Have you ever had thoughts so terrible that you wouldn’t dream of telling anyone? Thoughts that scared you? Thoughts you would NEVER have thought yourself to be capable of? With content so unspeakable that you thought you were going insane?
If you have you are not alone, not only those with mental illness or obsessive compulsive disorders have these types of thoughts but around 94% of the population have, had, and or will have intrusive thoughts at some point in their lives.
Intrusive thoughts range from mildly annoying to catastrophic, they can be about just about anything (although many people report thoughts of violence, self harm, or harming someone else) and can happen in short-term stress related situations or over longer periods of time. Most peoples biggest fear regarding them is that the thoughts are true or that they will act on them or that they are going insane.
My personal experience with intrusive thoughts began as a young child with thoughts such as: “No one likes you.” , “There’s something in your closet.” , “You’re parents/family/brothers hate you.” They came in waves of crushing waves of paranoia or just as sprinkles on my day to day activities. As a child I was not aware of what they were or that they weren’t true and I spent a very long time believing everything I thought to be the truth.
Throughout my adolescence and young adult hood I struggled with what my doctors and parents believed to be run of the mill anxiety(social) and depressive symptoms and to be fair I had never told anyone about these thoughts at that point in my life for fear that I would be committed to an institution or that it would come out that I had, in fact, completely lost my mind. As I became more informed about mental health related issues throughout my treatment for depression and social anxiety and through my own internet research, I became increasingly more aware of my intrusive thoughts and I sought to banish them. This of course did not work. The harder you attempt to avoid or push back against intrusive thoughts the more intense and frequent they can become.
At this point I still had not told anyone including my therapists, doctors or parents about these thoughts and I felt truly alone with them. It wasn’t until after I had my first child that I came to understand the exact nature of intrusive/paranoid thinking and understood that I was not alone.
I was hit particularly hard with postpartum depression and I was having severe intrusive thoughts and a huge amount of anxiety surrounding them along with panic attacks. I was having thoughts that something terrible was going to happen to my daughter, that I would fall down the stairs with her in my arms and crush her, or that if I left her alone with someone that they were going to hurt her. I sought treatment for this because it was affecting every aspect of my life, I wouldn’t let her out of my sight, I would rush like a mad woman every time I needed a shower because I felt like if I wasn’t there she was going to get hurt.
So finally I told a close family member about these thoughts and was shocked to learn that I was not alone in this and that many women with postpartum in particular had these horrific things coming to mind. With treatment and a new awareness of what was actually happening to me I was able to slowly overcome the anxiety and panic attacks that were attached to these intrusive thoughts.
Although, I don’t know if they will ever completely go away and I continue to have waves of them periodically, especially in times of high stress or change, I do know that I am not alone, I’m not crazy, and there is hope for me after all.
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More stories from Braven Marks and writers in Psyche and other communities.
The First Story She Ever Wrote
I watched Titanic the movie for the first time a year after it came out in 1998. I was eight years old and I was too young. The effects this had on my undeveloped brain were profound, so profound in fact I am still dealing with the after-effects 23 years later. “How?” you say could a film have such lasting effects on a child’s brain? Let me tell you! At eight years old I was as naive as naive gets, I blindly trusted those around me who were supposed to protect and care for me but I already had this intense need for belonging and love. My parents were separated when I was four and my mother an alcoholic moved me across the country and fell in love (or trauma bonded) with a hopelessly devastatingly deeply traumatized alcoholic man. She moved him in, married him, and had another child all in a very short few years and I was just along for the ride. My mother always valued having a man over the quality of the man and the effects they may have on her children. So to put it bluntly my mother chose an alcoholic man over me, and for the next decade chose him again and again and again. You can imagine how invalidating of an environment that was for a child to grow up in, constantly being emotionally abused and neglected by the one person who was supposed to care about her in the world. I hated this man for a very long time and hated my mother for taking me away from my biological father and subjecting me to this man’s alcoholism and violent unpredictable behavior. “What does this have to do with the movie Titanic?”. Well My friend I will tell you now. As I sat and watched this very sad and terribly inappropriate movie for an eight-year-old I saw my mother’s relationship playing out on the screen. Cal in the place of my new stepfather, Rose in the place of my mother, and to my great surprise, a wonderfully charming, handsome, and extremely validating young man Jack who although he has no possessions or status or money (all of the things my mother sought in a man aka security) in the world rescues and saves Rose from her terribly abusive relationship with Cal. At that moment my brain idealized Jack and instantly created this fantasy in my head of a man that would love me unconditionally and save me from my life. “That’s what we’re waiting for,” my brain said to me. “We need someone to save us.”