In the previous part, I started to talk about what intrusive thoughts are, what types I have, what they mean (or rather, don’t mean), what can trigger them, and how they can make me feel.
In this part, I will mainly be focusing on those thoughts that lead me to doubt my morality. I will also start to talk about how I was responding to them and the effect that this had.
Warning: I am aware that this article contains elements that would have sent me into a panic in the past. While I believe their inclusion is necessary, I would recommend only reading this when mentally stable enough to cope. And in case you were wondering, yes, I am having anxiety-inducing thoughts about the possible consequences of me publishing this article.
The website’s disclaimer can be found here. If you are unsure of where to find a crisis helpline, then this link may help with that.
Why are some thoughts more anxiety-inducing than others?
Not all thoughts cause me problems. In fact with some thoughts, my reaction is ‘normal’. I have the thought, I am aware of it, I don’t particularly like it, but that’s all. There is nothing that I feel needs to be done, or needs to be checked. It simply is what it is, and I am okay with that.
There are two factors that can cause a thought to be more of a problem. Firstly, is when the thought is about something that is important to me. Secondly, is when the thoughts seem true, or at least plausible enough to cause uncertainty. When these are both true, this is when problems can really start to arise. I can feel deeply unsettled and anxious. I can also feel engulfed by an urge to analyse the thought in order to reveal the truth. From here, things can easily start to spiral out of control.
It is, however, important to remember that these things are subjective. As such, my judgement of these factors is skewed by my OCD, and my mood at the time. A low mood can make these thoughts appear both far more plausible and far more serious than they actually are. This is something I have written about before.
How do my experiences differ from someone without OCD?
If everyone gets Intrusive Thoughts sometimes, and I am not unusual there, then why are they so much more of a problem for me? What is causing my experience to be different?
Well one difference is the sheer volume of them. I could go through multiple thoughts in a day, every day. There just seemed to be an endless supply of the things.
There was also though the fact that rather than having them, and then just moving on, I would go into them. I could easily end up spending hours on a single thought. The worst thoughts lasted for days. As a result, at times I was spending hours per day in their grip. They were dominating my life, even when I didn’t have a specific thought, I was waiting for the next shoe to drop. For a ‘normal’ person, though, the experience of them is very different. They may have a thought every now and then, think ‘that was weird’ or something like that, and then simply move on with their life.
In part, this is because for me the strength of the negative emotional reaction they provoked, was far stronger than normal. At its worst, I could either feel like I was dissolving, or be almost immobilised by anxiety. As a result of this, whereas someone without OCD may think ‘that’s a weird/unpleasant thought’, I would feel overwhelmed by the need to respond to it. Not doing so was simply not an option. I couldn’t just move on.
So why were my Intrusive Thoughts causing more of a problem?
The straightforward reason why is because I have OCD, which manipulates my thoughts and my emotions. This causes these thoughts to be more common, and feel worse, than they would otherwise.
However, there is more to it. While my OCD may be the initial cause of these Intrusive Thoughts, by choosing to respond to them (even if it didn’t feel like a choice) I was making it worse. By engaging with these thoughts, I was turning a thought, into an entire event.
With some thoughts this was less obvious, as they arrived already fully formed and feeling like a whole event. For instance, if I had a thought that I had done something awful, the accusation was there already, as were the emotions, and it didn’t seem like there was any choice to be made about whether this needed a response.
At other times, for instance when it was merely a question of whether something may have happened, I was sometimes aware that I was choosing to open Pandora’s box inside my mind. Nevertheless, I felt compelled by a sense of duty (at least that was the reason my OCD said I was doing it) to check whether I had indeed done anything wrong, because I didn’t want to allow myself to get away with something, even if it did seem possible to do so (which it usually didn’t anyway).
Ultimately though, in both cases I was making a choice. Once I responded to the thought, it would often make things feel worse before they would get better. Even when I did successfully reassure myself, the thought would either return anyway, or a new one would.
I have come to understand that responding to these thoughts is counter-productive.
The fantasy of understanding:
One seeming solution is that I could learn to reliably identify the cause of my thoughts.
This would therefore allow me to separate out the ‘real’, regular thoughts, that anyone would have, from the ‘fake’ intrusive thoughts that I was only having because of my mental health issues. I would then be able to safely ignore the intrusive thoughts, whilst ensuring that I was not ‘letting myself off’ by failing to take the normal thoughts seriously.
This idea relies on two obvious assumptions. The first is that it is indeed possible to identify which thoughts are intrusive and/or are caused by my OCD. The second is that if they are Intrusive/caused by my OCD, then they are definitely not true. There is also, however, a third, less obvious assumption, that is worth noting for the future. Namely, that it is necessary to do so.
So with that all having been said, is it an achievable goal?
Can I identify the Intrusive Thoughts caused by my OCD?
Some thoughts are clearly artificial, and nothing more than my mind openly bullying me; for instance, when unpleasant urges or images come into my mind, with no reason provided other than to make me feel bad. In these cases, I can clearly see that this is my OCD on manoeuvres.
Then there are thoughts that seem to have at least some substance to them, but there are clear traces of my OCD. Perhaps I am feeling particularly tired or low, or my mind is making a particularly huge logical leap that is not normal or sensible. Either way, while the thought may feel valid, there are signs that it is not. However, I can still miss these clues, or only notice them with the benefit of hindsight.
Then there are thoughts with no obvious tells. They appear to crop up organically, with a seemingly logical thought path leading to them. Perhaps I saw a news article containing details of a crime, and think ‘did I do the same thing in the past?’ Or something that feels morally equivalent, or at least not all that different. This is particularly the case for me with real event OCD.
