Oh gosh, sorry to hear. Intrusive thoughts are so problematic, aren't they? We tried the ashwaganda with my son and it did zip. I mean, nothing. Really nothing did anything. But what we found is that when we really dug in and went for treatment, it helped. My son is on medication and doing psychotherapy. I can understand not wanting to keep you long term on the benzo type drug. It's frankly, addictive and you will need more and more to get an affect. But OCD can be treated with other classes of drugs pretty effectively. ERP therapy is pretty well respected for treating ocd. It involves exposure. Which is scary, I'm sure. But with a trained psychologist, they help you through that. My son uses DBT therapy for intrusive thoughts. It's also been effective. Have you ever tried an SSRI?
First, the term intrusive thoughts has become a fad, but all thoughts come from nowhere and we all think. All the time. It's when those thoughts bother us to the point of damaging our lives that it's a problem, so the fact you think isn't the problem, the fact your thoughts are bothering you is the problem. Do know that stopping benzos can be really hard, and can pack a bad withdrawal, but in your case, you seem to be doing pretty darned well considering what you just did, but also know that there are no medications for mental illness that cure it. If you didn't fix it in therapy or other changes in your life, the drug just masked it which is better than suffering all the time but you didn't cure the problem and it looks like it came back. Treating this with natural medicine is much more complicated that taking one supplement. While ashwagandha can moderate the adrenal gland, and is a great herb for anxiety sufferers, by itself it isn't going to fix this. You'd have to do a program of taking several supplements under the guidance of someone who knows how to do that, change your diet, exercise, meditate, and get therapy to make that work, and there would be no guarantees it would work. You say intrusive thoughts, but as I noted, that doesn't actually say anything, so I assume you mean you are suffering from anxiety. If you wanted to stop that medication, the thing to do was get into therapy with a psychologist who specializes in treating anxiety and if you wanted to explore natural medicine, adopt a program and see if it works and, if it doesn't, try a different one. I would say that if stopping the med caused this you weren't medically ready to stop it yet or if you wanted to continue a medicinal approach it would have meant switching to antidepressants or other meds instead. Peace.