How do I deal with intrusive thoughts?

Brown liquor. Lots and lots of brown liquor.

I think sometimes people make generalisations based on their own negative experiences. Sometimes people think they have had therapy when they have had a few sessions with counsellor or a psychologist and sometimes think they have CBT when they have just met with someone who has used a few CBT based ideas.

But the facts are that CBT is the form of treatment with the most evidence of success but you need a therapist who has had the right level of training. The therapist will help you break the problem down to see what keeps it going. So there is usually some form of trigger and intrusive thought, and emotional reaction which leads to some type of response either rituals in your thoughts or behaviour in an attempt to neutralise the thought or make the situation safe.

The way therapy works is initially to help you learn new things about the nature of thoughts and undermine any unhelpful beliefs you might have about them. It may include in session experiments to help you gain new evidence that the thoughts are not harmful and then should include exposure and response prevention which is developing your ability to tolerate distressing thoughts without responding to them. That might eventually include listening to a tape of your intrusive thoughts whilst and animal is present.

Medication can be helpful for a smaller percentage of people.

You gotta ask yourself are you really that sick that you would be tempted to commit violence against some animal? I doubt it, the Dnepropetrovsk Maniacs started with animal cruelty by cutting open cats while they were still alive and ended up murdering over 20 people induing a pregnant woman whose fetus they cut out and some guys murder was even taped on video and is called three guys one hammer or something, so the dude in the video 1 guy 1 icepick where some idiot cuts an Asian man to pieces and then has sex with him and then eats his flesh is also responsible for animal cruelty having made a video of crucifying a kitten or some crap. Satan plays tricks on peoples minds and uses fear to gain control of the person, going to Church helped me with my intrusive thoughts, and I refused to watch those videos because that's not what my thoughts were about. Killing is bad period