little thoughts of horrors - a guide to intrusive thoughts

Have you ever been so disturbed by a horror movie that you feel it in your bones, but yet you can’t look away?

This sort of experience is a uniting factor amongst almost everyone who’s ever been a high school student, amongst whom staying up late with a scary movie and trying to freak out one’s friends is practically a rite of passage. And as freaked out as you were when you had this particular experience, the fear and horror is tempered by the thrill and the warm filter of carefree friendship so that you look back on it with nostalgia, rather than distaste.

But what happens when the horror show isn’t amongst the comfort of familiar faces?

What if never stops?

What if it’s in your head?

For many people, this is neither fiction, nor fun and games. It’s a harrowing daily reality.

According to the Mayo Clinic, an intrusive thought is an “unwelcome involuntary thought, image, or unpleasant idea that may become an obsession”. These thoughts are frequently upsetting or distressing, and can feel next to impossible to eliminate from one’s mind. While they can occur across a range of conditions, intrusive thoughts are a primary feature of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, which is one of the most commonly diagnosed co-morbidities of Tourette Syndrome.

In my own experience, intrusive thoughts have been one of the most challenging and upsetting aspects of life with Tourette Syndrome. Yet, I’ve found that they’re rarely talked about.

There are several reasons for this. Intrusive thoughts are not well understood, nor is the concept one that most people seem to be at all familiar with. It is often the case that people are so upset by their intrusive thoughts that it is simply emotionally difficult and draining to bring them from the sphere of one’s mind into common reality by speaking them aloud. But most of all, they’re heavily stigmatized. In my own life, the #1 biggest challenge in communicating my experience with intrusive thoughts has been the simple yet profound fear of being thought of as insane.

You see, these thoughts are not simply “unpleasant”. They are, quite frankly, the mechanism by which one’s mind tortures itself with the most disturbing, horrific types of things that it can conjure up. Whatever it is that is the most diametrically opposed to what you value and who you want to be as a person, and whatever it is that taps into your deepest fears: these are the fibers from which intrusive thoughts are spun. And they don’t stop on their own - they linger, like a festering wound, turning your stomach to rock while twisting your mind into a haunted, foul place.

Until, that is, one receives the proper treatment which allows them to confront these thoughts and put an end to the mental horror-show merry-go-round.

That is, if the individual ever receives help.

Because this particular problem is so heavily stigmatized there is a severe lack of dialogue surrounding it. Despite the likelihood that this problem is entirely commonplace in the Tourette Syndrome community, there are undoubtedly countless individuals suffering alone due to the lack of awareness that they are not alone.

I found myself in this situation for a long time.

I can remember being as young as maybe eight or nine years old and being haunted by never-ending thoughts of awful things. I felt, in my mind, the pain of losing my family, of being in all sorts of disasters, of seeing my pets run over by a car, and even of ending my own life.

I knew that none of these things were real, or things that I actually wanted to think about. On the contrary, I was scared beyond belief by these thoughts. I wanted them out of my head, but the more I tried to push them away, the closer and more maddeningly fixed in place they were.

I never talked about these things. Instead, I stayed silent while they drove me further into a severe anxiety-ridden and depressed state.

By this point, I was probably eleven years old. I never truly told anyone about what was going on in my head until I was in college. I suffered, needlessly, for YEARS.

But the bittersweet news in all of this, and the crux of my point: I didn’t have to suffer.

All along, there were treatments that could have helped me, had I known that this was such a common issue and reached out for help sooner.

When I was twenty-one, I finally signed myself up for Acceptance Committment Therapy (ACT). ACT is a therapy designed for anxiety disorders and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder which has been scientifically demonstrated to reduce the impact of symptoms on one’s life and well-being by teaching methods to disrupt the negative cycle of self-hatred and fixation which symptoms such as intrusive thoughts create. In this therapy I learned that I while I may experience intrusive thoughts, I have the ability to replace the instant self-loathing and fear they once elicited with a calmer attitude of observation and acceptance. With this new mindset, I had the ability to stop expending so much energy trying to replace these negative thoughts, and gained the ability to focus instead on things that I valued. Over time, I found that this helped me to not only feel less discomfort in response to my intrusive thoughts, but to stop having so many to begin with.

So finally, after all that internal drama and pain, I started to get better within a mere span of weeks. After about three months in therapy I felt like a brand new person. I felt free.

I still suffer from intrusive thoughts from time to time, but they are not constant. They do not haunt me. They do not rule me. They do not torture me.

They do not have to torture anyone else, either, so long as we remove the stigma and start bringing these experiences into real conversations.