: A Guide to Fighting the Hellish Bastards that are Intrusive Thoughts

#OCDAwarenessWeek

There's a difference between impulsive + intrusive thoughts.

Impulsive:
- Can be a symptom of a disorder or neurodivergence
- Not inherently bad (your brain telling you to do things)
- Can be unpleasant, but can also be things like "cut your hair off" or "eat the cardboard.”

Intrusive thoughts:
- Can be a symptom of OCD, neurodivergence + other mental illnesses
- Upsetting and often graphic
- Thoughts you do not want + thoughts that scare you (ego dystonic)
- Commonly thoughts about doing something violent or about abuse (triggering)

A PMHA asked our community: Does anyone have experience coping with intrusive thoughts? I don't really know what to do with them besides being confused and waiting for them to chill. Tumblr gave me this advice, and it could read like a slam poem:

1) "Pretend your intrusive thoughts are being said to you by a 13 year old boy on Xbox live trying to get a rise out of you by saying something like "your girlfriend dumped you because you're ugly." You can respond by saying, "That’s nice, Tim. Isn’t it past your bedtime?"

2) "Pretend your intrusive thoughts are being said to you by an annoying backseat driver like "drive into that pole." You can say, "Thanks Susan, or I could not do that!"

Thoughts from our community members:

"I second naming thoughts as a way to help! If that doesn't work, I've had good luck with squeezing an ice cube to give your head something else to focus on. Sometimes just having someone to talk to is the most helpful thing for me."

"I third naming, it saved me! But also distractions such as dog, shower, and workout help. Trying to get over skin picking as a terrible way to cope and my PMHA actually showed me about this fidget spinner - it's really helped with intrusive thoughts and combatting compulsions"

*Skill: Own Your Thoughts*

"Making it external and naming it is sometimes helpful, but also sometimes not so much (ex. saying "that's my OCD and not me" can be like, what? what's me? what's my OCD?).

So first, owning your thoughts - which doesn't mean that they're a reflection of your identity, or that you wanted to have them.

"Owning your thoughts simply means accepting that these are the thoughts going on in your head."

Perhaps you process these thoughts in an "OCD way" (ie. you take them too seriously and assume they deserve urgent responses) and in that case, it's fine to say that it's your OCD that's upsetting you. But the thought itself is not an "OCD thought."

The thought itself is simply a thought. If your first response to any thought is to disown it (ie. "that's not my thought"), then you are starting off by framing your thought as a threat and this is what kicks off the obsessive-compulsive loop. There is nothing to disown.

It's just what you happened to notice going on in the mind. If you want thoughts to stop being intrusive, you have to stop treating them like they are intruders. If you want them to come and go with ease, you have to allow them free passage."

*Skill: Content & Process*

Content refers to the words and images that make up your thoughts. If you could print the thought out and look at it as a series of words, what would those words be?

The content of the thought is merely what the thought is comprised of, like ingredients are the content of a soup." Process, on the other hand, refers to how we taste, experience, and think about the soup and the chef who made it.

One person may say the soup is delicious and applaud the chef and another may say the soup is disgusting and admonish the chef, but this is independent from whether or not the soup contains carrots.

People with OCD may be predisposed to perceive certain thoughts as threats, mandates to do compulsions, or evidence they have done something wrong. Someone without OCD might take the same thought content and process it as meaningless background chatter or junk mail.

In other words, people with OCD process their experiences through an OCD-lens, but the content itself is not unique to the disorder.

*Skill: Content & Process — Example*

Picture yourself standing on a train platform. In front of you is a child and you think, "I'd enjoy pushing that child off the platform and watching them get hid by a train."

Now, presuming you don't have an illustrious history of murdering people, you might find this thought pretty disturbing. It represents pretty much the opposite of your identity.

What is the content?
The content is the idea of pushing the child to their death.

What is the process?
You could process the thought in an OCD way and say, "I shouldn't have had that thought. Only horrible people think that way. I have to back away from the child because I must be a murderer." Or, you could process it by saying, "Well, that's creative."

Some thoughts on managing intrusive thoughts:

"I like to imagine stirring them around in a pot, like a nasty soup. You have to smell it, but you don't have to eat it! A little weird but works for me."

Having intrusive thoughts does not make you a bad person. They are not a reflection of your character.

"Everyone gets intrusive thoughts, but having them doesn't mean you have OCD. For people who do have OCD, these thoughts can be debilitating, causing extreme anxiety and discomfort. No matter how hard you try to get rid of them, they won't go away."

Advice from Jehan Segal: "Over the past few years, I have experienced intrusive thoughts that do not feel like mine. Things that scare me, disturb me, and for a long time, caused me to believe I was a bad person. I walk into a classroom, I think about school shooters.

"I walk into my mother's kitchen, I think about all the things I can do with a knife. Even though I wouldn't act on these thoughts, it's nightmarish and hard to talk about. But it's also a part of how I experience the world."

Discussions about mental illness don't usually stray from depression, anxiety, and suicide. It's not that those subjects aren't important, but when you spend your life imagining death and harm around every corner without any discussion of that experience, it was be dangerous."

It took me a very long time to realize that my intrusive thoughts do not define who I am." - Jehan Segal https://www.rookiemag.com/2015/08/its-loud-in-here/