Inspired by sixpenceee’s Call of The Void post.
Intrusive thoughts are unwelcome and upsetting involuntary thoughts, images, or ideas. We all experience these disturbing thoughts that fly through our heads from time to time. You may be driving and experience the involuntary thought of crashing your car into the one in front of you. You may be standing on a bridge and have a sudden urge to jump off. Perhaps you are cooking dinner and wonder what it would be like to stab your significant other with the large steak knife you’re holding. You quickly dismiss these thoughts, but they are disturbing nonetheless.
Luckily, these thoughts are normal. A recent study showed that 94 percent of people experience intrusive thoughts in their daily lives.
Sigmund Freud proposed an interesting theory to explain these intrusive thoughts. You may be familiar with his psychoanalytic theory of the conscious and unconscious mind. Essentially, the unconscious represents the irrational and instinctual side of our brain. It is made up of three parts: Id, Ego, and Super Ego.
Buried at the bottom of our unconscious mind is the Id, which represents all of our most basic, instinctual desires. Within the Id lies the life force (our basic human survival instincts) and the death force (our negative human destructive instincts). Freud concluded that people hold an unconscious desire to die, but that this desire is overpowered by the life instincts. He proposed that intrusive thoughts are a appendage of this death force.
When an individual tries to suppress thoughts, the frequency of those thoughts increases and becomes even more apparent than before. A Harvard Study showed that the more you try to suppress a thought, the more intrusive it becomes. In the study, they asked people to NOT think of a white bear. Participants were allowed to think of anything expect for the bear. But of course, being told not to think about the bear only made them think about it more.
Going to great lengths to suppress these thoughts and prevent them from occurring is associated with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. The best thing to do to get rid of these thoughts is not obsessing over them, rather, you should be unresponsive to them and avoid wasting time trying to push the thoughts away.
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