It’s often compounded by the fact that the anxiety condition may have been caused by drug use (weed and LSD are common triggers for depersonalization disorder). They’re scared that they have ‘opened a door’ to these thoughts and can’t close it and must live with them forever. I later discovered that this is a near-universal worry for people suffering from intrusive thoughts. I asked myself, “Will I ever really be able to ‘unthink’ these thoughts? What if these thoughts have changed me forever?” Or that a good person would never have such thoughts, therefore I must be a bad person. That the thoughts I’d had were so debasing and frightening that they would haunt me forever, skewing and tainting my normal thoughts even after recovery. This is now a well-known psychological occurrence and thankfully, can be treated using various methods including CBT and talk / exposure therapy.īut even when I discovered that there was a way for me to recover from Depersonalization disorder, what worried me terribly was that I’d somehow never be the same. In the 20th Century many studies were done on thought repression, and social psychologists adopted Dostoyevsky’s words for what became known as ‘White Bear’ phenomenon. “Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute.” Dostoyevsky mentions it in his ‘Winter Notes on Summer Impressions’: Edgar Allan Poe called it ‘The Imp of the Perverse’ (from his short story of the same name), the desire to do something we feel we should not. One of the theories I learned about was Ironic Process, the idea that if you actively try not to think of something, you are bound to think of it repeatedly. So I threw myself into researching the nature of these obsessive thoughts. My doctor was unfamiliar with Depersonalization disorder and online forums seemed to be filled with contradictory information. Every one hit me like a ton of bricks, hundreds of times a day, often causing outright panic attacks. I could never get used to them, never build up a tolerance. While the content varied, what the thoughts all had in common were their intensity and how frightening they were.
I had thoughts about hurting myself and others and, as is most common with Depersonalization, wildly abstract ruminations on the nature of being and reality.
My reflections ranged from wondering about the inherent strangeness of normal things (like my dog or a coffee cup) to considering the vastness and indifference of the universe. I know all too well how disturbing and even crippling intrusive thoughts can be. I suffered with the condition for two years and it put my studies, my career, my very life on hold. It also generates particularly intrusive thoughts about the nature of reality and existence. In 2005 I developed Depersonalization disorder, an anxiety spectrum condition that causes the sufferer to feel as if they are not real, or living in a dream. And even sleep may not provide respite, as anxiety can cause recurring nightmares.
In fact, considering the wide variety of conditions contained therein, intrusive thoughts are arguably the most common symptom, ranging from the innocuous to the blasphemous, the annoying to the disturbing.īut what can be most distressing about the thoughts is not their content but their sheer persistence, from the moment you wake in the morning until you fall asleep at night. Intrusive thoughts occur across the entire spectrum of anxiety disorders.
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