Mental health
Most people have thoughts that disturb them — violent, sexual, shameful, or just strange. Most people never tell anyone. They assume this means something is wrong with them. It almost never does.
Intrusive thoughts are a near-universal human experience that most people carry in complete silence. Understanding what they are — and what talking about them actually does — changes the experience significantly.
Intrusive thoughts are unwanted, involuntary thoughts, images, or urges that appear unbidden and often feel inconsistent with the person's values or sense of self. Research suggests they are experienced by the vast majority of people.
Studies on the prevalence of intrusive thoughts consistently find that 90 to 99 percent of people report having thoughts with disturbing content — thoughts about harming someone, sexual thoughts involving inappropriate people or scenarios, thoughts of humiliating themselves in public, irrational fears about having done something wrong. The content of intrusive thoughts in the general population is almost identical to the content of thoughts in people diagnosed with OCD. The difference is not the thought — it is the relationship to the thought.
Having an intrusive thought does not reveal something about your character, your desires, or your danger to others. It reveals that you have a human brain that generates thoughts without your explicit direction — which is a feature, not a bug, even when it produces disturbing content.
The silence around intrusive thoughts is itself a significant part of what makes them distressing. Secrecy amplifies the meaning attached to the thought and prevents access to the normalising information that would reduce distress.
When a disturbing thought is kept secret, the secrecy itself becomes evidence that the thought is significant and threatening. The thought grows in perceived importance because nothing interrupts the loop. If you were to discover that the person next to you on the train has thoughts that are equally disturbing — which statistically they almost certainly do — the thought would immediately lose some of its power. Isolation from this normalising information is exactly what secrecy produces.
Suppression also tends to increase intrusive thought frequency — the classic white bear effect. Trying not to think about something reliably makes you think about it more. Disclosure and acceptance tend to reduce both frequency and distress.
Talking about an intrusive thought to another person — and not being met with horror — is one of the most powerful ways to reduce its hold. The non-reaction is the intervention.
When you describe an intrusive thought to someone and they respond with recognition rather than shock — "yes, I have had things like that too" — the thought loses its status as evidence of something deeply wrong. The anonymity of an anonymous voice call can make this kind of disclosure significantly easier: there is no ongoing relationship to manage, no risk of the other person changing how they see you, no aftermath to navigate. You can say the thing that feels unsayable and see what actually happens.
Mindfuse: a place to say the difficult thing. First conversation free. €4 a month.
Say the thing that feels unsayable.
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