What Your Intrusive Thoughts Actually Say About You | Ep. 510
In this episode, I’m breaking down what intrusive thoughts actually say about you, why certain thoughts can feel so threatening to your identity, and how to stop getting pulled into analyzing, proving, and solving them.
In this episode, I’ll share:
- Why intrusive thoughts can feel especially distressing when they clash with your values and your sense of who you are.
- What I want you to understand about the basic rules of thoughts and why having a disturbing thought doesn’t automatically give it meaning.
- Why two people can have the same intrusive thought but respond to it very differently.
- How rumination, reassurance seeking, confessing, and trying to “figure out” a thought can keep you stuck.
- A simple way to practice letting intrusive thoughts come and go without analyzing, fixing, or fighting them.
- How to become more skillful at having uncomfortable thoughts while bringing your attention back to the life you want to live.
What Do My Intrusive Thoughts Mean About Me?
One of the most common questions I hear as an anxiety and OCD specialist is:
“What do my intrusive thoughts mean about me?”
What does it say about me that I had that thought?
Maybe you’ve had a thought that felt violent, disturbing, sexual, offensive, completely out of character, or totally opposite to your values.
And then your brain went to work.
Why did I think that?
What kind of person thinks something like that?
What if I secretly wanted it?
What if this says something terrible about who I really am?
Before you know it, you’ve spent hours analyzing a thought that may have flashed through your mind in a matter of seconds.
So, let’s talk about what’s actually happening when you experience an intrusive thought, why certain thoughts feel so threatening, and most importantly, how you can change your relationship with them.
Content
Why Intrusive Thoughts Can Feel So Personal
Intrusive thoughts can create what I think of as an identity conflict.
We all have an idea of who we are.
We have values. We have things that matter deeply to us. We have beliefs about the kind of partner, parent, friend, employee, or human being we want to be.
And then suddenly, your brain produces a thought that seems to contradict all of that.
Of course you’re going to notice it.
Imagine going to a theater expecting to see a comedy and suddenly realizing you’re watching a horror movie.
You’d probably think:
Wait. What is happening here? This isn’t what I signed up for.
Intrusive thoughts can create a similar reaction.
The thought feels so different from how you understand yourself that your brain immediately wants an explanation.
I’ve Had Intrusive Thoughts Too
I remember driving down Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles many years ago. There were trash cans lined up along the side of the road, and suddenly I had a thought about gleefully driving into every single one of them.
It wasn’t even a “What if I drive into those trash cans?” thought.
It was more like, Let’s slam into them.
Excuse me?!
That didn’t line up with who I believed myself to be. I wouldn’t intentionally destroy someone’s property or drive around causing havoc.
So naturally, the thought caught my attention.
And this is what can happen with intrusive thoughts.
You may have a horrible thought about someone you deeply love.
You might experience a thought that completely contradicts your religious or spiritual beliefs.
You might suddenly question a relationship you’ve previously felt secure in.
The thought can feel significant precisely because it clashes so dramatically with how you see yourself.
But before we decide what that thought means, we need to understand something incredibly important about how thoughts work.
The Basic Rules of Thoughts
I want you to imagine that I’m handing you a little rulebook called:
The Basic Foundations of Being a Human With a Brain.
There are a few things I really want you to understand.
First, humans have thousands of thoughts.
Some are pleasant.
Some are strange.
Some are funny.
Some are disturbing.
Some make absolutely no sense.
And some make us think, Where in the world did THAT come from?
This is part of being human.
People with OCD have intrusive thoughts.
People without OCD have intrusive thoughts.
People with anxiety have intrusive thoughts.
People without anxiety have intrusive thoughts.
We cannot completely control which thoughts our brains generate.
Your Thoughts Will Not Always Match Your Values
This is where I want you to check your expectations.
Sometimes we unknowingly expect ourselves to have only thoughts that are good, kind, appropriate, pure, or consistent with our values.
But that’s simply not how brains work.
If your standard is:
“Every thought I have should accurately represent who I am,”
you’re going to have a problem.
Because eventually your brain is going to produce something weird.
And if you believe that every thought is important, you’ll feel compelled to investigate it.
Thoughts Are Thoughts
Here’s another rule I want you to remember:
Thoughts do not have inherent value.
We don’t have to sort every thought into good thought or bad thought.
A thought is something your brain produced.
That’s it.
It isn’t automatically a reflection of your character, identity, intentions, desires, or values.
And sometimes your thoughts will directly contradict the things that matter most to you.
Which brings us back to our original question.
