Do you deal with intrusive thoughts?

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I've been having them since I was ten and I'm getting sick of having them. Today I was shooting a sweeps piece with an anchor and the thought popped into my mind to spit in his face. Over and over all morning long the thought distracted me as I tried to work. All I could visualize was letting one fly in his face. Then tonight, it was groping a female reporter. How does this all happen?

I've learned over the years to ignore the urges. The very first time it happened when I was ten I was helping mom wash dishes when the thought came to me to plunge a parring knife into her back. I had to fight it off with ounce of will power I had. Since then I've managed to deal with it, but the urges still remain....

I get thoughts like that.....like today I was walking around on campus and the thought of having a gun and shooting them all would not leave my mind. I would not even want to do that, so I don't know why it was all I could think about. So I have experianced that......or like when I was younger and sometimes wished I would find out my mom died in a car wreck i mean I did not feel like she deserved it or anything it was just something to think about. Not sure how that kind of thing happens but it can be annoying and disturbing.

YES it is terrible and I hate it often them come in as visuals and are things I would never want to do or things the upset me.! I thought I was alone! they make me anxeouse i want to be rid of them

It's my understanding that that's an OCD thing, so presumably treatments for OCD would help with that.

I had that pretty intensely in my teen years, but it (mercifully) faded when I was about 19-20. At my age now, I don't think I'd have the mental energy to deal with that at all. Ugh. Difficult stuff.

Meditating for 20 minute sessions 2-3x per day should help with this condition.

What is happening is that the mind is acting sort of like a bully. A bully notices the most sensitive and most receptive people to their bullying and then picks on them using the victims most obvious vulnerabilities. In a similar way, the mind pesters us with thoughts we are most vulnerable to.

Underneath our conscious thoughts, we have all sorts of subconscious thoughts in response to what we experience. E.g., we see a knife and our mind subconsciously makes all sorts of associations with cutting vegetables or stabbing people or memories of the knife being used. An OCDish person who has these types of thoughts is constantly feeling anxious and ashamed and self-conscious so their mind is most receptive to the most unpleasant of these thoughts. The way that those "intrusive" thoughts make you feel... that's how you were feeling to begin with, the thoughts are just an effect, not the cause.

So the remedy is to reorient oneself such that we do not react to such ideas with horror and aversion. Cultivate mental equipoise. When these thoughts surface, stay calm and try to react to them in detached and observant manner.

Is it really only an OCD thing? I only had a few as a teenager and they were more of the ridiculous kind than the "scary" kind, like, i would picture myself doing something totally random in the middle of class and had to fight laughing fits about it. But since then, I had two children, and i read about post natal depression as one does (at least i did) and it is very tightly associated with it. Could another form of depression trigger them? It could be worth exploring...

Up until I was probably fifteen years old, I could not control the urge to spit in my friends' faces, and did so quite a few times. The best reaction I got from this was from my best friend, who took it in stride and spit back at me, leading to a full-on spit war. We make our own fun

So yes, intrusive thoughts, I definitely deal with. Constantly we are bombarded by useless information (sometimes useful, but there is so much more empty chatter than there is relevant information)-- songs whose messages we don't want to absorb, news, pictures, flashing lights. It's a wonder we don't all suffer epilepsy.

I force myself to think in words of my choosing when this gets to be too much, or to reflect on my favorite thoughts. I find myself thinking I need to find some new thoughts to coalesce with the patterns I am already obsessed with, but then I notice that I am humming the Super Mario Brothers theme tune, and get distracted

Yes its happend to me before. since I dont drive and often walk around town, ive often felt the need to throw myself infront of traffic with something telling me if you do it once you'll live and then you can try it again, I mean yeah i know how rediculous it sounds so thats why i never have done it but still

how do you deal with it? I have no clue man.

I once had to have myself locked up (a voluntary psych commitment) in order to be sure I would not be able to act upon a certain intrusive thought, but the rest of the time I have always managed to just say "No!" on my own and to restrain/contain myself. At least in my own case, I tend to think this kind of thing stems from some deep-seated anger I am now slowly overcoming.

Yes I know what you mean. Often when I notice that something is important for somebody, it starts... And like BlueMage was into, the thoughts are the once that are most inapropriate for the situation. I am so glad I have them, because its funny, but I also dont usually have the heavy ones with guns and killing, and I dont have the urge to put them into action.

Yes, they usually have to do with hurting someone, people that I would never want to hurt.

I can remember having similar, but not violent @ 17 or so. It's another piece of evidence of the oddness here that we all experience. At the time you roll with it and accept the above^ And to think of it, when under fatigue, somewhat rarely now I'll still get them.

I think this is a' pseudo OCD type' axis relationship with AS-- those inherent AS fixations or "obsessions" in an random inertial "fire."
I don't think it's a (OCD) co morbid unless it was continual-- I wonder if this is so here, Scoots?

I suppose it could be other things; I don't know. All I know is that descriptions written by people with OCD line up with what people have been describing in this thread.

It might be possible that people who experience less disturbing 'intrusions' don't go to a doctor about it, so it isn't known to medicine. In my case the images/impulses line up with what people are saying here: thoughts of shooting my dad in back when deer hunting, images of razor blades cutting apart my hands, eyes, face, etc.

As to whether it's OCD per se, or OCD-ish -- I don't know, but I don't see a fundamental difference on a neurological level. In terms of the DSM, a person may not have enough traits to check enough boxes to be labelled with OCD, but if their experience is very similar to OCD lablled people, even if in isolated ways, it seems likely their brain likely has some OCD-ish wiring.

Or, perhaps there are people w/OCD with a type of autistic inertia. I don't see those two views as being different. The neurology and experiences are what they are, independent of human labels and the kludgy, crude DSM system of categorization.

My main reason for my previous post was just that if the intrusive thoughts are driving someone nuts such that they can't deal with it anymore, OCD might be a direction look in or ask a doctor about. (I'd half expect a doctor who doesn't know better to start thinking "psychosis," so people ought to know that may not at all be what it is.)

Yes I have the knife thoughts too and whenever im out in public I have the urge to say sexual thoughts out loud.

I deal with intrusive thoughts a lot, though their frequency and the degree they affect me has decreased dramatically since going on Risperdal/Risperidone.

i sometimes have intrusive thoughts (like: while driving, "why not drive straight into an oncoming car?") and am terrified i will impulsively act on them even though i have no desire to, and i get stuck in really terrible thought loops, also i tend to look places i should not, immediately following the thought "should not .. " in conversation .. someone's crotch, food on their face, up nostrils, at a zit, etc etc .. and have a difficult time stifling it. the more i think "do not look there" the more i look there. i thought maybe that one was a tourettish tendency? the urge to do what i should not do overwhelms till i comply with it. luckily it is not anything too severe. i have some tourette- like and some OCD-like traits and can't sort them out. i sometimes feel like a slave to a miswired brain. these things tend to come and go with stress, like lots of other things, confusing me even further.