*Trigger Warning!*
In the middle of this post there is a real life example of actual intrusive thoughts I have had. They are disturbing. I debated whether to include them or not. I chose to include them so that others who have also had disturbing thoughts can see that they aren’t alone. I will make sure it is clear what portions you should skip to avoid reading any of it.
As I mentioned in my last post about my commitment issues, I wanted to write a post in response to Rae’s follow-up post about intrusive thoughts.
I didn’t know that Rae was experiencing intrusive thoughts. When I read her post about it, I had a lot of mixed emotions. I was so happy that she was able to find relief in her work with a therapist. I was a little amazed at how well I understood what she was talking about. I was grateful to add a couple more tools to my own arsenal. And I was really frustrated at myself for not sharing with her what I had learned about handling intrusive thoughts years ago.
Many years ago, I had the opportunity to watch a seminar that was intended for clinical therapists. I was not then nor am I now a clinical therapist. But this seminar provided a new schema1 for me, one that has proved absolutely invaluable. I really want to credit the presenter, but when I say this happened many years ago, I mean somewhere around 10 years ago. I do not remember the presenter’s name. And doing a Google search to try to find this particular presenter or even this particular theory yielded no helpful results. I do apologize for not being able to cite my source.
Moving on.
This seminar was focused specifically on Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). One of the distressing symptoms accompanying PTSD is recurring flashbacks. When you are going about your daily life and something–big or small–triggers your mind to relive the past trauma. People will go out of their way to avoid triggers so as to avoid flashbacks. Sometimes it is easy to avoid a trigger, other times the pattern of avoidance takes over your life.
So what do you do about it?
This presenter’s suggestion surprised me: stop trying to avoid it.
You may not be as surprised as I was, but I was hearing this in a time before people commonly talked about “leaning into the discomfort”.
He continued to explain his suggestion by using the analogy of an unruly roommate. We’ve all had (or seen on TV) that one roommate who just makes your life miserable. You truly wish they weren’t there. Suppose you decide to lock this roommate out of the house. You change the locks after they leave for work or loafing or whatever they do when they aren’t at home, and you begin your new life unencumbered by this annoyance. And this works…until they come home. At which point, they become quite insistent on entering the home that, technically, is still theirs. They will pound on the front door, go around the house to the back door, and keep their noisy attempts to enter the house. Maybe they climb to the open window on the second story and sneak in that way, then come to confront you about being locked out. You were going about your day, doing your thing, living your life, when they came storming back into the house, irate that you even tried to deny them entrance. They will disrupt every moment until you either let them back in the house or they manage to break back into the house (probably causing some collateral damage in the process).
Your initial goal in barring this roommate entrance was greater peace, but you end up with even less peace than before.
Suppose, instead, you don’t change the locks. When they come to the door, you let them come in. They may carry a stink through the house as they slink their way into their bedroom, but once they are in the bedroom, you don’t actually notice them all that much. Sure, they may cause a mess in the bathroom or the kitchen. They may steal your food on occasion. But compared to the hell they raise to get into the house they are locked out of, the disruption is actually quite minimal. It’s still unpleasant, I’m not trying to say that they suddenly became the best roommate ever. But you will probably end up discovering that the fear and dread of that discomfort that has caused you to try to avoid it at any cost has been making it all much worse than it needs to be.
The fight to keep the unruly roommate out ends up causing more chaos and grief than just letting them exist in the shared space.
I was already convinced by the presenter of this seminar, but I decided to try it out. PTSD is not on the list of things I suffer from, for which I am incredibly grateful, but this concept doesn’t apply to only PTSD. It is also very useful for addressing intrusive thoughts.
One memorable intrusive thought I once experienced was, “Throw the baby off the balcony.” It was memorable for a few reasons. One is because of how truly horrified I was at the thought of doing harm to the baby in my arms. I literally took several steps away from the railing and clutched that baby tight to my chest, purely to avoid any possibility of that happening, even accidentally.
Trigger Warning!
The other main reason this was memorable was because I was able to apply this “unruly roommate” narrative to what I was experiencing. My inner monologue when a little something like this:
Intrusive Amelia: Throw the baby off the balcony
Normal Amelia: WHAT?!?! NOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!
Intrusive Amelia: Imagine how bad that would be. Can you imagine how terrible it would be to cause such harm to the baby? I wonder if the baby would die or if they’d just be permanently disabled like that one neighborhood kid when you were little. What would it sound like?
Normal Amelia: STOP!
Intrusive Amelia: *doesn’t stop*
Normal Amelia: *talking over Intrusive Amelia* NO! I need to give this baby a hug for my own reassurance. The baby is fine. I am fine. There wasn’t any chance that I was going to act on that thought. It was never going to happen. It isn’t abnormal to have those sorts of thoughts pop into your head. It is a normal kind of glitch. It isn’t you thinking about what you want to do or dreaming of what you wish you could do. If your mind is a stage and the actors coming onto the stage are thoughts, then that thought was a drunkard who snuck past the security guards. He’s gonna moon you from that stage, but I can either focus on how awful that is, or I can choose to focus on something else. Yeah, he’s still on stage. Yeah, I really wish he had never made it onto the stage in the first place. Yeah, it’s kind of hard to redirect my attention elsewhere, and that’s okay. These things happen. He’ll get bored of creating a scene and then he’ll leave. This is not a reflection of who I am. This is just my dumb, unruly roommate deciding to make my life miserable. My roommate does not control me. My roommate sucks. There is nothing wrong with me for having this kind of roommate.
*Yes, I talk to myself both in third and first person. It’s not consistent. Sue me.
End of Trigger Warning
While this was a particularly memorable intrusive thought, and it was unpleasant recalling Intrusive Amelia’s comments, I was very proud of myself. In that moment, when I had an intrusive thought, I let it be. I let it be, and it passed. The distress I experienced from that intrusive thought stayed in the moment. I am literally tearing up right now, as I’m writing this, because of how relieved I was/am to have a way of managing intrusive thoughts that is very effective for me.
Shame thrives in secrecy (thank you Brene Brown). And shame promotes secrecy. Intrusive thoughts can feel like something you need to hide and be very ashamed of. If you struggle with intrusive thoughts (or PTSD flashbacks, as this technique was originally intended to address) I would urge you to at least try thinking about those thoughts as an unruly roommate and see if it helps you.
Footnotes
- In psychology, a schema is like a framework for interpreting information/experiences. I think of it a little like your information filing system. Sometimes you don’t have any system, and things get pretty chaotic and there isn’t much in the way of a comprehensible structure. Sometimes you have a system but it doesn’t work well and you end up stymied every step of the way. Sometimes, like baby bear’s porridge, your schema is just right and it allows you to function in a healthy, adaptive way. ↩︎
Emotional Support Sisters 
Leave a comment