So, What Do Intrusive Thoughts Actually Say About You?
The first answer is probably not nearly as exciting as your anxious brain wants it to be.
The thought itself may mean nothing about you at all.
It happened.
Your brain generated a thought.
But there’s another piece of this that I think is really helpful to understand.
Our intrusive thoughts can often become attached to the things we care deeply about.
If you deeply value your children, you might experience intrusive thoughts involving your children.
If your career is incredibly important to you, your brain might generate intrusive thoughts about something going horribly wrong at work.
When something matters to us, uncertainty and perceived threats surrounding it can grab our attention.
But that still doesn’t make the intrusive thought a secret message about your character.
Why Do Some People Get Stuck on Intrusive Thoughts?
Here’s where things get really interesting.
Two people can experience an incredibly similar intrusive thought.
One person thinks:
Whoa. Weird.
And then carries on with their day.
The other person thinks:
WHY DID I THINK THAT?!
And then spends the next four hours trying to figure it out.
So the question isn’t only:
“Why did I have this thought?”
A much more useful question is:
“What happens after I have this thought?”
For those of us with anxiety, an intrusive thought can feel like a direct threat to our identity.
The thought conflicts with our values, so we feel an enormous urge to prove that it doesn’t mean anything.
And that’s when we can get stuck.
The Trap of Trying to Prove Who You Are
Let’s say you experience an intrusive thought that feels completely opposite to your values.
Anxiety says:
We need to figure this out.
So you analyze the thought.
You review what happened.
You check how you felt when you had it.
You search your memory for evidence.
You ask yourself whether you secretly wanted it.
You might ask someone else what they think.
You may confess the thought so that someone can reassure you.
You keep trying to reach that beautiful moment when you can finally say:
“Okay. I know for certain this thought doesn’t mean anything about me.”
But the certainty doesn’t last.
Soon enough, another doubt appears.
Yeah, but what if…?
And you’re right back in the cycle.
Your Response to the Thought Is What We Want to Work On
This is such an important shift.
Instead of trying to control which thoughts enter your mind, we can practice changing how we respond when they arrive.
We don’t have to eliminate intrusive thoughts.
We don’t have to solve them.
We don’t have to make them feel less scary before continuing with our lives.
We can practice allowing them to exist without turning them into a problem that needs our immediate attention.
Let Your Thoughts Be Like Clouds
One of my favorite ways to think about this is to imagine watching clouds move across the sky.
One cloud might be dark and gray.
Another might be white and fluffy.
Another might be thin and strange-looking.
You don’t need to climb into the sky and move them around.
You don’t need to decide which clouds are allowed to be there.
You observe them.
And eventually, they move.
We can begin practicing the same thing with our thoughts.
Let them come. Let them go. Let them rise. Let them fall.
The goal isn’t to force them out of your mind.
The practice is allowing them to be there without engaging with them.
Don’t Touch the Thought
When an intrusive thought appears, I want you to practice something that can feel incredibly difficult:
Don’t touch it.
Don’t try to make it go away.
Don’t try to make it better.
Don’t figure out why you had it.
Don’t investigate whether it’s true.
Don’t analyze what it says about you.
And don’t spend your day trying to prove it wrong.
You can notice:
There’s that thought.
And then allow it to be there.
Watch Out for Rumination
Rumination can be especially sneaky because it feels productive.
It can feel like:
I’m just trying to understand myself.
But if you’ve been trying to answer the same question again and again without ever reaching a satisfying conclusion, there’s a good chance you’re caught in rumination.
Instead of solving the thought, practice observing it without engaging with it.
Then gently bring your attention back to what you were doing or what matters to you right now.
This is a skill.
And like any skill, it gets stronger with practice.
Resist the Urge to Confess or Seek Reassurance
Another important part of this practice is allowing the thought to exist without immediately discussing it with somebody else.
You don’t necessarily need to confess the thought.
You don’t need someone else to tell you that you’re a good person.
You don’t need reassurance that the thought doesn’t mean anything.
Those strategies might give you relief for a moment, but they can also teach your brain that intrusive thoughts are important enough that they need to be neutralized.
Instead, we’re practicing:
I can have this thought and allow it to move through.
Invite the Thought In, But Don’t Serve It Tea
There’s a Zen idea I really love.
Imagine inviting the uncomfortable experience inside and allowing it to sit down…
but you don’t have to serve it tea.
I think that’s such a beautiful way to understand our work with intrusive thoughts.
We’re not fighting them.
We’re not throwing them out.
But we’re also not sitting down with them for three hours and having an intense conversation.
