Those Things We Never Talk About, by A Mentally Ill Girl

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[This is an attempt at a lighthearted (but informative) take on something that is absolutely horrible and destroys thousands of lives. Not lighthearted at all are the subjects you’ll find mentioned here: rape, sexual assault, suicide and child murder. So please, be safe.]

Welcome to the fun world of Fucked-Up Intrusive Thoughts! I’ll start.

When I was very young (nine? ten?) I heard a news story about ‘devil worshippers’ on the radio. My family were very religious at the time, but SURPRISE! I had severe OCD, although no-one knew it back then. By the end of the day I had convinced myself I was a devil worshipper, for no other reason than because things like ‘all that jumping around on the furniture you, a child of ten, are doing right now? That’s actually what devil worship is’ kept popping into my head. I lay awake that night fairly convinced I was going to hell, because OF COURSE I had accidentally worshipped the devil, and God was unlikely to care about whether I’d actually meant to or not. Eternity in hell for the ten-year-old!

Anyway, it got much much worse from there. Because intrusive thoughts are horrible, horrible things and while they can easily convince a little girl that she’s a devil worshipper they can also easily convince a grown adult that she just verbally abused someone in public, or needs to throw herself out of a moving car, or just sexually abused their newborn baby, or anything in fact. Fun times.

You would be amazed at how many people don’t understand intrusive thoughts. Even people in social justice circles. Like, it tends to go like this:

PERSON 1: I have disturbing, inappropriate sexual thoughts. Please help me get rid of them somehow.
PERSON 2: Clearly you are a Problematic™ potential predator/rapist. Away with you.

And so on. (This is actually not much of an exaggeration, by the way). But intrusive thoughts, be they of killing your child, committing sexual assault, pushing someone onto the railway tracks or anything – there’s one thing they all have in common –

You’re not going to do them.

No, you’re really not. I know this so firmly I’ve put it in both bold and italic. But don’t just take my word for it, everyone agrees and everyone knows that you’re not going to do them. Wikipedia agrees! OCD UK agrees! Clinical psychologists agree! The Huffington Post agrees!

Unfortunately, OCD and intrusive thoughts are designed to make you, brave soldier, completely disagree with this statement. But no matter what’s going on inside your head I swear that nothing horrible is happening outside of it. (Many has been the time I’ve had to look around and come to the conclusion ‘No-one is yelling at me or trying to hit me, so I must not have launched a torrent of slurs and insults onto a stranger in the street after all.’)

LASTLY, A VERY IMPORTANT THING: Apparently everyone actually gets intrusive thoughts – violent ones, sexual ones, disgusting ones – from time to time, but their brains healthily tune all that crap out. I cannot imagine what this may be like, and am somewhat jealous.

SOME FREQUENTLY RARELY ASKED QUESTIONS:

I keep having thoughts of hurting people I know/friends/family. Am I an abuser? – Nope. You have an anxiety disorder that keeps replaying scenarios that you’re afraid of. A thought alone doesn’t make you an abuser, the motivation behind those thoughts does. Your motivation is ‘oh god no these thoughts and these actions are horrible’. The absolute opposite of a abuser.

I keep having thoughts of harming my baby, am I a bad parent? – Nope. You have an anxiety disorder. (This point cannot be repeated enough). Also, if you’re a new mother scared of harming your newborn, you are very much not alone. Also also, no, none of the hundreds of mothers surveyed at that link actually harmed their children. Because that’s not what intrusive thoughts do.

I have sexual images of children pop into my head all the time. Am I a paedophile? – Nope, because you’re not sexually attracted to children. And in fact you’re terrified of the mere thought of it. What you’re getting is gross pop-ups from the internet server that is your mind, that’s all. Because you have an anxiety disorder (there it is again) that prevents you from crossing them out like all these mysterious normal people do.

Are you sure I’m not going to do the things my intrusive thoughts say I will? – I am very, very sure.