113: The Origin Of Intrusive Thoughts & How To Stop Them

You're not a freak.

I used to feel like there was something deeply wrong with me because of the thoughts that would barge their way into my head at the most random, inappropriate moments.

But judging yourself and trying to force the intrusive thoughts away has much the same effect as when we do the same with skin picking, hair pulling, and nail biting - it just makes things worse. Sometimes destructively worse.

I hear you. I see you.

Let's work on this together.

What you'll learn:
🌟Where your intrusive thoughts are coming from
🌟The unexpected connection to chronic picking, pulling, or biting
🌟3 questions to generate a powerful perspective shift and deep healing

Here are the 3 questions from this episode. Save them in your phone for future reference:
How does it make me feel? 
What does that feeling make me want to do?
What is this behaviour protecting me from? 

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My name is Raffaela Marie. I'm a holistic BFRB coach who has healed from 15 years of chronic skin picking myself and dedicated my life to helping driven women do the same. Through my podcast, free resources, and programs, I teach strategies to overcome urges, build emotional safety, and expand into authenticity. My approach goes beyond quick fixes, focusing on root causes and long-term recovery.

Transcript

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What if intrusive thoughts weren't something wrong with you, but actually a protective mechanism rooted in past experiences? This is the question we're going to be answering today. And it is going to give you a powerful perspective shift on the intrusive thoughts that you struggle with and why you struggle with them. And that perspective shift is going to help you to deal with them better. So they stop causing so many problems in your day-to-day life. Maybe you'll even feel a weight lifted. I struggled with intrusive thoughts when I was younger. I know how it feels. So I'm going to be sharing a bit of my own story as well along in this episode. You are listening to episode 113 of Beyond Skin Picking and Hebbling, the place to be if you want to learn how to address the root cause of why you pick, pull, and bite at your body so that you can create long-term sustainable healing. My name is Rafaela Marie. I am your host. I struggle with chronic skin picking for 15 years. And through a holistic and science-based approach, through addressing the root cause, I uncovered how you can heal from it. I became a coach for the past three years. I've been helping people like you to heal, and I share everything that I know with you on this podcast. And I have a very special opportunity that I've really been thoroughly enjoying the past few weeks. And that is, I want to invite you to share your story with me. This is an opportunity for you to be deeply heard, seen, and understood, and also to receive feedback and then also some guidance and some tangible steps you can take to start addressing the root cause right now. It is just so incredible to be able to connect with you, my listener, to get to know you better, to meet you, to hear your thoughts, to hear your experience and your story, and then also to be able to support you in the way that we all so deeply need. So if you're feeling drawn to that, make sure you click on the link in the show notes. What are intrusive thoughts? Let's just start with the basics to make sure we're all on the same page for this episode. Intrusive thoughts go directly against your values and beliefs. They can be of a sexual, violent, and mortifying nature, or they can become obsessive thoughts that create anxiety, stress, self-doubt, things like I've forgotten to lock the front door, even though you're sure that you did, I've forgotten to turn the stove off, or they can be thoughts around a loved one getting hurt. Did you know that 95% of people experience intrusive thoughts? But only one to two percent of people struggle with them. And I actually like to liken this to chronic skin picking and hair pulling and nail biting because these behaviors are normal on a normal level. A lot of people engage in these behaviors. I would say, now this is just my assumption. I didn't find these statistics anywhere. But I would say about 95% of the population also engages in some kind of picking, pulling, or biting at their body to some extent. But only a small percentage of the population actually struggles with these behaviors. So why is that? Why is it that so many people can experience the same thing, but only a very small percentage of those people suffer with that thing? Let me ask you a question. And I'm going to take a wild swing in the dark and assume that this is accurate. But have you ever tried to resist, suppress, use willpower to force intrusive thoughts away? Trying to avoid them and shove them down and ignore them. What we resist persists. And not only that, we start to resist it because we start to make meaning out of intrusive thoughts. We think they mean something