The ones you get when you hold a baby and your brain is telling you to throw it, or when you’re praying and a voice tells you Jesus sucks. Why does our brain do this? Is this like the worst version of us, or is it us preventing us from doing that?
In: Other
You mean I’m not the only one who does this?!?!
It’s because we are upset* and don’t have a good way of dealing with it.
For better or worse, we are wired to transfer aggression to targets more vulnerable than we are. For example, a manager under pressure snaps at an employee who reports to them; the employee goes home and yells at their spouse; the spouse yells at one of the kids; the kid hits the dog; the dog bites the cat; the cat gets into a fight and loses part of an ear.
The three things that helped me the most:
1. Resolving situations where I felt powerless
2. Getting out of situations where I was being mistreated
3. Turning 35
…but I’m not sure how much that last one mattered.
(* edit: I stepped away and thought about it, and wanted to expand this a little. Upset is caused by a thwarted intention, an unmet expectation, or an undelivered communication. It is in the nature of all these things to happen, some of the time. You mentioned Jesus, so I’ll bring up the serenity prayer in case you haven’t heard it: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.”)
Our minds are fairly imaginative. And one of the many ways our imagination works is by constantly running permutations and combinations of possibilities about everything we know.
Some of those combinations are good and some of them, like intrusive thoughts, are negative. However, the process doesn’t always discriminate to filter negative thoughts out.
So let’s say in your example, you’re holding a baby.
As you are holding the baby and focusing on that, your mind will throw a plethora of thoughts about that topic: baby is warm. Baby is cute. I could feed baby. I can check baby’s diaper. Do I have enough baby wipes. Did I launder baby’s clothes.
This just goes on and on in your head and each item just goes through you, as minor innocuous thoughts.
Once in a while you’ll just hit a weird association. As you’re walking around the house with baby in your arms, you’ll pass by the stairs and think “be careful don’t drop baby”. And most likely the tangential thought would follow as an idea of what would happen if you dropped baby down the stairs. So you have a little fear response working its way around this small bump in risk. Your thoughts then bundle another set as you catastrophize internally – “what if I threw baby down the stairs”
So of course that idea has a certain vivid shocking value and as such will rank much higher in the intensity scale compared to the hundreds of normal mundane thoughts that preceded it.
It kind of stands out and you assign a more memorable value to it. You question how you could conjure up such a bad thought.
Best thing to do is to understand that this is neither an intent or plan to act. It’s just some combination of things your mind stacked together because you were near the stairs and you were holding a baby. It’s just a random thought formation with no meaning behind it and no motivation.
If I showed you two images: a picture of a baby. A picture of a butcher knife.
And suddenly you have this image of a baby being stabbed by the knife, that’s just your mind forming associations. It’s unmotivated by anything more than two images. It doesn’t mean you have a deep dark underlying murderous character. Same with drivers having a visual of steering off a cliff or into oncoming traffic – they’re not being suicidal.
An intrusive thought is just a random association your mind happens to produce. Because it’s just what it does. Maybe if you’re fatigued or stressed, you’re less vigilant about filtering and directing your thoughts to the positive side of things. Who knows.
But I would say that it’s a fairly meaningless occurrence if it’s not constant and abnormally frequent. And feeling guilty or self conscious or questioning your sanity or character are probably a misguided reaction to what amounts to a meaningless random thought that you can just exit your stream of thought as quickly as it appeared without beating yourself up over it.
Here is something that awesome works quite nicely. Sit down someplace quiet for a bit, and say “Hello, voice that said to throw the baby. Would you be willing to talk to me?”
Then sit back and give it time. If it answers you can ask it questions.
If it doesn’t want to answer right away, make a point of stating that you realize it is trying to do something useful and important for you and that you hope to get a better understanding so as to make its job easier.
If there is more than one voice, you can differentiate between them and ask different ones different questions.
Brain thinks, that’s what it does, it’s a tool….need to develop the capacity to be independent of it…..meditation.
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