is now a lot nicer, in part because of how hard I worked during that time. I see now I could have made it a lot easier on myself if I'd have just "loosened up" a bit, yet I suspect it was this "tightness" and frustration that partly served as a catalyst to push myself further on.
Sorry for the ramble, I just feel like I want to apologise to all the people I made feel unhappy or awkward due to my emotional state and/or my inability to deal with my situation, but understand that would be unwelcome.
With some of the intrusive memories, I managed to 'solve' them by proving something to myself or talking them through with the person involved. It's still only a fraction of them all but it had a bit of a snowball effect one time before I added a few new ones. If they do come up then it's more like, "This silly thing in my past, ahaha" and it doesn't matter because you're not that person, but you were that person and gay as it sounds, you love that person, so it's not a painful thing.
Another thing is forcing association, like you can try and merge two things in your head. It's hard to explain because I'm a spacker, but you can kind of make yourself 'slip' out of embarrassing memories by putting something *after* them in the mental progression. So instead of the memory just fermenting in your mind, you build an association with another memory, or song, or something, and then you should be able to slip out of the shit headspace quicker.
Or weed. Don't do that though. Unless you're going to send me some.
I think you have to learn to live with the embarrassment. Trying to push thoughts out of your head is a fool's errand, it's like chanting "don't think of a pink elephant, don't think of a pink elephant" in an effort to avoid thinking of a pink elephant. If you allow yourself to feel the full burning shame and forgive yourself for it, the thoughts stop being quite so intrusive.
Are you me. I've been using a hair tie to snap on my wrist to make myself more aware of pulling myself out of intrusive thought cycles, I've also tried CBT but it was so much work for me, I got discharged because I couldn't keep up with the schedule for it and it was a lot of reading, I'm perpetually mentally drained it seems.
I get this quite a bit, and have learned to just sort of remind myself that I'm years and miles away from those events, and even sometimes laugh at myself for them. I really was a silly prick sometimes.
As for worrying about what others think about these moment, just pick a random person in your life and try and remember all the embarrassing or awkward shit they've done. You'll either not be able to, or if you can, you'll likely realise you don't really care.
>>30357 I swear my issues/mental health is down to shite sleep, the problem is how do you do all this? I can get in bed the same time every night but I just toss and turn for hours and the intrusive thoughts get worse without any distractions like the internet/watching tv too, I've tried and tried but it only exacerbates it all.
>>30358 Likewise, especially recently. I might only have 3 hours actual sleep but I guarantee I'll be lying in bed wide awake for hours. It's getting the point where I don't want to be in bed at the same time every night because it's just hours of frustration.
When you develop a good habit it becomes very easy, but getting there from your current position is the problem. There are multiple reasons why you might not feel tired enough to sleep and different solutions.
It might very well be that you are mentally over stimulated. In fact if you are getting intrusive thoughts you are effectively 'too tired to sleep'. There are several meditation (if you ignore the spiritual terminology) ways to break this.
The 2 I know are.
1 you try to lie absolutely perfectly still eyes closed after a while you will feel the urge to scratch, don't stay still. This is your body checking if you are still active. Your body will begin falling into sleep and your head should follow.
2 The other is a breathing exercise. imagine you are filling your chest and head with air breath in deeply filling slowly from the bottom of your lungs upwards until you fill you head. Then breath out in the same way emptying yourself fully. do this do this 20 times you might not even reach 20 before you nod off.
other non-meditation methods I've applied are
Doing a fuck load of exercise early in the day (late is generally not good as it might leave you over stimulated for bed) the 2 I've done is rock climbing back before THE EVENT happend, and forced marching.
>>30350 In my experience, it never really goes away. You can atone by not making the same mistakes with others going forward, being the kind of person someone you spent time with wouldn't believe used to be a cunt.
In a more general "hey remember this, dick" situation, like just before going to sleep or something, I do have insight on. I was diagnosed with a borderline personality disorder, emotionally unstable I think it was. This was due to stress and anxiety causing me to have homicidal ruminations which made me feel suicidal because I thought I was an Egg and a serial killer was going to hatch. It was pointed out to me that sociopaths don't feel remorse for thoughts like that and that those feelings and thoughts weren't necessarily my own, but a symptom of the condition.
Ruminations of any kind are more common with stress and anxiety, not just stuff you could get a PIP award for. Speaking to someone who can help you understand those thoughts and help you identify what triggers them is the best way to develop a healthy coping mechanism for when the do happen. Taking steps to try and reduce the amount of stress and anxiety you are under helps immensely, the simplest of which is exercise and sleep. If I have an episode, the next day I make sure that I'm physically exhausted come bedtime so I can sleep. I also read escapist literature, like Fantasy.
Finding a routine that works for you is half the battle, honestly.
>How do I stop intrusive thoughts about embarrassing memories?
Everyone has intrusive thoughts and there's a reason brains operate that way. If your problem is that you have too many then the fix is to understand how they work - frequency increases with a persons obsessing about them which is why they're such a life-threatening problem for the OCD.
>>30361 >This was due to stress and anxiety causing me to have homicidal ruminations which made me feel suicidal because I thought I was an Egg and a serial killer was going to hatch.
This one time, as a child, I took a shit onto a plastic bag while infront of the mirror in my mothers room. I just wanted to see what it looked like coming out, who doesnt? Well I forgot about the shit and my mom found it hours later when she got home from work.
>>30350 After practicing meditation for a while you'll begin to notice that thoughts can go as easily as they arrive - You simply let them go. Sounds wishy washy, but it really does boil down to 'don't think about it'.
