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Disturbing thoughts can be of course very frightening when they occur largely because we have a tendency to believe that the repetitiveness and the felt insistence and force behind them how upfront in the mind they can feel and how ongoing and how much they can bombard us creates the belief we might act out on them. We might be compelled to act upon the images or the ideas conveyed. So there's this sense that I might somehow be pushed by the repetitive thought into some kind of

transgressive behavior that will bring harm to myself or others.

And they can consist of a lot of content,

or they can consist of content that can be very disturbing.

doubts about one's value, one's prospect for finding love and security,

one's sense of sanity, one's sexual orientation, one's harmful visuals. People can have all kinds of suicidal ideations and other kinds of

really disturbing thoughts.

The most important,

one of the most important takeaways from tonight's talk

is that simply because of thought repeats itself actually does not mean that we

are necessarily in any imminent danger of acting upon them.

It's actually very often quite the opposite.

Even though it feels like the thought continually coming up,

like I'm going to lose my mind, I'm going to lose my mind seems like that means it could actually happen.

Or I don't know.

...