229. Intrusive Thoughts

Overcome Pornography for Good

Sara Brewer

Christianity, Sexuality, Religion & Spirituality, Health & Fitness

5 • 679 Ratings

🗓️ 9 June 2025

⏱️ 10 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Do intrusive thoughts create distress for you, especially when they involve sexuality? Through my work helping people overcome pornography, I've noticed how these unwanted thoughts often trigger shame, anxiety, and a desperate desire to make them stop.

In this episode, I share a powerful exercise about a pink elephant that perfectly illustrates why fighting against intrusive thoughts only makes them stronger. I demonstrate how we can learn to let intrusive thoughts exist without engaging with them, ultimately allowing them to fade naturally into the background.

Get full show notes, transcript, and more information here: https://centerforovercoming.com/post/intrusive-thoughts

If you’re ready to do this work and start practicing unconditional commitment towards quitting your porn habit, sign up to work with Sara: https://www.sarabrewer.com/workwithme

Transcript

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0:00.0	You are listening to the Overcome Pornography for Good podcast, episode 229, intrusive thoughts.
0:07.9	Welcome to the Overcome Pornography for Good podcast, where we take a research-based,
0:13.7	trauma-informed, and results-focused approach to quitting porn. This approach has been revolutionary
0:20.7	and changed thousands and thousands of lives.
0:24.2	I'm your host, Sarah Brewer. Hey everyone, welcome to today's podcast episode. Today we're going to talk
0:31.9	about intrusive thoughts and these pop up in all sorts of ways. Specifically, we'll kind of, you know,
0:37.4	delve into it with
0:38.3	intrusive sexual thoughts. And these can be really distressing and scary and can create a lot of
0:46.3	angst, especially depending on your beliefs about sex and sexuality or what is, you know, an okay
0:52.7	thought and what is a not okay thought? This will also
0:55.6	apply to any area where you are having thoughts or feelings or experiences and you don't want
1:01.7	them to be there and they even feel a little intrusive. And so we have in, you know, the last
1:06.6	couple of weeks talked quite a bit about this inner critic or inner oppressor. And so, you know,
1:12.3	those can be intrusive thoughts. It can be like intrusive thoughts from our inner oppressor,
1:16.4	these mean thoughts that we have about ourselves or, you know, shameful thoughts that just feel
1:22.3	intrusive and feel like we don't really have any control over them. What we don't want to do
1:26.4	with these thoughts is fight them.
1:29.3	So what do we do instead? That's what we're going to cover in today's episode. I love you all so much
1:34.0	and enjoy this audio on intrusive thoughts. We are going to talk about intrusive thoughts.
1:42.3	I saw this video on TikTok that I want to share and shout out to them
1:48.2	because it was really good and I thought it replied so much to what we do and what we talk about.
1:54.5	We're going to go through this little exercise. I'm going to let you think about it.
	...

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