Myheartwillheal,

I relate completely to your intrusive thoughts. Based on your description of them, it sounds like you’re in high school. I’ve been there. Let me explain.

I was a mess in high school. In my sophomore year, I started having intrusive thoughts. Right in the middle of anything that was important to me, the thought “I will fail” would leap out of nowhere and crush my confidence. The worst such time was when I was going to have sex with a girl. The intrusive thought “I won’t be able to” came up and killed my arousal. Once this had happened, it continued to happen with two other girls.

Now, I was in high school in the 80s. At that time, the worst thing you could possibly be was gay. Guys made gay jokes constantly, and girls weren’t much better. By my senior year, my unsuccessful attempts at intercourse were always at the back of my mind, and, to my horror, the thought “I’m gay” crept into my mind. I still have the journals where I scribbled out refutation after refutation of this thought. I knew, deep down, that the thought was false. I even knew it in concrete terms, in that I fell in love with a girl in my creative writing class and we made love, again and again, and I realized how much different, and confident, I felt when I was in love, as opposed to just trying to have sex because I was “supposed to.” But the damn intrusive thoughts kept coming when I was alone, or when I was just in my own world, which was most of the time in school.

What I noticed, finally, about the ugly intrusive thoughts was that they shape shifted. When I said to myself “It’d be okay if I were gay, or bisexual,” and really meant it, then the intrusive thought would adapt to anything else that was thought of as loathsome to people, such as “I’m a rapist” or “I’m going to Hell.” These thoughts were absurd, but would draw me into an anxious war in my head, which appeared to be the entire purpose of the intrusive thoughts.

Eventually I saw through the whole process and became able to “short circuit” it as follows: when an intrusive thought came up, regardless of the content, I would think “there it is again,” which led to “Here’s the whole stupid process again,” and I was finally able to let go of the process.

At this point in my life, I can look back on all of those early intrusive thoughts, and the obsessions it would lead to, as a particularly painful part in my journey. Do I still get anxious? Absolutely. And I still have intrusive thoughts. But not over being some loathsome creature that others would shun.

I hope you find this helpful in some way. I wish you healing.