Yes, but I have OCD and I’m already on one of the meds the article suggests as treatment. 
The worst thoughts, the ones like they talk about in Wiki - the violent ones, the horrific ones - I can usually close those off during the day but they manifest in nightmares. I only have dreams a couple times a year, everything else is nightmares.
Knitting and sexual violence, two great tastes that taste great together.
But yes, to answer seriously now, I do tend to get intrusive thoughts.
Sometimes they’re violent thoughts. Images of just what I could do to someone, what I’d be capable of doing if this thin veneer of civility slipped far enough.
I get inappropriately sexual thoughts sometimes too, and sometimes get obsessed with the thought of “Have I been molested by…” in a thought spiral. I have never been molested, I just can’t stop those thoughts when they come.
[ETA]: I also suffer from the imp of the perverse. When I’m washing glasses, all I can think about is how much pressure it would take to squeeze and shatter the glass, driving fragments into my hand. Same with lightbulbs (hence my phobia), throwing myself off of balconies or high places, stepping in front of a car that passes as it drives around the corner in front of me. Almost every time.
I went with the top answer, “Yes, extremely so.”
Though that’s no longer true.
Before I retired (worked as an accountant) I had them all the time. Toward the end of my work history all you had to do was put a little stress on me and I became almost totally unable to work because of them.
August 26, 1969*. The 4-5 seconds where I saw Kimo Peliholani die would roll through my mind maybe several hundred times before it would stop.
He wasn’t the first man I saw killed in Vietnam, he wasn’t the last, we weren’t really good friends or anything, he wasn’t the closest by a long shot, his wasn’t the most graphic death, I didn’t know he was dead until the next day when we found his body. It just stuck with me.
This coming July when the company I was with has it’s reunion I’ll probably meet his sister.
It took 2-3 years after retiring for them to start to fade. Now they are a rare thing, for which I am truly grateful.
It’s a hard thing not to have control of your mind.
*For the anal among you who have to check everything, you’ll find his death on the virtual walls and such like as August 23rd. But it was the 26th, got the diary to prove it.
I think about all sorts of crazy stuff, but I don’t obsess about it, and it’s almost always in the form of “I wonder what would happen…” or “I wonder if…”, not some kind of barely controllable urge or thought I can’t get rid of that dominates my consciousness.
I mean, I might be driving down the street, and coming up on a bridge, I might wonder what it might be like to drive into the river instead of over the bridge. Or I’m dealing with someone at work who’s particularly annoying me, and I might wonder what it would be like to stab them in the neck with a pencil, but it’s not like I choke up on my pencil in anticipation or anything like that.
I think everybody has thoughts like this, but the issue is more whether they dominate your thoughts or not.
I’ve got PTSD, so I’m all about intrusive thoughts. Well, it’s gotten better lately because someone told me the term “intrusive thoughts.” Giving it a name has helped me make it abate. When they start, as soon as I’m aware I’m in the spiral, I can kind of say to myself “intrusive thought!” and it breaks me out of it. I just have to work on going IN to the spiral and recognizing I’m in it when I’m in it.
As usual the Family Circus has already covered this topic
I’m with Old Eel. I had some violently self-injurious thoughts when I was a teen and tried everything I could think of to get them to stop. What finally worked was just letting them be there while reminding myself that they were only thoughts and I was not compelled (or even inclined) to act on them. Once I stopped fighting them, they lost their power. Also, being in analysis trained me to be curious about why unusual thoughts would pop up. Treating them like puzzles to be solved was another good way to defuse them. Now I don’t worry about thoughts like that at all.
I’m soaking in them.
All the time. Never knew what they were called before.
OCD, ADD, and Bipolar. My focus is constantly invaded by intrusive thoughts. Its way worse at night when I want to sleep. I have to fall asleep watching T.V. to keep them at bay until I doze off. Zoloft and ADD meds help with this the most.
For what it’s worth, my therapist had this idea for helping my compulsive scenario-running about awful things that might happen. Every time I find myself doing it, I need to stop and run through 5 different scenarios based on the same circumstances. I think it works on multiple levels, from exposure therapy to turning an alluring compulsion into a tedious chore you’d rather just not do.
I agree that Zen practice has great potential to help. The folks here who talk about naturally shrugging them off talk in very Zen terms: thoughts and self are considered two separate things, and thoughts are merely temporary.
Oh, yes, indeed. I take medication for it and everything. For example:
Every night as I would try to drift off to sleep I would imagine falling down the stairs. I have had similar thoughts about falling into those basement openings in NY city sidewalks.
I couldn’t look at my newborn’s fingers without thinking how easy it would be to bite them off.
I obsess over my handsome and popular child’s social life. I would obsess about my son not having anyone to trick or treat with. While this seems frivolous, I would be distraught about it from late August on, until after Halloween. It was terrible. Currently I am in mild freak out that some of his friends might be transferring their loyalty to a former friend of his. If I didn’t take medication regularly I would be a basket case. As it was, I had to take an Ativan last night after casually chatting with him and some of his friends.
I said mildly so, but that’s a function of their comparatively low frequency. When they intrude, they can be quite disturbing.
