Hi,

2 months ago I was freaked out in the morning when I noticed small, almost invisible white spots on my beard. The incident happened probably due to my irrational belief, which is connected with the fact that my parent (father) has a vitiligo skin disorder and got I scared that the same skin pattern appeared to me.

That moment extreme anxiety caught me and I felt a lot of stress due to irrational beliefs in my mind connected with the view on disease. It took some time to learn to handle this, and in this time I started to battle with my powerful mind how to handle and accept the situation.

In that time I was unable to function normally for about 2 weeks. I started to investigate my body and searched for any sign of skin disorder, and started to view that patterns on different parts of the body (eye circles, hands, etc.). I started googling for information and feeling strange mood of anxiety and helplessness.

In the meantime I went to the doctor, and he could not diagnose the disease. But that didn't really calmed me down.

After that I slowly started to recover - I was no feeling such a strong turmoil as before, and started to discovering my irrational thoughts behind perception of skin condition - I know that if my father wouldn't have the disease, I wouldn't ever noticed the small spots.

The problem I face until now after 2 months of the incident, is that every time I woke up in the morning the first thought that comes to my mind is that I should go to check if condition of my skin if there are any signs of disease on it (phobia, paranoia). The thought by itself doesn't produce so much anxiety as at the beginning (almost close to zero), but at times it produces more - if I'm not feeling good / well. Then I go to the mirror and look at my skin.

I want to get rid of this thoughts, especially in the morning when I wake up. The thoughts seem to be rooted in my subconsciousness and I have no idea how to remove it from my mind, although I can take control of it once it is there.

I know about cognitive behavioral therapy, which is used to threat such cases, but I don't know what to do to threat mind dysfunctional harmfulness. I'm afraid of thinking that this is going attract disease and make it real.

The irrational thoughts that I could identify behind the behavior:
I should not have vitiligo,
I wouldn't look good with vitiligo - people won't accept me with it

Produced feelings:
fear, anxiety

How to reprogram such thoughts that originate from subconsciousness?

Thanks for help