I is for Intrusive Thoughts
Please be advised that I will be giving a few examples of intrusive thoughts.The cycle of OCD is usually that you have an obsession which then provokes a compulsion. Well, obsessions can start with intrusive thoughts.
Wikipedia defines an intrusive thought as “an unwelcome, involuntary thought, image, or unpleasant idea that may become an obsession, is upsetting or distressing, and can feel difficult to manage or eliminate.”
It’s important to realize that everybody has ITs! The brain is a very strange place for everybody. Sometimes it likes to throw random thoughts your way. A normal, healthy* brain will flag these thoughts as spam, but an OCD brain will move them into the high priority inbox.
So, for example, if I’m driving along the highway, my brain might go: “Let’s drive into oncoming traffic do it do it DO IT.”
A healthy brain would then respond: “Uh…NO. Weird thought.” But they wouldn’t assign any meaning to it.
But an OCD brain would respond: “Oh my gosh, why did I have that thought? Does that mean I’m suicidal? Am I a danger to other people?” This becomes an obsession, which may provoke the compulsion to stop driving, to drive more slowly, or to not drive on the highway.
In therapy, you work a lot on recognizing that “a thought is a thought.” There are no good thoughts or bad thoughts. They are just thoughts. The moment you assign meaning to them is when things get tricky. You can dislike a thought but accept that you’re having it. It’s all about being mindful and letting the thoughts come and go as they please.
If you wish to step into the mind of somebody with OCD, I recommend Turtles All the Way Down by John Green or Unraveled by, hey, Claire Olivia Golden. 🙂 They both have main characters with OCD who experience a lot of intrusive thoughts.
*As an aside, I don’t want people to tell me, “Oh, your brain is perfectly healthy and normal. Don’t be so hard on yourself!” But the thing is, I KNOW my brain is unhealthy. That’s sort of the point of a mental illness. You wouldn’t tell someone with the stomach flu that they’re perfectly healthy and shouldn’t describe themself otherwise. So, yeah, I have a messed-up brain. That’s okay. I can cope with it. But there’s no use pretending it DOESN’T have a problem.