We’re allowing them to exist.
We are creating a safe place in our bodies for the discomfort that comes with them.
And then we continue living.
Become Skillful at Having Intrusive Thoughts
If your brain produces a lot of scary, vivid, unwanted thoughts, the goal isn’t to become someone who never has them.
The goal is to become someone who is incredibly skillful at having them.
Someone who can say:
Yep. There’s another one.
Someone who doesn’t immediately investigate.
Someone who doesn’t punish themselves for what their brain produced.
Someone who can experience discomfort without turning it into an emergency.
That is mastery.
And it doesn’t happen because you finally found the perfect answer to your intrusive thought.
It happens because you stopped requiring an answer.
Your Homework
Here’s what I want you to practice.
Start by checking your expectations about your thoughts.
Remind yourself that you’re going to have all kinds of thoughts because you’re a human being with a human brain.
You will have lovely thoughts.
You will have bizarre thoughts.
You will have thoughts that match your values beautifully.
And you’ll probably have some thoughts that make you think, What on earth was THAT?
Your job isn’t to achieve perfectly pure thinking.
Your job is to stop assigning so much meaning to every thought that comes through your mind.
Notice the thought.
Allow the discomfort.
Resist analyzing, confessing, checking, or reassurance seeking.
And then bring your attention back to your life.
You Can Learn to Do This
I know this is hard.
When an intrusive thought feels like it’s threatening your identity, your relationships, your values, or the things you love most, allowing it to remain unanswered can feel incredibly uncomfortable.
But this is something you can practice.
It’s about putting in the reps.
It’s about continuing even when your brain really, really wants certainty.
And it’s about being stubbornly compassionate with yourself throughout the process.
You don’t need to punish yourself for having a human brain.
You can learn to let thoughts come and go without allowing every single one to become an investigation into who you are.
As always, it is a beautiful day to do hard things.
Transcription: What Your Intrusive Thoughts Actually Say About You
One of the most common questions I get as an anxiety and OCD specialist is, what do my intrusive thoughts mean about me? What does it say about me that I had this thought? And my answer today might surprise you. Maybe not, but my guess is it will. Most of my clients and students, by the time they come to me, have spent hundreds of hours ruminating, trying to figure out what these thoughts mean.
Now, in addition to that, I have heard horror stories from my clients who have come from other therapists who have spent hours and hundreds of dollars in therapy going back and forward, trying to get to the root cause of their intrusive thoughts and identify what happened in their childhood that could have possibly made them have these specific intrusive thoughts.
And I’m sorry if that is you. I’m so sorry, because there is a very effective and very logical understanding of what’s going on in your brain and why you have these thoughts, and we can make sense of them today, and I’m so glad that you’re here to do this with me.
Hello, my name is Kimberly Quinlan. I am an anxiety and OCD specialist. I am a mom, I am a wife, and my goal is to help 10 million people suffer less with anxiety, and you’re one of them. I’m on a mission to give you the skills that you should have been given in the seventh grade to handle your thoughts and emotions.
By the end of this episode, you’re going to learn exactly what your intrusive thoughts say about you, and the answer here, I’m sorry to say, it’s not simple. It requires nuance. It requires some logic. It requires some compassion. But we are going to get to the bottom of this, and I really think it’s gonna help once you fully understand what’s going on in your brain.
So let’s actually first talk about the real conflict that you experience. So when you have an intrusive thought, it actually creates an identity conflict. Now, this is … An identity conflict is really a challenge in this idea we have about ourselves. We have this idea of who we are and what we are here to do and what our values are, and sometimes our thoughts conflict with that.
They don’t match. And I always, always think of it like, let’s say you go to the theater, and you’re thinking you’re gonna get a comedy show, but all of a sudden it’s not that. It’s like a terrible horror story. And of course, you’re gonna have a moment where you’re like, “Wait.” Isn’t this a comedy show?
You’re- it’s normal for you to stop and pause and be like, “Wait a second.” And in this case, that is what’s going on. These intrusive thoughts are causing you to have a conflict of who you believe you are. So some examples of this might be, I’ll give you a personal one, is I remember many years ago, I was driving down this awesome road.
It’s Mulholland Drive. It’s in Los Angeles. It takes you to the beach. Um, it’s a beautiful drive, and it was a weekend, or maybe it was a weekday, I can’t quite remember. But there were all of these trash cans lined up along the side of the road, and I had this thought that I was just going to gleefully, joyfully slam into every single one.
