Mental Health Post #19: Intrusive Thoughts

When my kids were much younger, we used to have a conversation every Sunday as we drove to church.  It was not about anything religious, nor was it about anything prosaic like dinner plans.  It was, in fact, about Frozen Girl.  You don't know this title, so let me explain to you exactly who Frozen Girl is.  Frozen Girl is an Incan mummy found in the Andes mountains in the late 1990s, and featured in a children's non-fiction book that my kids had checked out from the library months before.  Frozen Girl both repulsed and deeply fascinated my kids, to the point that she featured in daily conversations.  Now, months later, one of my daughters began bringing her up habitually, like clockwork, when we passed a certain road driving to church.  I would hear this little voice in the back say, "I wanna talk about Frozen Girl."  Said daughter was only 5'ish years old and at first it was kind of funny.  We would talk about Frozen Girl for a few minutes and then we would move on.  Every time, I wrestled with how much I should say in describing how she had died, especially when I was asked if it had hurt and if she had been scared.  After thinking about it long enough, I realized that it was her (and her sisters') way of contemplating death and the fear of going away.  After enough time, we stopped talking about it, and now that my kids are old, we sometimes bring up Frozen Girl again in reminiscence of how cute and silly they used to be as littles.

This story illustrates to me the repetitive nature of our thoughts when we are worried about something.  When you have chronic anxiety, you can find yourself ruminating about things all the day long as you replay what you should've done and what you should do in the future.  You can have compulsions like needing to go over and over procedural lists in your heads of how to behave or what you need to do.  It takes up a gross amount of bandwidth and drains energy away from other important aspects of living.  Many people with mental health diseases complain of brain fog, and the inability to think clearly and consistently.  I personally find it almost impossible to hold thoughts in my head and my memory goes to the dogs.  

Besides having repetitive thoughts, someone with anxiety/depression may have strange intrusive thoughts that are deeply unsettling.  I'm not talking about the normal weirdness that is inherent in the human condition.  Everyone wonders what it would be like to kiss some random person, or curiously thinks what it would feel like to jump off a cliff.  We have the weird thought and we throw it away because it's such nonsense.  When you have intrusive thoughts, the same distressing thoughts can keep coming back, sometimes worse each time.  I remember after I had one of my babies when we lived in family housing, I became almost obsessed with worry that my kids would get a hold of the kitchen knives and somehow fall on one.  It was just specific enough and often enough that it started to cause me real anxiety.  Thankfully it started getting bad around the same time I was finessing my antidepressant dosage, as well as seeing a truly wonderful therapist.  She talked to me about not letting my mind focus on those weird thoughts and how to recenter myself so that I didn't get so hung up on unlikely scenarios.  I like knowing that when we think about things over and over again, we are creating roads in our minds.  The more often we walk those roads, the more formed they get.  They may start out as just a deer trail, and with enough time and rumination, they can become 8 lane highways.  The goal is to not allow that kind of development to happen with the toxic thoughts.  We all have Frozen Girls in our lives and while we don't want to repress them in an unhealthy way, we also don't want to be thinking about them all the time and ruin all the good living to be had.

Photo note: we planted a tulip poplar last fall and it has the BIGGEST leaves.  They are so glorious and I hope that tree gives some family so much joy in 40 years when I no longer live here...