about us as a person. And these intrusive thoughts are intrusive, they're not pleasant. We don't want to associate who we are at our core with these thoughts, and so we resist them. And so not only have we attached personal meaning to these thoughts, but we've started to resist them. And what you resist persists. It's like very, very similar with chronic skin picking and hair-pulling and nail biting. The more you try to resist it, the stronger it gets, the harder it gets, the worse the relapses get. We've all been there. I have tried through willpower alone to stop chronic skin peeking so many times. And they are, without a doubt, the worst relapses I've ever had. The harder I tried to just stop picking, the worse I would the worse I would fall on my face and crash and burn and feel like absolute shit. Which is why we also end up not wanting to try anymore. But that's a whole other topic in itself. Now there's something we really need to understand about our own mind. And this has been confirmed again and again by different areas of research through behavioral psychology, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, clinical psychology, and trauma models, they all continue to come to the same conclusion, to the same understanding. And that is that everything we do is for a reason. Every behavior we engage in has a purpose. And that purpose is actually to serve you. It's actually on a subconscious level, there is a part of us that believes that this behavior does help us. And that can be hard to accept because we think, well, chronic skin picking, that just makes my life worse. If I could just get rid of this, I would feel so much better about myself. Intrusive thoughts. If I could just get rid of the intrusive thoughts, I could relax. But there, right there, is where we want to start getting curious. Because that is a part of the answer that we're looking for. What is skin picking a tool for? It's a tool for self-soothing. It's a tool to help us numb our emotions. It's a tool to help us escape. If you have a really loud inner critic, there is a high chance you're using skin picking or hair pulling or nail biting as a way to escape your own thoughts, to escape your own criticisms and judgments. And procrastination can be another tool we use to avoid our own judgment. If I procrastinate doing that thing, I don't have to risk failure. And I don't risk have to risk me being horrible to myself about failing. Or it can be a tool we use to give ourselves rest because we're not good at proactively and intentionally allowing ourselves to slow down and rest. Perfectionism is the need for control. And when we are in control, it helps us to feel safe. So the purpose of perfectionism is to create a pseudo-sense of safety, which helps us to regulate ourselves. No behavior is random or self-sabotaging at its core. It is an attempt to regulate, protect, or meet a need. But when the behavior becomes unhealthy, it's because it is that behavior was born out of survival. It doesn't come from a place of self-love. It doesn't come from a place of compassion, of self-acceptance. It comes from a place of I just need to survive. Because at some stage, you just needed to survive. And so you latched on to whatever would help you to survive. And those behaviors will and do become self-destructive over time. So that's one of the, so that's one of the answers we can have of why most people don't end up struggling with intrusive thoughts, even though they experience them, because their brain didn't latch on to an intrusive thought and say, I can use this to keep myself safe. And we're going to get to how it keeps you safe in a second. Just like people who engage in forms of self-grooming, they didn't at any point latch onto that behavior as a tool to help them to cope, to keep them safe, to help them survive. Other people latch on to shopping or food or porn or drugs, cigarettes, alcohol, over-exercising, overworking. There are so many different things that people latch on to. What you're experiencing is a very normal human experience. You are not strange. You are not broken. There is not something wrong with you that you are having these intrusive thoughts. You are like every other human being. You are like 95% of the population. We've just attached meaning to it. And we've you we and we've learned how to use intrusive thoughts as a protective mechanism, which is what we're going to understand now. What is their purpose? Yes, they are there to protect, but what are they protecting us from? How can we figure out what they are protecting us from? There's a quote from Marcia M. Lyne. She's an American psychologist and professor and author. This is a quote from her that pretty well sums up what we're looking at here. Problem behaviors are often the individual's best attempt to regulate overwhelming emotions. Same with skin picking, same with perfectionism, same with self-sabotage, same with procrastination, same with drinking and drugs and alcohol, all of these things. It's all to do with our emotions. Now there's three questions