Believing in approximately two things

June 8, 2026: 🗓 

This post is about intrusive thoughts. Actually it’s about thought recordings, a compound noun I’ve been using a lot recently.

Definition of a thought recording: Comprehensive intrusive thoughts. The intrusive thoughts aren't always negative, but they're not yours. Sometimes they're negative but sound just like you.

I’m going to use the abbreviation TR.

Also, TR could be misunderstood. I don’t know why I feel that way, other than my general feeling that many people are misunderstood right now and it’s the real cause of any problem. But I’m not going to make up my own reason for why I feel that way.

I only believe in approximately two things now, and one of them is this: I’m aligning myself with ___ (the blank I don’t have words for because I don’t know what it is, but I do know to align myself with it) when I allow the unknown to be unknown when I come across it.

This means not projecting my own pattern-recognition or worldview on it (at least, not consciously). Also, not assuming or assigning reasons to things I don’t yet understand. I don’t know why this is one of only two things I believe in, but I trust it.

The following is a real-life example of TR. I think it’s helpful to share examples instead of just generalizations.

Mise-en-scène: Me in driver’s seat of my parked car, hugging an oversized heritage flannel (which has become like a security teddy for me recently even though, for the first time in 8 years, I don’t feel so scared all the time), reading this quote by Carl Jung. Day. The quote is much longer, but these are the parts that resonated with me.

“People do not realize just how much they are putting at risk when they don’t accept what life presents them with, the questions and tasks that life sets them. When they resolve to spare themselves the pain and suffering, they owe to their nature. […]
Today I can say: I have been true to myself, I have done what I could to the best of my knowledge and conscience. Whether it was right or not, I cannot say. Suffering was inevitable in any case. But I want to suffer for those things which really belong to me. […]"
- Carl Jung

This really resonates with me. I actually feel inspired. Meanwhile, TR starts playing a dread-inducing story in my mind. TR plays different versions of this story throughout the years, but it has a central idea: there are other people living in my mind (in addition to just me).

For the past 8 years, TR seemingly tries to embed this story in my own backstory, like a “belief” I have about myself in the background while I go about my day.

While I’m reading the Carl Jung quote, TR tells me the people living in my mind are also reading the quote at the same time as me. It’s making them sad because it reminds them how they didn’t get to have their own bodies to be able to live out their destinies and do what life presents them with. Which makes me feel guilty for feeling inspired, especially because there’s an undertone that I caused this somehow and people have to suffer because of me. It doesn’t explicitly say this, it’s just a feeling attached to it.

Common themes:

1️⃣ The story is too vague to know how to fix it.
2️⃣ I don’t know how to communicate with the people allegedly living in my mind. But I get a vague impression they think I do, which causes detrimental misunderstandings.
3️⃣ It’s always an impossible situation to deal with.
4️⃣ I don’t actually believe the story is true, but the distress caused by the story lingers in the background while I try to live my life. Example: what if the people that allegedly live in my mind think I’m aware of them but just don’t care or am somehow purposely keeping them there? What if they only have access to a subset of thoughts in TR without being able to see the entire context (like the part where I don’t believe the stories are true)? What if they think those are my actual thoughts? What if they also experience TR, and they think I’m the one doing it to them? Et cetera.

Instead of being free to explore what resonates with me in the quote and develop my own inner compass, TR redirects me into feelings of guilt and confusion.

I try to counter-redirect it by recalling I have a tendency to personify aspects of my mind (which I actually didn’t start doing until TR started doing it 8 years ago by way of vivid stories in which I had dissociative identity disorder), and maybe just so much detail was added that the personifications feel real.

Then I remember I no longer assign reasons to things I don’t yet understand. I’m trying to hold space for things to interpret themselves (I don’t really know what this means yet, which is why my wording is vague).

I don’t need to replace TR’s stories with other fake stories. Actually I still do that sometimes. It’s like I just forget not to. Like I get sucked into it, and it makes me just totally forget they’re not my thoughts.

For years, I used to try to turn TR’s scary stories or shame stories into positive stories so I wasn’t in survival mode all the time. But TR would often morph my positive stories back into TR stories, which felt worse.

But maybe me thinking I was the one trying to make the story positive was just a pre-planned part of TR’s story, and I believed it was me because it seemed like something I would do. Also, I found it very difficult to ignore whatever story TR was presenting as reality if I didn’t have something to replace it with.

This is sort of unrelated, but I feel like TR removes some form of self-awareness from me for short periodes of time while it plays thoughts in my mind. When TR returns my self-awareness, I feel like I was replaced for that period of time. Like I didn’t have control over not being aware that TR was the one supplying the thoughts. I’ll need to think about how to explain that better.