It wasn’t a what if thought, it was like a, let’s slam into them. Now, I did not slam into them. I didn’t do the action, but it scared me to begin with. I was like, “What was that thought about? That doesn’t line up with who I am.” I would never damage someone’s property. I would never go out to cause havoc.
That’s the opposite of who I am. So it was a little bit shocking. Now, it also happens for those who are having, you know, all of a sudden, they might have a really negative thought about somebody they love. It doesn’t line up with how they’ve seen that person, or the person they see themselves to be. I’ve had clients tell me, “I’ve had thoughts about wanting really bad things to happen to other people,” and that blew me away.
Like, what is that about? I’ve had clients say that they’ve had thoughts that completely misalign with their spiritual or religious values and what they believe in, or maybe they’ve had thoughts of having doubt about a partner that they have previously loved. Now, these intrusive thoughts can show up and go against and contradict our values all the time.
Now, to reconcile this, we are going to need to understand the nature of intrusive thoughts in general. So what I want you to do is imagine that I’m handing to you a book, and this book is the basic foundations of the rules about thoughts in general. Like, this is you getting an actual solid understanding of why- we have thoughts and what is going on, and what is the norm for every human around having thoughts.
So let’s go through them. Number one, all humans have thousands of thoughts a day. All humans have a whole range, and they happen over a spectrum, right? So you will have some thoughts that are really good. You’ll have some thoughts that are really weird. You’ll have some thoughts that you have a lot of pleasure with.
You’ll have some thoughts that you’ll be like, “What the heck just happened?” That’s all normal. Both people with OCD and people without OCD, people with anxiety, without anxiety, have intrusive thoughts. It is a normal part of you being a human being. We cannot control these thoughts, and we have to check our expectation that all of our thoughts should line up with our values, and they should be good thoughts and pure thoughts.
That expectation in and of themselves is a huge part of what’s keeping you stuck, and so we have to let go of this idea that you’re always gonna have these good m- emotions, and you’re always gonna have these good f- thoughts. It’s just not possible. Now, the other thing to remember here in this rule book is that thoughts do not have an inherent value.
They are simply stories that our brain tell us. So thoughts are neither good nor bad. There is no such thing as a good and a bad thought. Thoughts are just thoughts. They don’t reflect who we are, and that thoughts, as I mentioned, will often not line up with what we value and what matters to us. So we really have to drop down into understanding these core rules about thoughts.
Okay then, so what do we do now? What do our intrusive thoughts actually say about us if we’re following those rules? Well, there are two answers to this question, or what I like to say is we really wanna break this question up into two sections. The first question is, what do our thoughts actually say about us?
Let’s get to that first. The truth is they mean nothing at all.
Now, as you know, I have a private practice. I have six amazing therapists in Calabasas, California. However, we do not take insurance. Now, if you are looking for insurance-covered OCD or BFRB treatment, I want to let you know about NOCD. NOCD provides face-to-face live video sessions with specialized licensed OCD therapists.
Now, their therapists use exposure and response prevention. We know this is the gold standard for OCD, so you can be absolutely confirmed that you’re in the right place there, and they have a clinically proven app that helps you stay connected to your therapist and others who have OCD between sessions, so you’ll always feel supported.
Now, the cool thing is NOCD is available in all 50 US states and even internationally, and they accept most insurance plans, making it affordable and accessible. We love that. Now, if you think you might have OCD or you’re struggling to manage your symptoms, you can book a free call. Just click the link in the show notes at nocd.com.
I am honored to partner with NOCD. I want to remind you that recovery is possible. Please do not forget that. Now, big hugs, and let’s get back to the show If we are following those general foundational rules about thoughts, your thoughts mean nothing about you. It also shows us what we value, right?
Because we’re going to have thoughts about things that we value. If you really value your children, you might have a lot of intrusive thoughts about them. If you’re going to value your career, you might have a lot of intrusive thoughts about them. Unfortunately, that is also the nature of thinking. Now, the third thing I want you to understand is that if you have a lot of intrusive thoughts, and they’re very repetitive and unwanted and distressing, it means that you have a brain that often has, like, a faulty or a weaker brake system.
We actually got research from 2017 from the University of Michigan, where we now understand that for folks who have a lot of intrusive thoughts, the metaphor I like to think of is our brake systems are weak. What that means is that our brain can’t pump the brakes on these really overly aggressive, vivid thoughts.
For folks who don’t have anxiety, their brake system works much better. But I have often reminded myself of, like, the reason I’m having all these is my brake system is just a little off. It’s sort of like the thoughts are getting through the gates, ultimately. So the second question we really need to ask here is, what does our anxiety about these intrusive thoughts mean?
