Bobm diary first try

[Special_Bird]

Good work man, you are making great progress!

I’ve been getting those dreams a lot lately too. It can be hard to get them out of your head, but make sure you keep trying. Letting those get any root inside your mind will lead to a nasty urge. It may seem futile sometimes, but continual effort towards redirecting your focus onto something else whether it be a mental image or something physical will help you to rid yourself of those urges.

For me what’s worked continually on this streak is something called the X technique. I posted a good description of it just a bit ago so I’ll just bring that up below. Give it some time and effort and you might find it very helpful.

@Special_Bird

Essentially what the technique is is a way of cutting a trigger off at its root, before it grows into an urge. When you see a trigger, the picture and thoughts about it tend to stick in your mind and won’t go away. To get rid of these thoughts, everytime the picture pops back in your head imagine a huge red X in front of it so that you can no longer see it. Focus your attention on the X. Then continue on with whatever else you were doing, meaning shift your physical focus to something else (i.e. back to your homework, back to the movie you were watching, back to the game, etc.). For urges that keep coming back, imagine an exploding X in front of them.

At first, the technique may seem ineffective, like even when you imagine an X, the image just comes right back. That is because your mind is weak, keep throwing that X in front of it, keep focusing on the X and whatever else you were doing before the trigger. The first few times, it will take a lot of back and forth fighting before you conquer it. In fact, for my first few times, it took all day or until something outside of my head actually distracted me.

Stay strong