Hello, intrusive thoughts!

Have you ever been minding your own business, living your life, and your brain suddenly asks you, “what if we drove into oncoming traffic?” Or, “what if you threw your phone in the ocean?” (Tempting, actually–maybe not the best example). These thoughts are completely normal, although they can feel extremely distressing. They’re called intrusive thoughts, a charming symptom of anxiety or OCD.

For some people, they’re just random and fleeting. Of course you aren’t going to swerve into oncoming traffic; silly brain! For others, intrusive thoughts aren’t fleeting at all. They stick around; they repeat; they destabilize. Worst, they feel incredibly shameful, which only makes them louder.

One “cure” for anxiety–inasmuch as there is one–is talking about it out loud. Everything sounds worse in the echo chamber of your brain. When you share your scary, shameful thoughts aloud, they lose some of their power over you. An example: I used to have a terrible intrusive thought about accidentally throwing my dog out the car window. I would never actually do this, as I love my dog. But the thought would come every time we drove somewhere with the dog and it was, as you can imagine, incredibly distressing. When I finally screwed up my courage and told my best friend about it, she laughed out loud. She immediately apologized but actually her laughing was helpful! It was a ridiculous thought! The second I named it and she laughed, it became just silly instead of frightening. And now I have it rarely, if at all.

The point of this self-disclosure is that sharing our fears is actually one way to diminish them. Intrusive thoughts trick our brains into thinking there is danger when there is none. Checking those thoughts by telling them to someone else takes away their power and allows us to accept emotionally what we may know rationally: our thoughts cannot hurt us unless we let them.

I don’t mean you should minimize or diminish your thoughts, intrusive or otherwise. Rather, try meeting them with curiosity instead of fear. Try sharing them with others instead of letting them echo in your brain. You might find you can let them go. And if you can’t, that’s ok too; that just means it’s time to talk to a therapist.

You know where to find me.

The pain and comfort of shared grief

This is not what I wanted to write about today. In fact, I had started a totally different post yesterday. But this morning, whatever I had written before seemed pointless in the face of yet another senseless tragedy.

When a tragedy occurs—a mass shooting, for instance, or a racist murder—we experience grief, even if we haven’t been directly impacted. I don’t personally know anyone who was killed yesterday in Texas, or in any of the other violent tragedies that have taken place over the last several years, but last night I found myself crying in my husband’s arms, thinking about the devastation of those families and communities.

I’m not a big fan of the five stages of grief (the most commonly cited and probably most poorly understood theory of grief but that’s a discussion for another day). Despite my rejection of the five stage model, those first three stages describe my feelings at the moment: stage one, denial (this cannot have happened again); stage two, anger (why does this keep happening, what is everyone doing, someone should DO SOMETHING); and stage three, fear (we are not safe. My children are not safe).

I am rattling around between these three stages, both drawn to the news and social media and also wanting to hide from it. I want to talk about it at length with others but also can’t bring myself to discuss it out loud. I am alternately disbelieving, furious, and terrified. I want to do something useful but also feel paralyzed and useless. I am, in short, experiencing grief.

I know I’m not alone. So many of us who are parents talk about holding our babies close after this kind of event and that’s certainly something I did last night: I watched my children sleeping peacefully and thanked God they were safe. In my sadness and fear, I imagined parents all over the country doing the same thing. And I imagined all of us reaching out to hold each other up, clasping our hands together and sitting with the enormity of this tragedy and all the others that preceded it.

When something does not directly impact us, it can be easy to turn away from it (denial again, right? “That will never happen to me, ignore ignore ignore”). And there can be some turning away: we cannot sit only with pain all day, every day. But there can also be some turning toward each other. We can grieve together. We can hold space for each other in moments like this, acknowledging that witnessing suffering and tragedy is nearly as bad as experiencing it for ourselves. We can call what we are experiencing grief, even if it is not our personal loss to bear. We can be still in this moment and feel the wave of anguish, of anger, of fear. It won’t swallow us if we hold on to each other. It brings me a measure of peace to believe this; I hope it does for you as well.

Carrying the weight of grief

Grief brings its own kind of exhaustion. Clients often tell me that they think they’re getting enough sleep—they’re going to bed at a reasonable hour and sleeping through until the morning, minus the usual up-to-pee-at-3-in-the-morning—and yet they still feel tired all the time. Why is that, they want to know? Often it’s the weight of their grief, holding them down even as they try to move through the day.

I’m no somatic therapy expert but it’s widely accepted that our feelings show up in our bodies. It’s no coincidence that we describe being “gutted” or “broken-hearted” when something upsetting happens; we often feel emotional pain in a physical way. We cannot disconnect our minds and our bodies, no matter how we sometimes try.

Just like any other heartbreak, grief can show up physically: as exhaustion for instance, or a general achiness throughout the body. Sometimes you may cry so hard you become short of breath for a minute. We cannot ignore the physical pain and weight that grief exerts on us. So if you feel tired, headachy, occasionally short of breath, certainly check in with your primary doctor first. But after you get the all-clear, spend some time considering: is carrying the weight of your grief hurting you?

This is not to say you’re doing grief wrong. All the ways you grief manifests are normal, if awful. Rather, I hope you take away that if you are suffering, you are not alone. No one can take your pain away from you but others are willing to help you carry it. There is no burden you have to shoulder alone, even (especially) your grief. This is your invitation to reach out—to a friend, a lover, a stranger, a therapist—and let someone else share the weight with you.