If we go back to our basic rule book and we understand that everybody has these thoughts, what really then we want to look at is, why do some people get anxious about them and other people don’t? Because I know a lot of People I see in my office, they might bring in their partner, and their partner will say, “Yeah, I have these same thoughts.
I have the same thoughts that I’m gonna push Grandma down the stairs. I have these same thoughts that, um, you know, like, terrible things are gonna happen,” but they’re like, they kind of just, like, flow in and flow out. For the folks with a lot of anxiety, they tend to have a very strong reaction of resistance when they have these intrusive thoughts.
So again, we wanna look at here is for those with anxiety, the thought creates a conflict with our values. It feels like a direct threat of who we believe we are. It also makes us feel compelled, then we have to prove that it doesn’t mean anything about us, and that we then wanna disprove it over and over and over again, trying to make sure our identity isn’t at risk here.
Now, we also experience this deep sense of hyper-responsibility to prevent even the minuscule possibility of something bad happening. And so what we can see here is if we all have intrusive thoughts, that’s normal. We know they don’t mean anything. But for us anxious folks, we know that there is some interpretation of them that ends up keeping us stuck.
Now, what I want us to do is to understand that our response is what matters, not the thought itself. And when we can reconcile this and understand this at its core, we can then change this and break this cycle. So the solution is to let yourself have any thought All thoughts, all of them, even the really scary ones, the heinous ones, the ones that make you so uncomfortable, your job is to practice letting them pass on their own.
I want you to pretend like you’re watching clouds in the sky. So when you’re watching clouds in the sky, you might see a gray, dark one, and then a white fluffy one, and then a thin swizzgilly one, and you’re just observing them and letting them pass, and you’re gonna do the same as that with your thoughts.
You’re gonna allow your thoughts to pass and come and go and rise and fall like the clouds in the sky. Now, there are some key points I want you to remember. You are going to let yourself have any single thought, doesn’t matter what they are, and you’re gonna let them pass. Do not touch them. Do not try to make them go away.
Do not try to make them better. Do not try and figure out what they mean. Everything we’re doing here is about just letting them be there. Do not touch them with a 10-foot pole, if you can. We’re also going to try not to ruminate about them. We’re not here to analyze it. A lot of what we talk about in the rumination reset is this exact skill, observing a thought without having to engage in it and really solve it.
And then the last thing is, we’re not discussing it with anybody else. We’re just going to let it move through. We don’t need to confess it. We don’t need reassurance on it. We’re just going to allow it to pass. Now, as I mentioned, we have the rumination reset here to help you. It is a $47 course. It will help you to be able to have thoughts, observe them, not engage with them, and have a practice called attention training to bring your attention back to doing what it is that you wanna do or what you need to get done.
What I want you to do is imagine that you are becoming a part of this elite club of folks who are building mastery over intrusive thoughts. If you’re unlucky but lucky enough to be in this club, I’m in it too, we have to understand that our brake systems don’t work that great. The scary thoughts get through the gates, and so we have to become almost ninja, like Buddhist monk style at allowing these thoughts, and we need to become someone who can skillfully befriend these thoughts.
They’re not dangerous. They’re not bad. They’re not here to punish you. You don’t need punishment for having them. We want to make friends with them. I love the Zen story about you invite it in, and you allow it to sit down, but you don’t serve it tea, and that’s what we wanna do here. We wanna create a safe place, the corners, your shoulder to head to shoulder to stomach.
We wanna create a safe place for this discomfort to be here. Okay, so your homework is we are going to remember the rules. We talked about these foundations of understanding intrusive thought. Your homework is to remind yourself and get your expectations in check. You’re gonna have all kinds of thoughts.
There is no right or wrong thought. There is no… We don’t wanna have expectations that you’re only gonna have those pure thoughts. You’re going to t- stop assigning meaning to them. As always, it is a beautiful day to do hard things. I know how hard you guys are working. I know how hard this is. It’s brutal.
I’m feeling for you. My heart hurts. But I also have so much hope for you because this is something you’ve mastered. It’s something I’ve mastered, and I’m just a regular old person. If I can do it, you can too. It’s a matter of putting in the reps and not giving up on yourself and being absolutely stubbornly compassionate towards yourself.
Thank you so much for being here, and I’ll see you in the next episode.
Please note that this podcast or any other resources from cbtschool.com should not replace professional mental health care. If you feel you would benefit, please reach out to a provider in your area. Have a wonderful day, and thank you for supporting cbtschool.com.