we can ask ourselves to uncover what is going on, what is going on beneath the intrusive thoughts. You can also use these questions for skin picking or hair-bulling or nail biting or any other behavior that you're struggling with. But these will help us to explore what is underneath, where is it actually coming from? Because when we can build that understanding, we can start to access a bit of compassion for ourselves. And that is healing. When we can have an intrusive thought and feel a little bit of softening, some understanding of like, oh, I know what you're trying to do here. It's like with a work colleague, you notice that they're in a bit of a shit mood. They're not very pleasant to work with. Maybe they're being a bit short and snappy. And it can be really frustrating to work with someone who is in that state. Maybe you start to question, is it to do with me? Have I done something wrong? Maybe we start to blame ourselves a little bit, get a little bit insecure, or maybe we project and say, Well, this person's just being an arsehole. There's something wrong with them. But if we actually got curious and asked, hey, what's going on? Are you okay? And then that person shares, yeah, I just lost my best friend today. I found out this morning. That would bring in an overwhelming amount of understanding and compassion for that person of, oh, no wonder you're acting that way. No wonder you're behaving that way. And then it allows us to accept them as they are. That is what we want to create for ourselves. We want to create that deep understanding of, oh, I see why you're doing this. It's not personal, it's not about me. And then it allows us to accept the existence of that thing that was originally frustrating us, that was originally causing us to question ourselves. Suddenly it's okay that it's there. Suddenly it's okay that your work colleague is in a shit mood and they're not able to be very pleasant. Suddenly, you can have space and you can accept that they are there. That is what we want to create for ourselves internally, because that is how we let go of intrusive thoughts. That is also how we heal from chronic skin peeking and hair pulling and nail biting. Now, these are three questions that can help us to begin to create that internal experience of acceptance and compassion and understanding within ourselves. I'm going to share the three questions with you. Then I'm going to unpack those questions through a personal experience with an intrusive thought I used to have a lot as a teenager. The first question is: how do intrusive thoughts make you feel? Because it's all about emotion. The whole reason why we engage in any kind of self-destructive or unhealthy behavior is because of emotion. If we didn't feel anything, we wouldn't be driven to do anything. So how does the intrusive thought make you feel? Does it make you feel scared, anxious? Does it make you spiral? Does it make you feel ashamed, embarrassed? Does it make you feel confused, conflicted, self-doubt? How, what is the emotional response that you have to the intrusive thought? Just think of that for yourself right now. How does it make you feel? Now, when you acknowledge how it makes you feel, we want to ask the next question. Question number two, what does that feeling make you want to do? So we're isolating the emotions, we're setting aside the intrusive thoughts, and we're just focusing on the emotion. So if you feel embarrassed, scared, anxious, self-doubt, what do those emotions in themselves make you want to do? How would you, how would you automatically react to that? If you were to listen to those feelings, have those feelings and listen to them, how would you react? The third question is: what is this behavior protecting me from? Now, if you are getting a bit lost, that's okay. That's why I'm going to share with you my personal experience with an intrusive thought and unpack these questions with you and give you more insight because there's a lot to these questions that can give us so much incredible information about ourselves. So, an intrusive thought I used to have around a mortifying behavior behavior when I was a teenager was in my first job. I grew up in the Blue Mountains, New South Wales, Australia, and I got my first job in a fine dining restaurant in a small town called Blacksland. And at that stage of my life, I was deeply depressed. I had very, very little self-worth. I struggled to leave the house. I experienced selective mutism. I had crippling social anxiety. I was not in a good place. Life was really, really hard. Now, uh, in this first job that I got, in my apprenticeship, I was doing an apprenticeship to become a chef, and this restaurant was run by a couple. Now, the intrusive thought that I used to have was that I would slap my boss's wife instead of saying hello. Instead of shaking her hand, I would slap her. Or, you know how you give people a kiss on the cheek to say hello? Instead of giving her a kiss on the cheek, I would give her a big smooch on the mouth. Now, if we go through those three questions, how