Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned (Yeats, The Second Coming)

The relationship between our thoughts and the centre of our consciousness, the ego, is complicated. It would be comforting to think that our thoughts are always at our command, but they are not. Often, like the falconer, we can only watch as they spiral out of control.

There is a common psychological experience we are all familiar with that can be summed up by the phrase:

“Where did that come from?”

These are the thoughts – ‘what if I just jumped off the edge?’, ‘what if I pushed him in front of the train?’, ‘what if I say something terrible and offensive?’ – which pass, like travellers in exotic garb through our consciousness. We marvel at their sudden appearance, maybe even entertain them for a while as a guilty pleasure, and then they are gone.

These thoughts are characterised by their ephemeral nature and their sense of novelty but, while they come to us unbidden, they never threaten the sovereignty of the ego. They are the inoffensive cousins of the real usurpers: intrusive thoughts.

Imagine that one day an email arrives in your inbox. There is a video attachment. Inside, there is footage of you, in your house, going about your daily business. Your heart quickens – how did they film this? There you are, making breakfast; paying the bills; hoovering the living room. Time passes. There is a knocking sound, and the you in the video answers the door. It is your friend. You welcome them in and you sit down to lunch. Afterwards, they offer to do the washing up. While their back is turned, you walk up behind them, pick up the kitchen knife, and slit their throat.

This, I hope, communicates something of the sudden and incontrovertible power of the intrusive thought spiral. In the story, you have a series of choices: you could choose not to open the email in the first place; to call up your friend to check they’re okay; to get the police involved; to examine the video’s authenticity. When it comes to intrusive thoughts, you have no options. It’s a live video feed: CCTV of the soul. You can’t even close the video once you’ve watched it: it plays over and over and over again. It takes up so much space in your head that there’s no room for anything else. It can remain for hours, days, weeks, longer. You might not have killed anyone yet, but the truth is right there in front of you: you are a killer.

Intrusive thoughts are difficult to talk about. Dreams can present us with all sorts of gruesome images, but generally speaking we can describe them to other people without the fear that they will identify us with them; they happen, after all, while we’re asleep. The terror of intrusive thoughts is that they hijack the mind while we’re awake (and thus apparently ‘in control’), forcing the ego into submission and foisting their truth upon us.

This truth, the content of these thoughts can vary wildly between people: contamination, suicidal ideation, blasphemy. I want to make it clear that I can only talk about my own experience in this regard and, generally speaking, my intrusive thoughts fall squarely into the violent category.

When I had a particularly powerful bout of these thoughts last summer, it nearly killed me. To me, these thoughts were only the first step in a series of events which would lead to me becoming what I saw in the images that dominated my consciousness. I genuinely thought that if I didn’t kill myself, I would be a danger to other people. It’s not that I wanted to die; it’s that suicide was the only way of protecting the people that I loved from the monster inside me. It inflated the evils of my past, and prophesied worse ones in the future.

In reality, I was never a danger to anyone except myself (this is overwhelmingly the case with people who suffer from mental health problems). I never had the urge to enact any of the terrible things that I saw; I only felt horror, revulsion, fear and shame. But when you are possessed by these thoughts – and it truly is a possession – none of that matters. There is no reasoning with intuition, no bargaining with grace. Intrusive thoughts, like religious experiences, are transcendent.

I’ve talked in this blog about the interpretation of dream images, and of psychosomatic symptoms. In my experience, taking a similar approach to intrusive thoughts has been of great help and comfort. With dreams, there is often a compensatory factor, a sort of psychic homeostasis, with the unconscious providing a counterpoint to the conscious mind. If you were to make a list of my conscious attitudes at the time of this flurry of intrusive thoughts, it would read something like this:

Vulnerable

Powerless

Useless

Frightened

Weak

And so on. I’d been fostering these feelings for years. I hadn’t yet started to pay serious attention to my dreams, nor to my psychosomatic symptoms, so I believe that these intrusive thoughts – murderous, grotesque, terrifying – were the only option left to get my attention.

I believe these thoughts were an explosion from the unconscious that did two things: compensate for my conscious attitude of vulnerability, and confront me with my repressed shadow.

The first part of that equation is simple enough. In their grotesque, overblown power, the images I was confronted with were the absolute reverse of my all-encompassing vulnerability. These two extremes therefore suggested an achievable middle-ground of assertiveness to which I now actively aspire.

The second part is more complicated. The fact of the matter is, that while in many ways I had been a victim, there was a secret part of me that understood and yearned for the power that an abuser feels. I had repressed this fact, denied the darkness in myself, and so it had grown ever darker, ever denser.

Simultaneously, I was denying this same darkness in other people. From small acts of spite, to bloody violence, to sustained emotional abuse, I made excuses for everyone. I blamed their childhoods, their own abusive pasts, their mental health problems, and in so doing, I disempowered them. I denied the existence of evil.

Evil does exist. It exists in all of us, and is a vital component of human experience. In denying it, I wasn’t just making excuses for people, I was committing an act of psychic self-mutilation. Every dark thought, feeling, or action committed by myself or anyone else was imprisoned deep within my unconscious and categorised as ‘not me’. And then, all at once, it broke free.

It gleefully picked on the most vulnerable people, tormenting me with images of myself committing terrible, unconscionable crimes. It revealed to me my unbalanced conscious attitude of vulnerability and servitude, but it also revealed my hypocrisy. It was like the shadow’s tantrum: in all its baroque horror, in all its brutality and its sanguinary violence, it was only screaming:

‘I EXIST’.

These realisations came slowly, but as they did so, things started to change. The thoughts have lessened in violence and frequency now, and when they do return in earnest (when I’m at my most vulnerable) they are still distressing, naturally, but their power over me isn’t absolute. I know that, in their own way, they are a defence mechanism – part of a psychic regulatory system that is hoary and strange, but not unknowable.

This teleological approach won’t be for everyone. It can be overwhelmingly difficult to try to find meaning in suffering, but I believe that it is worthwhile. Treat your unconscious as a hostile, alien source of meaningless symptoms and it will fill that mould. But recognise it for the fertile acre that it is, work with it, and the harvest you bring forth will be sweet.