Feel like I have no control over my thoughts

[Ollie46]

I’ve been mostly a lot better recently but I’ve had this the past couple of days. It’s just so weird, I can go long periods of time with no intrusive or obsessive thinking about my sexually perverse thoughts and then as soon as I remember it, this wave of depression hits me. I feel like I have no control over the thoughts, when they aren’t there life is good but as soon as they return I just feel completely at their mercy. I can’t get ahold of them at all, particularly during any sexual activity like masturbation.

It feels maddening, I can’t keep them away at all and the fact that I even have them in the first place makes me feel guilty and depressed. All this, accompanied with the fear that it’s not OCD, and that it feels too strong to be OCD... it’s been a rough few days

[dksea]

1 hour ago, Ollie46 said:

I feel like I have no control over the thoughts

In a sense, you don't.  At least not directly.

We often like to imagine that we are in complete control of our minds, after all, our minds are ourselves right?  They define who we are!  But really, thats a myth.  While we are in control of our conscious self, there is much of our mind that happens on auto-pilot, in fact, probably the majority of it.  This is actually easy to realize when you think about it.  Take for example automatic processes like breathing, pumping blood, digestion.  Our brain is sending out nerve impulses that control these actions all the time without our even thinking about it.  Granted in some cases (say breathing) we can exert temporary manual control, but in other cases like heart beat or digestion we can only affect this indirectly.  

But all that is pretty low level, handled by the brain stem.  Surely that is different than higher brain functions right?  Ok, but consider the next level, voluntary actions.  Say you decide to move your arm, you don't individually control the muscles, you don't even individually control the parts of your arm, you just think, often without turning it into a noticed command "move my arm".  To get even more complex, as I am typing this message my fingers are moving across the keyboard in a very complex pattern.  But I'm not thinking directly about where to put each finger (though I did when I was first learning).  At this point my brain has largely automated the process of connecting the words i want to type to the keys on the keyboard.  I don't think, for example

"I want to type an 'A'"
Step 1: Move finger to 'A' key
Step 2: Press down on 'A' key
Step 3: Release finger from 'A" key
etc.

It all happens without me consciously thinking about it, automatic thoughts are happening.

Ok, but thats still motor movement, thats not THOUGHT thoughts.  Well lets tackle thoughts.  Consider your dreams for example.  Except for a handful of people capable of lucid dreaming, the majority of us have no control whatsoever about what happens in our dreams.  Yet those thoughts have to come from somewhere right?  Its definitely not from someone else brain, its from our own!  There is a whole part of our brain that generates thoughts all on its own, without us choosing to even think about it actively.  in fact this happens all the time, our brain is constantly taking in outside stimuli (sound, smells, touch, etc.) and trying to make sense of it.  Lets say your walking down the street, you walk past a girl and get a whiff of her perfume.  Suddenly you are thinking about a girl you dated in high school who wore the same perfume.  You haven't thought of this girl in years, you weren't intentionally thinking about her, yet there the thought is!  Your brain processed the scent and it triggered the thought of your old girlfriend.  That is happening to you all the time!  Your mind is being triggered by what would otherwise be an overwhelming amount of stimuli (people with autism have a harder time processing stimuli its believed).  Sights, sounds, smells, all of them triggering memories or ideas in your brain, and somewhere, some part of your brain is constantly deciding whether to let your conscious mind, your "self" know about them.  

Think of it like a business.  You are the CEO, you make the big decisions, meanwhile all day long your employees are generating reports, information, etc. Many of them want to talk to you, but you can't possibly talk to all of them, so you have a secretary who filters your requests and decides which ones are most important, and which ones are least.  The idea is that only the most important ideas and requests get passed along for you to deal with in your limited time.  Unfortunately, unlike a real secretary we can't give our brain an explicit memo that says "no, don't let THAT thought in again".  Meanwhile in OCD people that secretary is a little frazzled and doesn't always do a great job of keeping the unwanted requests from filtering to us.  Worse, when we engage in a compulsion its like we are telling the secretary "ok, next time that person wants to talk to me, make sure to send them in".  Compulsions train our brains, Pavlov style, that certain behaviors are important even when we'd rather they not be.

So no, unfortunately you don't have direct control over your all your thoughts.  HOWEVER you can exercise indirect control.  You can control how you respond to thoughts and through that you can teach your brain that certain types of thoughts are more or less important.  Its like shopping online, the more times you buy the same object, the more likely you are to get ads for that product.  If you stop responding to ads for a certain product and stop buying that product, its likely that ad will appear less and less.  Thats how you get control.

[Jules46]

Really liked this post too, i'm a newbie here but felt your post was spot on, really hope it helps ollie and others as well as myself thank you -Jules

[Caramoole]

On 05/11/2018 at 03:34, dksea said:

In a sense, you don't.  At least not directly.

We often like to imagine that we are in complete control of our minds, after all, our minds are ourselves right?  They define who we are!  But really, thats a myth.  While we are in control of our conscious self, there is much of our mind that happens on auto-pilot, in fact, probably the majority of it.  This is actually easy to realize when you think about it.  Take for example automatic processes like breathing, pumping blood, digestion.  Our brain is sending out nerve impulses that control these actions all the time without our even thinking about it.  Granted in some cases (say breathing) we can exert temporary manual control, but in other cases like heart beat or digestion we can only affect this indirectly.  

But all that is pretty low level, handled by the brain stem.  Surely that is different than higher brain functions right?  Ok, but consider the next level, voluntary actions.  Say you decide to move your arm, you don't individually control the muscles, you don't even individually control the parts of your arm, you just think, often without turning it into a noticed command "move my arm".  To get even more complex, as I am typing this message my fingers are moving across the keyboard in a very complex pattern.  But I'm not thinking directly about where to put each finger (though I did when I was first learning).  At this point my brain has largely automated the process of connecting the words i want to type to the keys on the keyboard.  I don't think, for example

"I want to type an 'A'"
Step 1: Move finger to 'A' key
Step 2: Press down on 'A' key
Step 3: Release finger from 'A" key
etc.