In these cases, I may be aware that my mind is subjecting me to an unusual level of scrutiny. However, I cannot be certain that this is the case, and it certainly doesn’t feel like it at the time. I also cannot be certain that a person without OCD wouldn’t have had the same thought in the same circumstances.
On top of this, I may not even notice the thought. The mental path is so ingrained, that it has become second nature. As such the in-between step, that takes me from reading the article, to questioning my own actions/morality, is so seamless, that I am unaware of it. It just happens, and seems so completely natural, so as to not even be questioned.
So no, I cannot always tell which thoughts are caused by my OCD.
In fact even now as I write this, I am doubting whether they are all Intrusive Thoughts. Are real event fears, prompted by a trigger, truly intrusive? Well they are neither normal, or able to be trusted, that much is certainly true. There is also clearly that in-between step that takes me from point A, to point B. So if it isn’t an Intrusive Thought then what is it?
Perhaps though, it doesn’t really make much of a difference either way.
What does it mean if a thought is ‘real’ or ‘fake’?
For the sake of argument, let’s imagine that I could tell with 100% accuracy which thoughts are caused by my OCD, and which ones aren’t.
Therefore, I know for certain that I have only had a certain thought because of my OCD. Does this mean that there is no truth to it? It certainly makes this more likely. It would be joining countless other past thoughts if so. Does this however mean that I can be 100% sure that it’s not true? No. There is a very small, but still non-zero chance, that the thought could still be real. After all, even a broken clock can be right twice a day.
Likewise, the opposite is also true. If a thought is ‘real’, which is to say, not a result of my OCD, does this mean that it is therefore true? It is true that ‘normal’ people can trust their thoughts more than I can mine. Does that mean though that their judgement is always right, and all of their thoughts turn out to be true? Again, no.
To a large extent then, it doesn’t actually help all that much to know. It doesn’t, by itself, solve anything. It may provide a mental safety net, and help me weather the initial panic. But that is all that knowing on its own would enable. My OCD would simply move the goalposts, and say, ‘well you still can’t be 100% certain’. It would be able to do this because of the way my OCD causes my mind to perceive uncertainty. The difference between something being somewhat likely, and something being vanishingly unlikely, but still possible, can feel remarkably small.
What this ultimately means, is that while knowing why a thought occurred may seem important, as far as the long-term solution is concerned, it is simply a side-show. I don’t need to know why a thought has occurred, in order to deal with it.
So what does this mean?
I have established that my thoughts cannot be neatly divided into ‘real’ and ‘fake’ ones. It simply isn’t possible to always tell, and even if I could, it wouldn’t be all that useful anyway. Yes, the more clearly my mind is under the influence of my OCD, the less reliable my thoughts become. However my OCD is far too sneaky to be able to judge this all the time, and the risk that my OCD could be correct through sheer dumb luck, was beyond my uncertainty tolerance. Mainly that is, because I didn’t have an uncertainty tolerance.
So where does that leave me? Well the first option is the one that I followed for years. That is, to say that all thoughts could be true, and therefore need to be checked. So that is what I did.
Whenever a thought occurred, I would tangle with it. I would try to analyse it, and come to a conclusion on whether or not the thought was true. I would reassure myself that it either wasn’t true, or that it wasn’t as bad as it seemed. Or if that failed, that I could still live with it, perhaps through making up for it in some way. I would go over and over it in my head, as many times as it took to reassure my mind. This gruelling process would eventually result in me being able to move on, battered and bruised. Until the next thought took its place that is.
I have to say, I would not recommend it. Thankfully, there is another option, which in part, involves developing an uncertainty tolerance.
What can I say for certain?
I know that I do get intrusive thoughts, and that I do have OCD. I know that countless previous thoughts have turned out not to be as bad as they initially seemed.
As such, I have learnt that when my OCD is involved I cannot trust my thoughts and my judgement of them. Therefore I cannot assume that these thoughts contain any underlying truth, or that they are indicative of anything other than that I have OCD. I also know that even if the thought were true, it would almost certainly not be as serious as it feels. My OCD is perfectly capable of lying about more than one thing at a time. In fact, this seems to be its standard operating procedure.
I also know that while my OCD may not be the reason for every thought, doubt and anxiety that I have, there is a high chance that for any particular thought, it is.
So what does this mean? What it means is that for any individual thought, without needing to look at it individually, I can say the following:
- There is a high chance that it isn’t true.
- There is a high chance that even were it true, it would not be as cataclysmic as it feels.
Now, I am well aware that this statement may not be particularly reassuring on its own. It wouldn’t have been for me at least, with my need for certainty. In fact that 99.9% chance would seem irrelevant, with all my focus brought to bear upon that 0.1% chance. Because how could I move on with my life with even a 0.1% chance that I was this awful, evil, irredeemable person? As it turns out though, I can, which is something I will talk more about in future articles.
Why is responding to my thoughts a problem?
The reason why responding to these thoughts is a problem, is because by doing so, I am inadvertently validating them. This is because by responding to them, I was teaching my brain the wrong lesson. Rather than showing my brain that these thoughts were incorrect, as I thought I was doing, I was actually teaching it that the thought was indeed important.
This is because instead of my brain seeing that yet again the thought has eventually turned out to have been overblown, what it sees is that I have dropped whatever it was I was doing, and instead paid attention to this thought. I was therefore showing my brain that they are a threat, that they are worthy of attention, and that they are a priority.
My mind is therefore taking from my responding to the thought that it was right to have flagged them up in the first place. This means that by responding to these thoughts, I was contributing to a continuing cycle, and fuelling future thoughts.
Last Updated: 9th June 2026
