Working with Intrusive Thoughts

This webinar is intended for counselling practitioners and other interested professionals.

This is an interactive meeting with cameras on and the breakout rooms.

Breaking the Loop: Strategies for Managing Intrusive Thoughts - An Integrative Approach

This workshop offers an integrative framework for working with a misunderstood and often stigmatised psychological experience. It is designed to enhance your knowledge, skills, and confidence in helping clients manage distressing intrusive thoughts.

We’ll explore the different types of intrusive thoughts, such as those involving harm, sexuality, blasphemy, contamination, or unwanted impulses, and how they commonly present in clinical work. These experiences arise across a range of psychological contexts, including OCD, Pure O, anxiety, depression, and trauma-related presentations. The training provides insights into the psychological mechanisms behind these thoughts, and examines how early caregiving environments, emotional containment, and excessive personal responsibility shape vulnerability.

A key focus will be on the emotional impact of intrusive thoughts—particularly the shame, fear, and confusion they often generate. We’ll explore ways to normalise these experiences and help clients reframe their self-concept. The training draws on a range of approaches, including CBT, psychoeducation, mindfulness, grounding and distraction strategies, metacognitive principles, and compassion-focused therapy.

We’ll also address how to distinguish intrusive thoughts from harmful intent, emphasising that such thoughts, while distressing, are not predictive of behaviour. Finally, we’ll consider the cultural and spiritual dimensions of intrusive thinking, including intersections with religious belief, superstition, and new age thinking, exploring how these frameworks can both support and complicate the therapeutic process.

Who Should Attend:

This workshop is ideal for therapists, counsellors, and mental health professionals working with clients experiencing distressing intrusive thoughts, anxiety, trauma, or body-related concerns. Whether you’re looking to expand your therapeutic toolkit or deepen your understanding of the emotional and psychological processes at play, this workshop will equip you with practical strategies and insights.

About the speaker

Vikki Scott is a UKCP- and BACP-registered Transpersonal Integrative Psychotherapist, specialising in anxiety disorders, career fatigue, relationship difficulties, and intrusive thoughts.

Before qualifying as a psychotherapist, Vikki spent over two decades working in the media, producing films for charities including Mind, Kick It Out, and Peace One Day. She now has a portfolio career that includes work in publishing, where she promotes a wide range of prominent wellbeing authors, as well as fiction, through her work with Watkins Publishing. She is also a writer herself. Prior to this, she founded and ran a coaching company that supported young people in schools to build confidence, develop resilience, and strengthen their interview skills.

Vikki’s path into psychotherapy was deeply shaped by personal experience. After the early loss of her mother, she experienced debilitating intrusive thoughts, known as Pure O, and explored many therapeutic approaches—from psychoeducation and CBT to mindfulness—in search of relief. It was Integrative Psychotherapy that ultimately proved to be the turning point, transforming her life. Her lived experience underpins her strong belief in the potential for healing and personal transformation.