Intrusive thoughts are common thoughts that everyone has experienced at some point in their life. As the name implies, intrusive thoughts are unwanted thoughts that come to mind, sometimes out of nowhere.
While most people have had intrusive thoughts and they don’t cause too many issues, it’s more debilitating for some people than others, such as those with OCD, anxiety, and other mental illnesses. As someone with an anxiety disorder, I’ve suffered from intrusive thoughts, mainly violent ones, and a lot of that suffering came from me not knowing what they were or how to stop them.
Since I started therapy years ago, I’ve gotten better at coping with intrusive thoughts, but they still unnerve me occasionally. Here are some things you might not know about them, or some thoughts you may have had if you, too, suffer from intrusive thoughts:
1. You can’t control them.
As the name implies, intrusive thoughts intrude on you. You can’t control them nor did you create them in the first place. For whatever reason, our brains latch onto these thoughts, some more than others, that appear, sometimes out of the blue.
2. You think you control them.
If you’re like me, you feel like you should be able to control your thoughts. It’s your own brain, after all; how could you not be in control of them? I often have an inner monologue running, so intrusive thoughts being out of control still bother me.
But while I still don’t know where these thoughts come from or why I have them, I’ve accepted that brains are weird. Sometimes they do things that don’t make sense, and this is just one of the ways that they don’t.
3. You try to suppress them.
For years, I tried to suppress and ignore the intrusive thoughts I had in hopes of them coming less frequently. I thought pretending they didn’t exist or forcefully pushing them back in my mind was the best way to deal with them.
Unfortunately, suppressing your thoughts has the opposite effect: the more you try to push them away, the louder they become, and the more frequently they occur. When you acknowledge but don’t give them power, they start to occur less.
4. You think they’re your own thoughts.
Because I spend so much time in my head, I thought that any thought I had reflected how I really felt. You can imagine how distressing this was when I started having violent and vulgar intrusive thoughts. I thought it meant that I was really thinking about those things and it confused me. What if these thoughts were things I secretly thought and I was a bad person?
I’ve had to unlearn that thoughts don’t always align with what you’re feeling, especially intrusive thoughts. I know who I am deep down, and that is not a person who wants to hurt others.
5. You feel guilty for having them.
As mentioned earlier, I thought I was a bad person for having intrusive thoughts. My guilt grew so much that, in high school, I fell into a depressive episode and had suicidal thoughts. Even after I went to therapy and took medication, I still didn’t tell my providers about my intrusive thoughts for the longest time, feeling ashamed.
But these thoughts happen to anyone, and I eventually told my healthcare team about them. That helped me immensely in dealing with them and realizing that they didn’t define me as a person.
At the end of the day, intrusive thoughts are just that — thoughts.
It’s easy to think you’re the only one who feels this way and decide to keep it a secret, but the truth is, probably everyone has experienced intrusive thoughts at least once in their life. It’s not a unique experience. More importantly, it doesn’t make you a bad person.
If you struggle with intrusive thoughts, I hope you know you’re not alone, and you’re not a bad person for having them. In addition to talking with a doctor if you can, there are other resources out there that can help you so you can live your life without unnecessary guilt like I had so many years ago. Freeing myself from intrusive thoughts was hard but worth it.
