Care Pack #016
Intrusive Thoughts
For the thoughts you would never say out loud. They are far more common than anyone admits, and they do not mean what you are afraid they mean.
Before you begin, where are you right now?
One tap. It gives you something to measure against at the end.
A thought arrives that is violent, or sexual, or blasphemous, or about somebody you love being hurt. It is completely against everything you believe. You recoil from it, and then a second and worse thought follows: what kind of person thinks that?
Almost everybody has these. They are one of the most common experiences in mental health and one of the least reported, because the content feels like evidence against you and saying it out loud feels like a confession. So people carry them privately for years, and the privacy is the part that makes them grow.
The horror you feel about the thought is the clearest sign it is not what you want. That reaction is the whole point.
The line that matters
Everything on this page is about unwanted thoughts: the ones that horrify you, that you push against, that feel like they arrived from outside your own values.
That is a different thing from wanting to. If a thought feels like something you want to act on, if you find yourself planning, gathering means, or thinking about when rather than recoiling at whether, then this pack is not the right page and the difference is important.
If that is where you are, whether the harm points at you or at somebody else, get somebody now. Call or text 988, or your local emergency number. Saying it out loud to a person trained for it is the whole of what is being asked of you.
- 1.Label it without arguing with it: that is an intrusive thought. Naming it is the whole move, and it is not the same as agreeing with it
- 2.Do not try to push it out or swap it for a better one. Suppression is what makes these louder, reliably
- 3.Let it sit there unanswered while you carry on with whatever you were doing. Hands back on the task
- 4.Notice the horror you feel about it. That reaction is information about your values, not about your intentions
- 5.It will pass on its own once you stop feeding it. Every one you have ever had already has
What they actually are
A brain generates enormous quantities of material, most of it junk, most of it never noticed. Occasionally it produces something that violates your values so sharply that you notice it hard, and the noticing is what makes it stick. That is the entire mechanism.
The content of an intrusive thought tends to be precisely what would horrify you most. It is not a wish, and it is not a warning. It is your alarm system misfiring at the thing you care about protecting.
People who are frightened by these thoughts are, as a group, notably unlikely to act on them. The distress is doing exactly what distress does: telling you something is contrary to who you are.
The four loops that keep them going
The thought itself is not the problem. What you do to get rid of it is what turns a passing moment into a pattern, and all four of these feel like relief while making it worse.
Checking
Going back to make sure. Re-reading the message, checking the knife drawer, checking your own reaction to see whether it felt wrong enough.
What it costs
Each check teaches your brain that the thought was worth checking, so the next one arrives with more weight.
Reassurance
Asking someone whether you are a good person, or asking the internet whether people who think this ever do it.
What it costs
It works for about twenty minutes. Then the doubt returns needing a slightly bigger dose, and you have taught yourself you cannot settle it alone.
Suppression
Pushing the thought away, replacing it, praying it out, refusing to let it finish.
What it costs
The most reliably counterproductive of all of them. Trying not to think something is a way of thinking it on a schedule.
Avoidance
Not holding the baby. Not being alone with someone. Staying off bridges, out of kitchens, away from the person the thought involved.
What it costs
It shrinks your life to the size of the fear, and confirms to you that the danger was real enough to require the precaution.
The ones nobody says
Some content is so frightening to admit that people carry it for decades. Thoughts about harming a child. Sexual thoughts about the wrong person entirely. Thoughts about a partner, a parent, yourself. Blasphemous thoughts arriving at the worst possible moment for someone devout.
New and expectant parents get a particularly cruel version: vivid, unwanted images of something terrible happening to the baby, or of being the cause of it. This is a widely recognised experience among new parents, and it is overwhelmingly fear rather than desire. What if I dropped him is a very different sentence from I want to.
Many people never say this to anybody, because they are frightened of what will happen if they do. That fear is real and it deserves to be taken seriously rather than waved away. What is also true is that this is a recognised presentation, and clinicians working in this area are familiar with the difference between an unwanted intrusive thought and an intention.
If the fear of how it will be received is the thing keeping you silent, that fear is itself a good place to start. "There is something I have been afraid to tell anyone, and I am worried about what happens if I do" is a complete and reasonable opening sentence.
What actually helps
The approach with the strongest track record runs opposite to instinct. Rather than arguing with the thought, disproving it, or driving it out, you let it be there without responding to it, and you stop performing the rituals that were meant to neutralise it.
That is uncomfortable, and it is much easier with somebody guiding it than alone off a web page. It is worth asking for by name: tell whoever you see that you have unwanted intrusive thoughts and ask what they use for them.
In the meantime, the single most useful habit is the small one at the top of this page. Notice it, name it as an intrusive thought, leave it unanswered, and go back to what you were doing.
Where to go next
You are not the thought. You are the one recoiling from it, and that has been true every single time.
You reached the end. Where are you now?
One tap, however it landed.
Take this one with you
You will not remember which page this was on at three in the morning. Put your email in and this pack comes to you, then one steady letter a month. Never a gate, and it stops the moment you say so.
There is more on the shelf
66 other packs sit alongside this one, written for the stretch you are in. All of them free, all of them yours.
See the other packsThis digital shelf is free for everyone, and it stays that way because people hold it open. You can be one of them, from $12 a month. Nobody is ever charged to read a pack.