. So from then on, that’s what I sought out, intense and passionate connections with people who loved me unconditionally, or at least I thought they would. In my sophomore year of high school, I thought I finally found him, my knight, in shining armor here to save me from my life and myself. Here to love me unconditionally and to live happily ever after with. I’m not exactly sure when the first time I split on him was but I did, any hint of invalidation or disinterest sent me into a spiral of emotions I couldn’t control leading me to knock my knight off of his horse and into the dirt for me to step on. I didn’t know then that I was the toxic one, I didn’t know borderline personality disorder existed, and I definitely didn’t know what splitting was. For those of you who don’t know splitting is a term used in psychology referring to black and white thinking. Something can either be all good, or all bad, idealized or devalued, I love you don’t leave me, I hate you leave me alone. I had no clue I was doing this and no one cared enough to help me figure it out so I went on like this for some time exhibiting this black and white thinking that changed on a dime many other extreme emotional behaviors until one day my knight, the one who was going to save me, cheated on me. I was completely devastated, I hated him for doing it, I hated myself because I obviously wasn’t worth saving, I hated her most of all for being beautiful and perky and blonde, all of the things I would never be. After this, I was very cautious in all of my relationships and I trusted no one, I became certain that no one could ever love me for me. So I stopped being me. I hid all of the parts of myself that I had ever been criticized, bullied, devalued, dismissed, or berated for. I became a shell of myself mirroring the actions, interests, values, and behaviors of those around me changing like a chameleon with each interaction in an attempt to keep people from abandoning me. But they did. Seemingly over and over again. Every romantic relationship and platonic friendship I had eventually left. I was never good enough to be loved unconditionally. I didn’t deserve it and I wasn’t worthy of it, or at least that’s what I thought. I was 31 years old when I was finally diagnosed with borderline personality disorder after I had burnt my entire life to the ground for the hundredth time. I began therapy holding the belief that I was the victim in the situation, that it was all my partner’s fault and they were the villain in my head. I wanted to know why I kept attracting people who weren’t good for me and that I wasn’t good enough for. After a few weeks of therapy and some different assessments, my therapist told me her findings and that there was a very good possibility I was borderline. I struggled with this greatly in the beginning, every time I searched “Borderline personality disorder” on the internet I was met with the stigma of the disorder, information to help friends and family of people with borderline to cope with their toxicity or to leave them completely. All of these articles and books and posts about people with this disorder painting them as the toxic villains of the story. It was extremely devastating for me, but I finally understood why people were always leaving me. The cold hard truth was not an easy pill to swallow, I was the villain, or at the very least toxic. This gave me a new lens to look through my entire life with and everything became crystal clear. There was no doubt in my mind that I had the disorder, I recognized all nine of the qualifying traits in myself. I grew up in the perfect microcosm of narcissistic, invalidating, addiction-filled chaos that would lead to them. My fear of abandonment and self-hatred had led me to behave in toxic ways and with zero self-awareness. It became clear that no one had really left me, I had pushed them all away, in my frantic efforts to avoid abandonment. I am slowly learning how to live with this disorder, and maybe someday I’ll even recover from it but for now, I’ll have to accept it for what it is. I am doing the work, becoming more self-aware each day, gaining confidence and self-respect, doing my best to maintain my relationships with others, practicing gentle parenting (which is the HARDEST thing I’ve ever done but that’s a whole different story), and going to therapy. My life may never look like I thought it would or how I envisioned my story to play out as a child, but I know now that I don’t need a man to save me, the only way I can be “saved” is if I do it myself! I am the author of my own story now and I’m changing the narrative!
By Braven Marks3 years ago in Psyche
The Invisble amongst us
"In January 2021, I was driving to see my mother at a local hospital. Traffic halted suddenly, and I was so happy I did not strike the vehicle in front of me. I gazed up in my rear-view mirror just as the vehicle behind struck my little sub-compact vehicle. "
By Bruce Curle `6 days ago in Psyche
How My Life’s Purpose to Have an Unbreakable Heart Left Me Broken in Life
Ever noticed how people who are afraid of having their heart broken often end up feeling broken? Until recently, that was the case for me anyway. I was always striving to have an unbreakable heart — but never quite succeeded. What did it mean for me to “have an unbreakable heart”? For one, it meant that I was always trying to protect my heart from everything and everyone. I thought I could achieve that by not letting anything or anyone in. You’ve probably heard about the concept of “building walls around your heart”. That’s what I was doing. I built high, wide, fortified walls around my heart — walls that would even make the Great Wall of China look small.
By Unbreakable Heart4 days ago in Psyche
Comments (1)
You definitely aren’t alone. I hope you are doing well, i know you wrote this awhile ago now.