Intrusive Thoughts & Feelings are often portrayed in horror. Because, yes, they can be horrifying or point to something horrific…
CAUTION!
If you experience intrusive thoughts & feelings in a recurrent and persistent manner, especially tormenting ones, please seek help from qualified professionals as soon as possible. They should examine them and get to the root of them so that they will cease.
But what are intrusive thoughts and feelings, really? More commonly referred to simply as “intrusive thoughts”, but I believe that feelings are also relevant when explaining this phenomenon. Intrusive thoughts and feelings, as the name implies, are ones that intrude. More specifically, within you. They don’t seem to be your own and may even seem foreign to you. As if someone or something is taking over you or tuning into your brain to put things there and influence you toward some end. They can be unsettling, if not just confusing. And in many cases, cause shame and guilt, making you wonder what is wrong with you and if you should be concerned. What if you’re a ticking bomb?
Should you be concerned? While this is indeed a serious issue to be alarmed by, it’s unhelpful to be too harsh on yourself for it. After all, they don’t define you. And if you’re resisting impulses to be destructive, or even refusing to agree with destructive intrusions, you’re already showing character. Still, continually denying them won’t work. They must be checked.
Why do they happen? There are many potential causes for such a thing. The most likely one is being out of touch with your own thoughts and feelings, so much that they have twisted themselves in the dark and are slipping through the cracks, unrecognizable to you. Another likely cause is that you are what is called a “psychic sponge” (highly intuitive and/or empathic) and you’re picking up thoughts and feelings from others but haven’t taken the proper time to acknowledge and trace them to their source (sounds supernatural but isn’t). It can also be attributed to being actively exposed to the same or similar thoughts and feelings, such that they start playing in you like broken records. It could also be one of the Symptoms of Consuming Too Much Horror.
Intrusive thoughts and feelings can be neutral or even positive, but the more unsettling and detrimental types can be the following:
• Violent: Inciting and/or showing you graphic images of harm done or being done, to yourself and/or to others.
• Sexual: Arousing desire and lust, possibly for behaviors and creatures that may be forbidden or looked down on if you were to engage in or with them.
• Eerie: Driving you toward the unknown or even unknowable, as though other planes and dimensions exist and you’re close to discovering them or communicating with them.
• Self-deprecating: Corroding your confidence and esteem, stripping you of your enthusiasm and will to take action or be present, alluding to worthlessness.
• Dooming: Nulling optimism with pessimism, or with “realism” or an overemphasis on crude and cruel realities, leading you to expect the worst scenarios and blocking you from seeing brighter possibilities and the accurate probabilities of them.
Etc.
You are not your thoughts and feelings, less so your intrusive ones, but they come from somewhere and can be quite convincing if you let them. So, retain control.
What are some of the worst intrusive thoughts or feelings you ever had?