It all happens without me consciously thinking about it, automatic thoughts are happening.

Ok, but thats still motor movement, thats not THOUGHT thoughts.  Well lets tackle thoughts.  Consider your dreams for example.  Except for a handful of people capable of lucid dreaming, the majority of us have no control whatsoever about what happens in our dreams.  Yet those thoughts have to come from somewhere right?  Its definitely not from someone else brain, its from our own!  There is a whole part of our brain that generates thoughts all on its own, without us choosing to even think about it actively.  in fact this happens all the time, our brain is constantly taking in outside stimuli (sound, smells, touch, etc.) and trying to make sense of it.  Lets say your walking down the street, you walk past a girl and get a whiff of her perfume.  Suddenly you are thinking about a girl you dated in high school who wore the same perfume.  You haven't thought of this girl in years, you weren't intentionally thinking about her, yet there the thought is!  Your brain processed the scent and it triggered the thought of your old girlfriend.  That is happening to you all the time!  Your mind is being triggered by what would otherwise be an overwhelming amount of stimuli (people with autism have a harder time processing stimuli its believed).  Sights, sounds, smells, all of them triggering memories or ideas in your brain, and somewhere, some part of your brain is constantly deciding whether to let your conscious mind, your "self" know about them.  

Think of it like a business.  You are the CEO, you make the big decisions, meanwhile all day long your employees are generating reports, information, etc. Many of them want to talk to you, but you can't possibly talk to all of them, so you have a secretary who filters your requests and decides which ones are most important, and which ones are least.  The idea is that only the most important ideas and requests get passed along for you to deal with in your limited time.  Unfortunately, unlike a real secretary we can't give our brain an explicit memo that says "no, don't let THAT thought in again".  Meanwhile in OCD people that secretary is a little frazzled and doesn't always do a great job of keeping the unwanted requests from filtering to us.  Worse, when we engage in a compulsion its like we are telling the secretary "ok, next time that person wants to talk to me, make sure to send them in".  Compulsions train our brains, Pavlov style, that certain behaviors are important even when we'd rather they not be.

So no, unfortunately you don't have direct control over your all your thoughts.  HOWEVER you can exercise indirect control.  You can control how you respond to thoughts and through that you can teach your brain that certain types of thoughts are more or less important.  Its like shopping online, the more times you buy the same object, the more likely you are to get ads for that product.  If you stop responding to ads for a certain product and stop buying that product, its likely that ad will appear less and less.  Thats how you get control.

[gingerbreadgirl]

I love this comparison to online shopping! So so true. 

Another comparison I've heard is that your brain is like a pet you train. It responds to what you teach it. If you teach it that every passing  person is a threat  they need to attack, then it will, and it will become very aggressive, anxious and unhappy. Your  brain is the same, it responds to what you tell it to respond to. 

[Angst]

Hi Ollie46.  I agree with dksea that we do not control thoughts. I particularly like the the way he describes memory and the way events trigger the retrieval of memories. But I wonder if the analogy with internet shopping mirrrors the experience of the generation of thoughtsduring sexual activity? What do you guys think?

[dksea]

2 hours ago, Angst said:

But I wonder if the analogy with internet shopping mirrrors the experience of the generation of thoughtsduring sexual activity?

Yup, the more time you spend focusing on a thought, the more "important" your brain will think it is.  The specific thought isn't particularly important, nor is what you are doing when the thought occurs.  It may be more likely to be related, but it doesn't have to be.

For example, a number of years back (maybe a decade now?) I went through a really troublesome period with my OCD and thoughts related to self-harm.  The first major incident occurred while I was watching an episode of Doctor Who (David Tenant is the best!).  There was NOTHING in the scene that was related to self harm, it was a new episode so i'd never even seen it before, but for whatever reason at that exact moment my OCD kicked in, latched on to a random thought and BLAM, panic ensued.  Because of how intense the anxiety I felt at the time I created a strong attachment in my brain to that particular episode and scene of the show.  For awhile I wouldn't watch it because of the anxiety it would trigger.  Even though the thought and what i'd been watching weren't thematically related, the connection had been made.  And by avoid that episode over and over I was strengthening the association in my mind between the thought and the episode.  I was making things worse.  Finally after I had managed (with some help) to get a handle on my anxiety and accept and recognize the OCD for what it was I forced myself to rewatch the episode.  I was in a good place so it didn't take many times rewatching to break the connection, but it might have taken many.

Long story short, it doesn't particularly matter what the thought is or when you have it as far as the OCD aspect is concerned.  The nice thing about the action is you can use it as a tool to fight your OCD.  You can CHOOSE to engage in the action (assuming its safe otherwise) and work on ignoring the OCD sirens that pop in to your head.  Over time you will dehabituate yourself and the thought will become disconnected with the action and continue to fade from importance.

[Ollie46]

Thank you for the responses everybody, especially dksea for giving that very in-depth explanation!

I felt like such an idiot whilst reading it because it reminded me that, actually, I already know all of that. It used to come so naturally to me, just not giving the thoughts and feelings the reactions that they want. I was fine for about 4 years solid and I could do it anytime I wanted! I don’t know why I’m finding it so damn hard to just do that. I work myself up and do all the things I’m not supposed to because I get so scared!

I’m going to work extra hard at changing my responses to the OCD, I’m sure I’ll be able to get back to where I was if I try hard enough. At least I hope so!