To ask about your intrusive thoughts

[AnxiousPeg]

I've name changed for this. Not totally sure why... just that it's weird.

Occasionally I get a thought that bothers me. I have a long history of dealing with this and mostly, nowadays, I'm quite robust.

But the very fact that occasionally a thought just 'sticks' unnerves me. It makes me think that there's something special or 'woo' about that thought, and then it bothers me even more.

Clearly, these thoughts are always bad ones. I've had one this evening, and it's getting me down.

Does anyone else have this?

Does anyone get really anxious about the butterfly effect?

E.g. when my grandparents are driving up to visit us in London, I worry that they will crash. Then I stress that it will be my fault of they crash because they are coming to visit ME. If I decided to visit them instead, it would never happen. If I didn't live where I live, they might not have been on that road at that specific time, if I hadn't this, if I hadn't that...

If my daughter gets bullied at school, it will be my fault for choosing to send her to that school, or for living in an area where my only option was to send her to that school...

I get the same thoughts coming back time and again. I even wondered if hypnotherapy would work, but really I know even if it did I would just replace it with some thing new. I have to stay busy all the time. I have real problems if the baby wakes at night and I have to rock him back to sleep, because sitting in a dark room for an hour or more just rocking him opens me up to start thinking and then I get cross with the baby for it. My DH is really good and he knows now if I've been up with ds more than 30 mins he will usually come and take over. I just want to be normal.

I've tried hypnotherapy and NLP... hasn't rid me of my thoughts that I'm running out of time to have another baby but may not be able to prevent them from being harmed in some way

I'm glad I found this thread as this is me!
I have OCD and although there are some behavioural compulsions that come with it sometimes, most of it manifests itself in intrusive thoughts. I can go over things in my head 100 times, it drives me nuts!!
Like a conversation I've had where I'm worried about how the other person perceived me or if I said something wrong or stupid. I'll replay it over & over again in my mind.
I've also had thoughts like others have said like if I'm driving 'I could easily knock that cyclist off his bike' or if I'm walkimg down the street 'I could easily push that old lady over' - I would never in a million years do any of those things!
And the self sabotage thing is a definite for me too! My intrusive thoughts get worse when things are good.
Really does drive me crazy as I do know it's all just thoughts which don't mean anything but sometimes they are so hard to ignore.