Just thoughts
I have a theory that many of a person’s habits of thought are formed when they are young. This theory posits that people develop certain ways of thinking about stuff: things that they daydream about, or certain narratives that they fall back on through which they try to make sense of their lives. And these habits of thought become like the wagon trenches that they repeatedly crash back into throughout their lives whether they mean to or not. You know--you turn the wheels and get out of the ruts for a bit, but every once in a while you still hear that crunch when the wheels crash back into the trench. Some people, when they are in their late teens (a fairly critical point in brain maturation) develop intrusive, self-destructive thoughts as a matter of habit, and sometimes those thoughts become habitual, a way of thinking/daydreaming/narrating their lives that they fall into as a routine part of their existence. Fortunately, many (most? lots? nearly all? how optimistic are you feeling today?) survive these intrusive thoughts. They manage to wade out of the molasses of self-doubt to live an actual life, despite the fact that their brains clearly hate them. However, I suspect that many people who were suicidal when they were young, and survive that to go on to live mostly normal lives, still fall into thinking those thoughts, because those thoughts had been the constant background noise of their brains at a time when their brains were in a formative stage. These people are no longer suicidal, but they still think—almost casually—about ways to kill themselves. What would be the least dramatic? The least painful? The time at which it would have the least impact? Not because they are actually “making plans” but because it’s one of the default settings their brain has developed.
Does this make any sense to anyone else? Are there any psych experts out there who might care to comment on this?
