Johnny - believe me, I am not sick of you. I was once where you are. Believe me I've been working on this for a very long time.

If thoughts are as you put it just "popping into your head" I think you'd find CBT helpful. It's all about recognizing distorted and unhelpful thinking, and challenging it. There are a number of tools, but the one I find most helpful is called a thought record. So say you get a negative thought "I'm a loser" you write it down, and write down any feelings you're having that are associated with the throught. Then you write down, as best you can objective evidence for and against the thought. But they have to be facts, they can't be your beliefs.

So for me the facts against the thought "I'm a loser" might look like something like this:

I got my MBA
I got my CPA
I have friends
I play the harp well,
I have an offer of a book deal
I've been told I'm a good writer.

The facts that support the thought for me would be.
I don't have a job, although that's more of a belief since not having a job doesn't necessarily make anyone a loser.
I've had trouble staying sober. Again there's an element of judgement there.

Then you look at all the facts and see if you can come up with a more balanced belief. In my case that might be something like, "While I struggle with some things in life, I have been and am successeful in other things, so I'm not a total loser."

If you want a good book on CBT, get "Mind over Mood" it's what all the CBT programs up here use.

As for letting it go, that took a lot of time and hard work. Now whenever I get a negative thought around my PTSD, usually about how much I've suffered, I jsut go stop - not going there, that was the past, it's no longer true/happening, and I'm ok today. This is where I find mindfulness really helps, both in paying attention to my thought patterns, and staying in the present.

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