You have a thought. It’s dreadful, terrible, or otherwise unwanted and seemingly originates from nowhere.
5 Minute Read
You have a thought. It’s dreadful, terrible, or otherwise unwanted and seemingly originates from nowhere.
The thought is not just uncomfortable–but wrong.
Maybe even disturbing.
And then the questions hit you:
“Why did I think that?”
“Does this mean something about me?”
“Where did that come from?”
If you’ve had that moment, you’re not alone.
Disoriented
Everything about the situation feels ugly and frightening.
You really do begin to worry that you are going crazy, that you’ve reached some stage of ‘breaking.’
That this could be the moment you’ve heard about, or seen in films.
Or
In everyday terms, something far more common is going on.
You are having unwanted or intrusive thoughts that seem to show up on their own.
They arrive often without any warning and often out of character of who you are.
They don’t feel chosen.
They feel like something that is being done to you.
But Why?
That is the ultimate question, and one you are likely asking yourself.
1. Your mind creates all kinds of thoughts
Not every thought is actually intentional - some thoughts just are.
From a faith dynamic you might think about it like this: In the garden, in the beginning, humanity rebelled against God and His created order.
From that time forward, all of creation, including humans, has been living through the brokenness and fracturing of life.
So, if you live in a broken world, it makes sense that you are going to experience its brokenness in various ways throughout life.
As a result, from time to time, likely for a variety of reasons, you have thoughts–some good, some bad and awful.
2. Attention makes them stick
The more a thought stands out, the more your mind returns to it.
They get attention because they often go against some value that you have.
They threaten something that you hold dear or threaten to somehow take away something that you love or feel you have to have in life to be okay.
You may try some strategy to disarm the thought, some ritual, some action, some behavior–something that ends up giving the thought a lot of attention.
For many, this only further worsens the situation and frequency of the thought.
As we said in another article, it’s like saying: whatever you do, don’t think of an orange elephant—that’s the very first thing you will envision.
3. A Sense of Importance Keeps Them Reverberating
When a thought touches something very meaningful to you - it feels harder to ignore.
You raise your guard.
Something essential is being threatened, or at least it feels that way.
4. Discomfort makes them very memorable
For many that have the intrusive thoughts, the more uncomfortable a thought feels, the more it stands out in your memory.
You tie emotion to it.
The whole thing can feel very traumatic and it leaves a mark on you that is not easy to forget.
But there is hope, so let’s go forward.
What They Don’t Mean
One of the BIGGEST Misconceptions is this:
“I thought this ________ and it must actually mean something.”
But the reality is that not every thought is a reflection of your character or who you are.
And not every thought is a signal of intent.
Sometimes, a thought is just a thought.
You live in a world that is endlessly surrounding you with brokenness.
It’s so thick that you can taste, touch, smell, hear and feel it everywhere.
You are bound to have thoughts that look like:
“What if someday I did that?”
“Maybe the bump in the road was actually me hitting someone and not realizing it.”
“What if the thought keeps returning and I go crazy and do the very thing that I am trying to avoid?”
“Maybe I will lose control and stab someone with this knife or sleep walk and hurt someone?”
These are just a few of the many fearful thoughts you may hear people talk about as they share their struggles.
But the presence of an unwanted thought does not, by itself, signal intent.
To some degree they are a result of your strengths being turned against you.
Strengths Turned Against You
To be a human is to be an artist of sorts: to create, to imagine, to build, to analyze, to synthesize.
Really, as you think about your thoughts, it’s not entirely all that odd that you conjure from your imagination various ideas.
Nor is it a great stretch to see someone with strong analytical abilities have that strength turned against them. They have an intrusive thought and, like so many other things in their world, they begin to analyze it.
The vicious nature of intrusive thoughts is that they can take your creativity and turn it against you.
Your strengths are bent in an unhelpful direction.
But that doesn’t mean that suddenly the thoughts have meaning, just because you feel like they do.
Who Are You?
From a biblical view of things, this distinction matters.
The Bible doesn’t treat every thought that enters your mind as a reflection of who you are.
Instead, it consistently directs us to evaluate what is true - not simply react.
Your identity doesn’t get determined by every thought that flows through you, but by what you trust and follow.
The presence of a thought is not the same as agreement with the thought.
So Why Do You Have Disturbing Thoughts?
Likely not because something is wrong and you’re going crazy, but rather because you’re human, living among brokenness.
Your mind is reacting to something that feels like it should have your attention, and you mistakenly give it more than you should.
Sometimes, the very fact that the thought bothers you says more about your values than the thought itself.
Hope for Today
If you’ve had thoughts like this, you’re not alone.
And you are not defined by them.
There is a different way to understand what is going on – and a different way to respond.
God gives us truth & grace to navigate the complexity and difficulty of not only these questions, but life in its entirety.
If you’d like to keep reading, you can find more here → Articles
And if talking it through would help you, you’re always welcome to reach out and schedule a one-on-one meeting to walk through this together.
