This wasn't something I thought of in my response, but I do agree!
(Often my disgust-response is dealing with something society would find it very acceptable and normal to be disgusted by, because I'm a defense attorney and I'm often reading narratives of, like, crime, and my clients are poor and often oppressed people like the poor have bad hygiene, are abrasive, are angry, have ugly disabilities, dress in terrible clothing, have no manners, and a variety of things that society loves to judge but that ultimately mean nothing about their worth as a person.)
But when I have that kind of disgust-response to a client, I know it is not the helpful or professional response, so I have developed a few tools to use in the moment.
Step back from the narrative I'm reading or hearing. Who is telling me this narrative and what would it be in their interests for me to believe?
(Normally for me this is "police" or "an alleged victim" and while judges like to go on about police being unbiased witnesses, I think it's pretty clear police have an interest in people reading their reports and agreeing with their conclusions. Police don't like to be wrong and they make stupid snap judgments all the time because they're human. Police also have certain patterns they expect to see and they will force the facts of a case into those patterns even if they don't fit.)
Look for a story that's easy to believe or fits into a broader narrative. From "all these people are gross perverts/society is degenerating into indecency and porn" to "this person is a monstrous abuser" to "these kids are thugs and gangsters dealing drugs in middle school," these are images or touchstones or stories that are immediately and viscerally easy to respond to. This is the kind of thing that touches off emotional disgust and shuts out empathy, because it turns the immediate story of a particular person into just one of a faceless mob of Constant Horrible Things Happening.
Remember: People who want to convince you of something only use these broader narratives to do it when they don't have enough evidence to do it based on the story right in front of them. You can only fight this in your mind by focusing on what provably actually happened.
For example: So a kid brought a few vapes to school. Does that mean that an epidemic of drug dealing is sweeping our middle schools? Actually, no; drug use among kids is at historic lows (because kids don't hang out together in person anymore, is my theory, but that's a whole different thing). Though also a little yes, because marijuana vapes are absurdly easy to come by and kids are vulnerable to the concentrations of THC.
Especially watch out for anything that confirms "what you've always known" or what you believe deeply. People these days use that kind of thing to give you misinformation or get you to agree with things that you don't actually agree with. Like, yes you might personally think this kink is gross, but be suspicious of something that confirms that it is in fact Very Harmful. They're putting the Misinformation Pill in Confirmation Bias Chocolate Coating for you.
You're fine. Thought crimes are fake. If someone is telling you that you have thought crimes, they're trying to control what you think, and that's poisonous. You should be able to think terrible thoughts, understand why they crossed your mind, and choose yourself as a sentient being whether or not to follow up on them IRL. Thought control is only pushed by people who don't want you thinking through their bullshit.
And if you feel you're a bad person for thinking bad things, welcome to being a sack of meat and electrical impulses. Imagining you're evil for your thoughts is the sort of thing people do when they want to do better but they don't know how to do better so they just start restricting themselves from doing worse instead.
I promise you, I've defended many people who've done truly bad things to other people, and nearly all of them were just stupid flawed people who were still worth defending. You're worth defending too.
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