Recurrent intrusive thoughts

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Ahh... Yes, well, that sure catches my attention. I am currently working with some very hard-wired triggers that bypass any attempts at reframing or thought replacement, and instead go straight to my poor battered amygdala. A key trigger was put in place when I was about 17 years old by my father during a public tirade of humiliating emotional abuse.

Professional therapists are great and I benefit enormously from them. But at the same time for purposes of diagnosing something like PTSD they sometimes can feel constrained by a list of specific diagnostic criteria that must present to predetermined degrees. So to me even though I may not meet the officially prescribed diagnostic thresholds for a given disorder, I can still experience troubles aligned with them and can benefit from therapeutic interventions designed to treat them. So my present intention is to work on my triggers with my therapist "as if" they were caused by PTSD and see if they respond positively.

I wonder how some approach along those lines might work in your case.

I am sorry to hear that others battle with this problem also, but it is comforting to me to know that I am not the only one with this issue, as most people I talk to in AA and such say that they had this problem at first, just accepted that the past can't be changed, stay in today, and move on. If only it were so easy.

In a way, it does seem kind of freeing to just admit that they will never go away. I no longer have to spend as much energy wondering why I have them, what I need to do to remove them, and the like. They are just a part of my makeup. I am brown hair and blue eyes, and I have negative recurrent thoughts. The only real regret I have with them is that when they are bad, they do make me depressed and irritable, and I am not as good of parent and spouse then, but now I can just focus on how to function best in those situations instead of focusing on how to make the thoughts go away. Do I wish I didn't have them? Of course! They do seem to be related to Asperger's, I believe.

I think the PTSD treatment idea is a good one. Even if I don't exactly meet the DSM 5 criteria for PTSD, I have suffered a couple of trauma and have lingering effects from them. I asked both of my therapists that if they had to pick one emotion at the root of my trouble that is deepest ingrained in me, what would it be? They both said anxiety, so they recognize I have problems with anxiety, which is at the root of PTSD. There do seem to be some non-SSRI medications that help with PTSD. I don't know if they make the obsessions go away or just reduce the anxiety. I do think that one was a tricyclic antidepressant that is also used in OCD, so that might help. I did read some more on OCD and it does seem that you can just have the obsessions part of it. It also seems that sexual obsessions are a pretty common form of it.

It's your profession.

You know it wouldn't hurt to seek treatment for something, even though you might not be diagnosed with that "something."

The hive mind is extremely aggressive, pervasive, and relentless.
The manipulation is subliminal. It goes under radar and works through your subconscious.

Sorry to hear about that. I never thought about certain messages bypassing the cortex and going straight to the Amygdala. That is an interesting idea. My dad was pretty good at shaming also, including in public. Around him the only emotion you were supposed to show was happiness. One was never to be angry or sad, and if you were he called you names and would let people in public know about what was wrong with you. It was kind of hard to sit at his funeral and hear all these people say all the good things about him, and thinking-you only saw half of the picture.

My Dad did have good qualities about him, and I assume he loved me, but I think he just wasn't ready to deal with someone with mental issues. I don't think he ever wanted kids, my Mom (who had a few mental issues of her own) forced him into it. He came from a very emotionally stable house. I felt like a disappointment a lot-here they went to all this trouble and spent all this money to adopt someone, and I turn out to be a psychological mess. Obviously this wasn't my fault, but I have just started to really learn about the different disorders I have and how they affect me-other than the alcoholism and drug addiction which I knew about for years and did something about 22 years ago.

I hope you treatment goes well. What sort of things do you do to work on this hardwiring? As you said earlier, it will probably take a bit of time.

I will continue to seek help for them, but just with a different attitude. I will no longer expect them to go away if I just do the "right thing". Maybe the better goal is just to expect to lessen how often they occur.

You're right...it's not as simple as that.

But there are truths....and one truth is that you're not a loser.

What would be a better word to use to describe that frustrating and romantically challenged period of my life?

Without question, one of the most helpful books I've read is:
Stress Management, Matheny and Riordan

I read it over 20 years ago and still apply what I learned. Both of my therapists studied under Matheny.

In terms of how I am attempting to rewire that annoying direct line to my amygdala, it seems to start with that most dreaded yet helpful of all AA discussion topics: Acceptance.

I figure if I can patiently learn how to interject just a fraction of a second of Acceptance in the neural pathway to my otherwise instant negative reaction, that will give me a potential splice-point to redirect things to my cortex so that they can be more helpfully processed. At my age neuroplasticity is not what it used to be, but I am hopeful.

By the way, my sobriety date is in 1992, so we are in similar boats in that regard.

I would call it your "formative period."

I am not sure much was getting formed then, other than depression and bad memories for today.

Those memories are potentially very useful in a therapeutic context. If you didn't have them, it is more difficult to treat those who have had them (which is many people).

They could serve you well as an agent of restraint as well. As an "adversive" in the behaviorist sense.

The subject of formative years reminded me of what I discovered when trying to figure myself out. That when I was about 3-4 yrs old, the babysitter we had showed us horror movies like Blade Runner and Nightmare on Elm Street. I grew up thinking those were dreams until my husband showed me Blade Runner and it all pieced together.

All the anxiety, the paranoia, the psychotic thoughts, my constant dreaming of death and fear... probably stemmed from that babysitter. I have a wild imagination already, those movies just fueled it. It gave my already obsessive personality something bad to focus on.

I never thought about the science behind how accepting it made it easier for me to deal with. That's interesting.

I lived with this too.

Observations:
1. The flashbacks are regarding perceived negative events.
2. They seem to purposely remind me of an event to scream to me "You are a loser" or "You are a failure" or "You were stupid" or "what's wrong with you".
3. They are regarding times when I was very mentally ill and could not act as I would today.
4. I use to say nonsensical words when they would happen to block them from my mind.
5. I am haunted by "is there atonement for what did when I was severely mentally ill?". Though, I never really did anything tragic.
6. Finally, as I got better, they came less often.

This is the result of decades of mental illness. So I would speculate you must of endured a long period as well.

Last edited by LoveNotHate on 23 Jul 2015, 2:40 pm, edited 1 time in total.

How did you deal with it? What course of treatment did you take? Most of these describe me to an uncannily eerie tee.

Which mental illness(es) did you have?