Q&A How Do We Respond to Intrusive Thoughts Without Reinforcing Them?

My husband struggled with porn, masturbation, and sexualizing women for about 20 years, which eventually included repeatedly fantasizing about a friend of mine for over a year. He has now been completely abstinent for four months. Looking back, he says he can hardly relate to his former thinking. He realizes that he had turned this person into a sexual cue associated with novelty and forbiddenness, even mentally exaggerating physical features that weren’t actually there. He says it wasn’t really about finding her particularly attractive, but about the sexualized pathways he had developed. Now he strongly does NOT want to sexualize her or certain other women. However, particularly while falling asleep, he sometimes becomes aware that his mind could form a sexual image and immediately fears it will involve one of these specific people. That fear itself seems to bring them to mind. He stops the thought rather than intentionally developing or enjoying it, but he has become hypervigilant about monitoring his mind, which is exhausting for him and painful for me because their continued presence in his thoughts can feel significant even when I rationally understand the mechanism. How should he respond to these unwanted thoughts without reinforcing them through fear and hypervigilance, and how can I understand them with grace and compassion without interpreting their presence as continued desire or significance? We are approaching 2 years of our marriage with one child. I really want to move past this, accept the new man he has become, but I am still hurting a lot.