Bad special interest, advice please

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Hello, i am new here, so you will have to forgive me if this is in the wrong place but...

I have always had a "special interest" /obsession with various things. I have been told by my psychiatrist that it's one of the classic features of my aspergers and i will always probably have one. Quite often i picked these up though things that have happened to me in the past or sometimes simply just by catching onto something, such as a TV program, game type of public transport, and once even dolls.

Now my problem is, my current and longest running one is not a particularly healthy one to have at all, i don't really want to say what it is, but i picked it up from a bad experience which developed into a special interest related to said bad experience. It has taken hold quite strongly, i spend too much time reading about it, and i have been tempted to do things that could have a serious impact on my future, just because of this. It's also very much hindering my recovery as i have other quite serious mental health issues.

Does anyone here know how to "drop" a certain obsession? My special interest usually changes every few months, however this time it hasn't and I'm very worried i will be stuck with it for a long time, which is not going to be a good thing. I think it has stuck for so long because unlike most of my other special interests there is a vast amount of information available about it online and pretty much in everyday life. I have never really worked out how they change, i just know they have before. I think this could be due to the fact they have not been so closely related to life experience before and also because there is only a certain amount of information on it available, for example once a TV series stopped running, a couple of months later there would be nothing new so my mind would pick something else. I'm not sure if this is the case, it's just my theory.

Sorry for the long post, but can anyone relate/give advice or insights? I'm just so worried that this particular thing could stick and I could really do with a more healthy/harmless interest as i know i will always have one, i just need to be rid of this particular one.

My thoughts while still reading your post: Maybe try getting out there and forcing yourself to go to new places, see new things, have new experiences, learn new things, meet different people, hear different music, watch a different type of movie, try a new sport or hobby out etc just for the opportunity to expose yourself to a whole bunch of different things & maybe, just maybe, something along the way will catch your interest and BAM! New special interest. Heck, you might go play a little soccer & spot a kid longboarding and decide that's what you'd like to get into, or go to a movie and hear a song playing during the ending credits and end up completely infatuated with the band or genre or country where they're from etc. Just go do as many different and new things as possible, and the chances that something else will spark a new special interest will go up exponentially compared to doing as you've always done and getting as you've always gotten.

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No for supporting trump. Because doing so is deplorable.

You need to find something else to be obsessed with. It won't be easy. It may take days, weeks, months or years. (Hopefully only days though haha!)

Going to refer to an amazing quote.

Whaia te iti kahuranga ki te tuahu koe me he maunga teitei - This is a Maori saying which translates to Aim for the highest cloud so that if you miss it, you will hit a lofty mountain.

Good Luck!

I get the impression that you developed this special interest as a way to cope with the bad experience that you had. In that respect, it is probably a good thing because it's protecting your psyche from trauma. However, it's not good to act upon this interest if it's illegal and/or harmful to anyone in any way. I think that you should probably seek therapy, not only to help deal with your interest, but more importantly to help you deal with the root cause, which was your bad experience.

Hope this helps, and all the best to you.

You think this is a long post and apologize? Some of mine go on for WEEKS in comparison...I can be very encyclopedic & often wish this wasn't true about me.

The more you fear fixating on an obsession, the more that obsession keeps its hold on you. Try telling yourself NOT to think of something. You know how this works...it doesn't work, is exactly the point.

I am wondering if this obsession is so dangerous to you or to others that fixating on it is genuinely harmful. I've found that when I got obsessed with something I considered bizarre, by allowing myself to stop running away from it and not being freaked out by my thoughts and feelings, it ceased to be interesting to me.

This was something that was "in my own head" that I did not openly share with others...but as long as I felt that it was a freakish way of thinking, I was obsessed with it. When I could let go of feeling so hung up and weird about my own thoughts and develop an attitude of "so what..."? I just naturally found the interest dropping away and nothing could bring it back.

Often the act of HIDING the obsession is most of what makes it so interesting. That is how it was for me. There was one person who was a kind of "focus" for this particular fantasy I was running in my mind and I spoke to him about it and, in doing so, it was like deflating a balloon. This person was very interested in me and attempted to make me interested in him by creating these events that would bring this obsession back to life -- but it never returned. So I am saying that very often by telling someone, the obsession will disappear. And I WAS very worried about this at the time, I remember. The worry was a large part of what kept me attached to the whole idea.