Does anyone ever get thoughts and images they dont want but you dont get anxiety of them but theyre still there and you get scared they might be true.
can anyone relate?: Does anyone ever get... - OCD Support
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can anyone relate?
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youn
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Hi youn,
It sounds like you are struggling at the moment. I can relate to what you are saying, as I am sure many others can, and know it is not a pleasant thing to live with this sort of worry.
These are called Intrusive Thoughts - you don’t consciously want to think those thoughts, they just come into your head.
Most people (with and without anxiety disorders) experience them - I can’t remember the exact statistic now but it is something like 90% of people have them.
For some people, they are just a passing thought, you may think “Oh that’s not very nice” or “I didn’t want to think that” etc. But then the thought passes and you give it no more thought as the day goes on. They don’t have to come as a result of an ‘anxious’ situation or some sort of ‘trigger’ - they are often completely random.
Some people have recurring intrusive thoughts, meaning you have the same thought multiple times, but it still doesn’t ‘mean’ anything. I used to have recurring intrusive thoughts about car accidents, for example.
For other people, particularly those with anxiety disorders, they can feel particularly horrified/saddened/repulsed by the thoughts and worry they mean something about them as a person - they don’t. Similar to what you are describing - it doesn’t start with an anxious feeling but once you’ve had the thought, it creates some sort of worry about if it is true.
In OCD (which I am diagnosed with), sufferers have an intrusive thought which they give some sort of (unnecessary) meaning to. In order to relieve the anxiety/stop the thought from coming true they perform some sort of behaviour/ritual - which could be entirely mental and not physically ‘doing’ something. For example, on quite a simplistic level, people may have a recurring intrusive thought about catching a deadly virus, they feel the only way to prevent this from happening is to wash their hands every time they touch a particular item(s) which is deemed ‘unsafe’ - the hand washing provides temporary relief from the anxiety.
In short, to experience these intrusive thoughts is a completely normal part of life for most people. Whether it is a ‘problem’ depends entirely on how a person responds to these thoughts and the feelings they create.
Best Wishes,
Eleanor
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