Flags and Thought Monsters: A Practical Guide to Overcoming Intrusive Thoughts

Nov, 2024

Dear reader,

I wrote this many years ago when I was still too afraid to share it, but I am very happy to now be posting my method for dealing with Pure OCD and intrusive thoughts. I hope this finds someone who feels alone and it helps them as it helped me.

xoxo

Katherine

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Because you’re reading this, dearest love, I believe you are in distress. You might be in distress because your thoughts are impossible to predict and control. You might be in distress because you think you’re a bad person. You might be in distress because you are contending with violent intrusive thoughts. I am here with you in this moment and am holding your hand and I want you to breathe because you’ve found a post that can (possibly) help you to understand your brain and help you heal. Or perhaps, if nothing else, let you know that you are not alone.

Now, ma cherie, in our first adventure together, I present to you: A METAPHOR.

Part 1: The Metaphor for Pure OCD: your mind is a meadow.

Imagine your mind is a sprawling and lush field of tall grass swaying in the breeze. You could even call it a mind-field. Ahahaha. The tall grass is beautiful and full of life, but if you’re reading this, your brain/field is also full of Thought Monsters. Enter full Scooby ruh roh!

Thought Monsters are ugly little suckers and they come in limitless varieties, shapes and sizes. Yours are unique to you, but not as unique as you might think because everyone has Thought Monsters. The difference between Pure OCD sufferers and less neuro-spicy individuals is that ours tend to be harder to shake and we think they determine our unworthiness. In this metaphor, the Thought Monsters are conveniently sized to be perfectly hidden by the tall grass of your mind, lurking and waiting.

For some people, they say things like “My parents will die if I don’t hug them three times before they leave the house” or “I’ll never be good at school so it’s better just to give up.” Or my most consistent monster, the kind that says “You might lose control and use the knife you're holding to murder someone you love."

Pretty scary stuff right? It sure scared me at 17 years old when I didn’t know what on EARTH my brain was doing and I started to believe the worst about myself. Take a deep breath if you need to, you are currently being very brave and facing your worst fears.

I digress.

Thought Monsters have impeccable timing; they show up when the stakes are the highest.

Here are three examples of things my brain has delighted me with in the past:

“If I am chopping things in the kitchen and my family comes in I might lose control and hurt them.”

“If I hold that baby something horrible will happen and they will be hurt. I am too dangerous to hold anyone fragile.”

“I am driving and simultaneously imagining careening into oncoming traffic. I shouldn’t drive because someday I might act on this impulse and hurt people.”

It’s friggin SCARY my friend! No doubt about it! And there’s way more scary stuff that my brain has created over the years. Stephen King ain’t got NOTHING on us.

Part 2: Obsession to Curiosity

Instead of those thoughts passing quietly through our brain and onto their own lives (thank-you-very-much) we get into a cycle of believing we are culpable for having them and capable of acting on them, and it can turn into an extremely isolating and traumatic time.

If you're anything like me, your initial reaction to these thoughts is anything but helpful. I didn't know how to manage my thoughts so they managed me, and they managed me into all sorts of unhelpful habits.

1. Distraction: I would try and cover intrusive thoughts by diving into other activities, aggressively redirecting my mind. This would work short term but it never lasted and I would always boomerang back to the paralyzing fear and imagery I had been avoiding.

2. Distancing: I closed myself off from friendships, my family and intimacy to avoid the violent thoughts that would inevitably appear from these interactions. I would often be faking being fine on the outside while the distress raged on internally.

3. Numbing: In order to feel less guilt, pain and shame, I started to suppress feeling everything. However, if you numb pain, you numb joy, laughter, love, affection, honesty... all the messy good stuff that you are blessed to feel as a wonderful, imperfect, emotional being.

4. Bargaining: There were dark nights where I made pacts about hurting myself before harming anyone else. I also remember deciding that if things went really badly, I would run away to a forest and live in a cabin.

5. Justifying: When I say justifying, I don’t mean justifying the violent thoughts but rather reassuring your goodness based on a specific event or fact about your behaviour. “I did this” or “This hasn’t happened, therefore I am a good person.” For a really long time, my anchor was the fact that I had never had a violent thought about my mom. Up until about 23 I had had intrusive violent thoughts about every other person but her. I believed that as long as she was safe from my brain, I couldn’t really be bad. But then, one day, I had an intrusive thought about her and it drove me so deeply backwards that the small “progress” I thought I had made evaporated.

   
   

Are you seeing a theme? The theme is self-deceit. To deflect, distance, distract, numb, justify and bargain against intrusive thoughts is a guarantee that they will resurface and resurface and resurface and... you get the idea. These are the boomerang tactics of thought management.

So, does anything actually work? Is there any hope for the future?

Yes, there is. And you might not believe it's possible, but I'm proof. The way forward for me was acceptance.

Part 3: What does management and acceptance look like?

There is no quick fix, but there are tactics that you can start your tool kit with. I think it took me about 3-4 years of ongoing thought management to feel confident with it. But it is a skill, it CAN be learned, and below I have shared what I did to ease the trauma my intrusive thoughts were causing to a liveable and peaceful place.

Management is the key to a long, sparkly life with mental health. The three steps to my management are as follows.

