Dear Bassy:

I will quote from your thread of last year as well as from this one and offer you my suggestions:

“The thought of going blind was so scary… After a while I feared that my thoughts could turn into a reality.. I was scared that the fear of becoming blind was actually going to make me blind”- You can do this exercise again and again whenever you fear that a thought about something will make that something happen: stand in front of a mirror and say to yourself: I am a zebra, then watch: did you turn to a zebra? Or think: I will die in the next minute, then watch the time, are you still alive? Test your thoughts this way.

“I fear that I will read something that can worsen my anxiety”- we can do an exercise right now because you are reading these very words that I am typing to you. I will state something and let’s see if it will come true for you. Ready?

Here is my statement: by the end of this sentence you will experience a strong earthquake and a rock from someplace will smash your computer, and so you will not be able to read the next line.

Didn’t happen, did it.

“she recently appeared in one of my dreams.. and this scared me… I really want to never think about her again”- we can’t not think about any one thing. We are more likely to think about something we don’t want to think about. We therefore have to stop fearing our thoughts instead of trying to not think. Same with images from a dream.

An image, an imagination, a thought with words, these are not dangerous. You can do an exercise with an image similar to the above.

I suffered from severe anxiety myself and from the consequences of severe anxiety: decades of OCD and other symptoms. Therefore I have a lot more to suggest to you, but first I will wait for a response to you regarding what I already suggested so far.

anita