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Originally Posted by neutrino
At my therapy session today my therapist and I talked a bit about some intrusive thoughts I have. Mainly the intrusive thoughts I have about faking/lying/exaggerating things I say or do. I fear that I'm lying and making things up and then I tend to go through memories, conversations and past events repeatedly to make sure that I've told no lies. My therapist says that's OCD.
He told me to say "I'm lying" or "I'm a liar" every time those thoughts enter my mind and to stop there and not try to prove to myself that I'm not a liar. He said he wanted me to tell myself that I'm a liar over and over and over again without thinking things like "no I'm not" etc. He said to do so until the thoughts lose their meaning or something.
I'm going to try it but it sounds a bit weird to me. Has your therapist suggested similar things to you? Is this the equivalent to people with for example intrusive thoughts about contamination (which I guess is a more "visible" symptom) not washing their hands when they feel like they're not clean? I've heard something about ERP. Is this it? Has it worked for you?
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I haven't been to therapy, but I remember when I had OCD the whole "false memories" thing happened with me and caused quite a few problems. Basically I would replay an event in my head over and over, questioning whether or not I did something negative. At times my OCD fabricated events/thoughts which I later believed, as in some cases I was able to go back and check objective data to find out that what actually happened contradicted the stuff my memory told me that I'd done.
It's problematic, but at the end of the day you have to trust the more reliable common ground, you know yourself well enough to know that you wouldn't do/think certain things. Give yourself the benefit of the doubt. If you have to question whether or not you lied about something, then the odds are you didn't lie about it at all.