1. Recognition.

2. Acceptance.

3. Placement.

1. Recognition:The process of recognizing a thought in the moment is the ability to observe something going on in your mind objectively without associating yourself with it. A thought is powerful, but it is an imagined thing. It feels real, but in fact, you are an observer to it and not a participant. (Meditation is a huge help for this as it allows you to connect to your physical breath and body instead of going completely cerebral when faced with triggering situations or thoughts.) You recognize that it is removed from you as a person with no connection to your true self.

2. Acceptance is a longer word for love. To deny the thought is to fuel the thought. You have to welcome the imagery in all its horror and understand this is your brain’s attempt to help. Thank the thought monster, love the thought monster for doing what it thinks is a good job and love yourself for being the deep empathetic person you are.

3. Placement: this could also be called organizing or labeling. This is the act of filing away the thought in a way that isn’t dismissive. How you choose to do this step is your prerogative and I will teach you my own version as an example, that is my gift to you but know that these steps could look very different.

   
   

Maybe you journal to recognize, accept and organize your thoughts, you write a song that takes you through a process when you are in distress. Heck, maybe a short poem you have tattooed on your arm as a reminder could work. This is your journey. This is your brain. Lean on your strengths and imagination to make this process your own.

To cope with my OCD I created an imaginary depiction of monsters so who am I to judge what you come up with?

Part 4: What I do.

Here’s an example of how I recognize, accept and place my intrusive thoughts.

1. The intrusive thought pops in to my brain. For me it is like a vivid short film of something I fear happening, usually I am the perpetrator of the action. I hold space for the imagery that is appearing, and I allow it to become it's horrible self. It's good to breathe or speak aloud if it helps you. You REALLY have to let itself play itself out. To deny it is fuel for the thought.

2. I acknowledge the Thought Monster: “Hello you. Well now. That was an impressive thought, you outdid yourself this time with your violence and creativity. I appreciate you trying to help me. I love that you try to help me and I appreciate and welcome you.”

3. I create and imagine the Thought Monster responsible for the thought. Are they holding a little knife? Are they driving a little clown car? The sky is the limit. They usually look pleased with themselves and stand there being their ridiculous, muttering away in gibberish. My Thought Monsters have always been reminiscent of Maleficent's monsters in the original Disney Sleeping Beauty.

4. I thank the Monster for it's contribution, for trying to help me be safe. I send it love, I wrap it in affection and then I give it a flag so that I can see it and recognize it again when it comes back.

What do I mean by a flag?

When I first started recognizing and labeling my intrusive thoughts, I needed a way to empower myself in the process. The thoughts were always coming to me, and I needed a weapon to fight back that wasn’t any form of repression. I needed to mark the thoughts so that I could start to understand and deflate repeat offenders. Thus, the flags were born.

In my brain it would so would go something like this.

TM: “Something evil and horrible!”

Me: "Wow! That was mighty horrible dear friend. I am impressed at your imaginative powers. So that I can tell that when you return you are a harmless thought and not a real threat, please take this flag and move along."

TM: taking the flag “grumble grumble grumble”

Once you know something, you can never not know it. And Thought Monsters hate flags. Unhappy little bastards. Big flags, little flags, red flags, purple flags, checkered flags, round flags, triangle flags, square flags, national flags. Any flag you can imagine, they HATE them.

It will take time to break down the habit of fearing these thoughts, this took me years. Because I’ve been doing this for A LONG TIME and there are often repeat offenders for specific thoughts, I have some monsters that are just piles of flags in my mind. Each time they come by they have to take the flag. I always still recognize them, offer them love and try to help them understand that I don’t need their help today.

And so this is the pattern.

See the monster, all of it.

Love the monster, all of it.

Give them a flag.

Repeat.

Part 5: Winding down

I won’t lie to you my dear, Thought Monster recognition, labeling and placement is really hard, painstaking work. In the beginning it was entirely uphill. I had to pour so much love into the process. I had to love each thought, wrap it with compassion and let it stick around as long as it needed while trying to love myself the same way. I had to drench my brain in love, drown it in forgiveness and understanding. Soak each and every disgusting idea in gentle understanding, recognizing over and over and OVER again that the thoughts aren’t me, I am not them, and we can co-exist without fear and without judgement. Oof. It’s a big change to make in your brain, that’s for sure.

You have to stay vigilant, yet flexible. Aware, but gentle. But slowly, Thought Monsters will start to avoid you, because you are a flag handing-out MACHINE.

So someday, your brain will look like a field that anyone, however scared and alone they might feel, can trust themselves to navigate safely because they can see the flags, waving above the grass and chart a course through with love and ease.

Addendum

Intrusive thoughts often target what you care about most. Isn’t that just the worst thing ever? So sorry to be the bearer of bad news. It’s often the case that for people with O.C.D. an intrusive thought is the exact opposite of a core value.

For me it’s always been my family and people I love: my worst intrusive thoughts involve hurting them and people that are vulnerable. But it could be anything! Maybe if you’re religious, doing sacrilegious things would be the absolute worst thing you could imagine. Or maybe if you really value trust, you imagine cheating or betraying someone you love in a horrible way. You get the idea.

Warning dearest! I merely tell you this, my love, to shine a light on a typical pattern but it's not the rule. You can still have intrusive thoughts on everything under the sun even if it's not a core value. What a delight! I know!