The Long Road Ahead

When I was making a previous blog post, I thought about the ways in which the people affected me in my past. It got me thinking about the way I handle those situations in my life, and the sheer amount of thoughts I had about those people. I learned years later, of course, that I had something called intrusive thoughts (trust me, they’re intrusive) What are those? You may wonder, well it’s a wide range of symptoms, but these thoughts often occur in wanting to harm someone or yourself or dealing with intense feelings related to trauma. Now that may shock you, I know I was shocked when I first started looking back on those thoughts myself, that’s for later in the post.

Now the term itself has several factors and diagnoses to consider, but generally these fall under 2 sections of OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) & PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder), but there is a distinction here,

A person with OCD generally needs to find ways to satisfy the thoughts, that’s where the compulsion comes into play. You might obsess over the ways you treated your kids or the way you looked after a pet, and then this would lead to a downward spiral of you thinking, fighting and rationalising with/against yourself that you are a good parent or that you treated a pet correctly. There are ways in which these symptoms can be managed, such as thought separation or exposure therapy.

For a person with PTSD, the thoughts often come from triggers. These can be anything, depending on what happened to said person, a smell, a phrase, a particular sight, anything. This can lead to them, although there is an extensive list of techniques used to lessen the triggers/thoughts, such as self monitoring & grounding exercises.

Why am I writing this, you may be wondering? Well, as I wrote my last post, I started to think about the effect of those experiences on my life. Through that, I began to realise that those thoughts I had were intrusive, they were dark. I did think about hurting those that hurt me, abandoned me and mistreated me, but I almost never acted upon it (there was once when I was going through a particularly hard time in my life). I repressed those thoughts, I never seen them as dark in that moment, more like justified in doing said action because of the abuse i suffered, but I was always very empathetic to anyone. So when I thought harder about that pain, I kind of pushed those thoughts down deep.

Now I want to address them more in a therapeutic setting as I never had the right context to put them under. Even with the therapy I’ve had, I never achieved this realisation until recently. Thankfully, I’m going to get the help I need to cope with these issues, and hopefully I motivate the person reading this to get help too. I believe in you 🙂

Also, please do not self diagnose yourself from articles you read on the internet. No matter how well you believe you have those symptoms, please seek help from a verified mental health professional.

After all, it’s very easy to trick yourself into seeing the symptoms you read off a screen. I knew someone whose mother had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and for 3 weeks after that he started to think he had symptoms because he read up on the symptoms and attended the consultations. So every time he’d forget his keys, or phone back about a meeting, or even put a load of washing on, he’d start panicking. Also, did I mention he is 28, which would put him down as one of the earliest cases for onset Alzheimer’s ever

A website that seems reliable & reputable is https://www.verywellmind.com/ I like them as they appear to cite their sources, and I’m a sucker for anything empirical. Their articles appear written by licensed professionals, not just random people on the internet (like me), this website is not a substitute for real therapy.

Section on OCD:
https://www.verywellmind.com/ocd-4157242
Section on OCD & Intrusive thought:
https://www.verywellmind.com/how-can-i-stop-ocd-thoughts-2510498#toc-separating-your-thoughts-from-your-identity

Section for PTSD:
https://www.verywellmind.com/ptsd-4157229
Section for PTSD & Intrusive thought:
https://www.verywellmind.com/ways-of-coping-with-upsetting-thoughts-and-memories-2797625

also if theres anything you think is wrong or missing please feel free to message me im a layman and love the oppertunity to learn things.