You’d never act on them, of course (I hope!), but I’m really hoping I’m not alone in this and that I am still sane. I mentioned this to my husband last night and asked if he had similar thoughts, and he acted like I was crazy and denied he ever has such thoughts.
For example, last night I was making tea for us and grabbed the boiling kettle off the stove and walked over to the other counter to pour it into the mugs. As I was doing this, my dog was standing in the middle of the kitchen. I had a flash of “what would happen if I poured this boiling water over the dog?” It actually gives me the creeps to even picture what would happen, but the thought occurred nonetheless.
Another example is if I’m in the living room cutting something with the sewing scissors and my husband is sitting right next to me. I have a flash of “what if I stabbed him in the leg with these scissors?” Again, I’d never, ever do it, but the thought goes through my head anyhow.
Final example. I’m driving down the road and there is a steep cliff to my right. “What if I just drove off this cliff?” I don’t do it, of course, but I start wondering what the outcome would be.
These thoughts happen about once every few days. Sometimes they are horrible enough that I have to immediately distract myself because I’m horrified at the thought I just had and if I allow a mental image to form, I might get very upset.
Well, we can go knock on the door of the asylum together. I have wacko thoughts such as yours all the time, they are intrusive, annoying, and frightening, but so far I haven’t jumped off the balcony of a 20 story building, dropped a mug of hot tea on the cat, or stabbed Mr. Sali with a butcher knife! … A religious person might say these psycho thoughts come to you courtesy of the Devil.
Damn, I hate that I used had instead of have in the thread title. Too busy of thinking about stabbing this letter opener into my coworkers ear I guess.
Yep, I have these all the time. Especially the driving the car off a cliff (or into on-going traffic).
The only one that bothers me is that from time to time I have thoughts about slicing the tip of my finger off with a knife. That one makes me feel really icky because it’s quite an insistent thought and I can easily start dwelling on it if my attention isn’t redirected elsewhere.
I had weird thoughts after the birth of my last son. Sudden images of the building collapsing or otherwise catastrophic happenings… it was awful. Makes you feel kind of crazy, it does.
My psychologist has told me before that quite a few highly intelligent people have tiny bits of OCD symptoms. I didn’t think he meant the intrusive thoughts themselves, but it doesn’t surprise me.
BTW, the official way to deal with them is to realize they are just thoughts, and that you are in no danger of acting on them.
Right now I’m pretty much in the midst of a low-grade panic attack because I was trying to fall asleep and suddenly thought about skiing down a mountain and falling off. Unlike the above type of thoughts, realizing the thought isn’t real doesn’t help. The thought itself is immensely uncomfortable.
My irrational thoughts usually revolve around much sillier stuff. Like if I’m on an elevator with other people I’ll suddenly consider jumping up and down and going “Blah wagh bolly google mollly wooo woo woo woo wooooooo!!!” just to see what reaction I might get. Of course I never actually have done anything like that. I just smirk silently to myself and enjoy my little fantasy.
There’s nothing at all wrong with thoughts, of any kind. It’s the actions that matter.
I’m not a shrink, but I don’t think I’d call your thoughts irrational or psychotic. “Psychosis” involves breaking away from reality, e.g. hearing voices that tell you to kill your family. “Irrational” would describe a response (to some situation) that most people wouldn’t have, or couldn’t make sense of, e.g. bursting into tears when you can’t hand the cashier exact change.
It seems you are exploring “what if” scenarios in your head in a very uninhibited way. And as you’re finding out, many folks (myself included) have the same sorts of daydreams.
A friend of mine, when he was in college, had a summer internship at a nuclear power plant. One of the background-check questions was something like “have you ever thought about killing anyone?” He answered yes, since he’s had the sort of wandering daydreams we’re talking about here. He got the job.
If you ever start feeling the urge to actually pour boiling water on your dog; stab your husband; or drive off of a cliff, then it’s time to talk to your doctor.
I have these kinds of thoughts fairly regularly. I always feel mildly ill afterwards because they are so unpleasant but I’ve never felt any desire to act on them. I just figure I watch too many horror movies or something.
Oh, yes, I have these all the time (though they aren’t psychosis.) They used to cause me great distress, because I believed they were indicative of insanity. The ones I was most ashamed of involved saying something extremely racist out of nowhere, or telling someone I cared about they were hideously fat. I once had a sleepless night of whimpering and panicking because I was worried I was going to stab my husband in his sleep (didn’t want to, at all… just freaked out by the fact that I COULD.) You see, I believed (and this IS irrational) that if I thought about something too many times, it would happen. Then the more I tried to suppress these horrible thoughts, the more they would come up.
I had a CBT therapist who I managed to confess all of these horrible dark thoughts to, and she didn’t bat an eyelash. ‘‘Oh,’’ she said, ‘‘That’s really normal. Everybody thinks that stuff all the time. The difference is that people with anxiety disorders believe those thoughts mean something bad and tend to obsess over them. Next time you have a thought like that, think, ‘‘oh, that’s silly’’ and move on.’’
And the relief since then has been immense. I have those crazy thoughts all the time but I don’t regard them as any crazier than the rest of my crazy thoughts. It’s not an issue any more. We all think loony things. It’s what we DO that counts.
I, and everyone I’ve ever discussed it with, have these thoughts *all *the time. On the subway platform, I’ll think, “What if I stepped off just as the train was arriving?” When I’m fishing some object out of the garbage disposal, I’ll think, “It would be so easy to reach over and flip that switch with my hand in here.” It’s not always gruesome, either. I might see someone hot and think, “What would they do if I just went up and kissed them?” Or I might be driving and think, “I could just take off for Mexico.” As long as you don’t feel you’d actually do it, you’re fine.
And of course, there’s an XKCD about this: xkcd: Freedom
I mean, in a weird way, couldn’t this just be our brain trying to exercise its creative power? If we try to look at it as an expression of human creativity, it’s sort of beautiful. I doubt there are any other living creatures that can weigh the pros and cons of a given action by imagining the action and its consequences in such vivid detail. As disturbing as our thoughts can be sometimes, maybe without them, we wouldn’t have things like… civilization.
My mind is always coming up with every scenario it can wherever I am. This leds to thinking lots of bad stuff, but I always have something planed for emergencies when they happen.
These thoughts may very well be normal for some people, but in cases like mine (postpartum), there has to be some kind of pathology there. I never had thoughts like that before, and after 3 or 4 months of them at that one time, I’ve never had them again.