did that intrusive thought make me feel? It made me feel mortified, anxious, embarrassed. I was terrified of the idea of doing that. Those are intense feelings to experience. What we want to understand is that these emotions that we experience are not isolated to the intrusive thoughts. That feeling of mortification, of embarrassment, of I also felt shame at that as well, at the idea of it. That feeling of anxiety, that already, those emotions already existed inside me. The intrusive thoughts just came in, became a tool to help me to manage those emotions. Because I didn't know how. And the reason why we hold we hold on to these really painful emotions is because there's a time in your life where you felt mortified, where you felt anxious, where you felt terrified, where you felt shame, and you were left alone in that emotion, in that experience. And so instead of processing that emotion, you held on to it. Because as children, we cannot process emotion alone. You do not have the mental capacity. Your brain isn't developed enough to do that. We need an adult, a grounded, an emotionally mature adult. And most of us didn't have that. Doesn't mean that your parent or caregiver wasn't amazing, but if they weren't able to navigate their own emotions, they couldn't help you to navigate your own. So those feelings of mortification, shame, embarrassment, anxiety, I already was holding them in my system. There were already unprotions that were already sitting inside me, unprocessed, that I didn't know how to deal with. And so I found, subconsciously found all these tools to help me do that. Skin picking was one of them. Intrusive thoughts became another. So now let's go to the next question. If I isolate those emotions, I separate them from the behavior, because the behavior is just a symptom. Skin picking, hair-pulling, nail biting, intrusive thoughts, procrastination, they're all just a symptom. Then I can ask myself, well, what do those emotions that I feel, what do they make me want to do? What is my reaction to them? The action that I take in response to those emotions. We're not talking about another feeling that it makes you feel. We're talking about the physical action that you take in response. Now, when I felt these things, it made me want to avoid people, avoid social events, all that it made me want to isolate. Because if I isolated, then I wouldn't have to worry about feeling those feelings. Now, if I couldn't avoid social situations, these are feeling these emotions, the fear of feeling these emotions, of doing something that would make me feel mortified, I would stay small and quiet. I wouldn't let myself relax. I would stay hyper-vigilant and alert and in control of myself. Even drinking alcohol didn't let me relax. I still, I was still able to stay in control of myself and not let myself relax, even if I got drunk. I might have been out of relaxed a little bit, but the level of control I needed to have over myself to feel safe was really intense at this part of my life. So basically, I kept myself small to keep myself safe. I kept myself quiet to keep myself safe. I stayed vigilant so that I could make sure that I wouldn't do or say anything that would make me feel embarrassed, that would make me feel stupid, that would make me feel shame that already existed inside of me. I could not relax and just let myself be myself. Because if you relax and let yourself be yourself, you're not thinking much about what you're saying and doing, you're just being. And that was too risky for me. Because, and I wonder if you can relate to this on any level, if you have had experiences in your life where you have just been existing. You've just been yourself and you've experienced hurt because of that. You've been judged or rejected or dismissed because you were just being. So this then brings us to the third question. What is this behavior protecting me from? If I isolated, if I kept myself small, if I kept myself quote unquote safe, I could protect myself from social rejection, the fear of not belonging. Now, there are universal fears that every human being holds, holds. It's the fear of not being enough, the fear of not belonging, the fear of not being lovable or likable, the fear of rejection. Every human being has holds these universal fears on some level. And our unhealthy, self-destructive behaviors are usually born from that place. These are deep-seated, often unconscious, limiting beliefs that we have: that I don't belong, I'm not enough, I'm not lovable. And every single human being holds these fears. Every single human being has had experiences that tells them that this is true. These degrade our self-trust, our self-belief, our self-worth, our the identity of ourself. And so we start to try and protect ourselves. And so there would have been a moment or moments where I had intrusive thoughts and I started to take them personally. And so my mind started to learn oh, these intrusive thoughts that everyone has, I can start to use this tool to make you stop, to make you isolate, to make you stay small and quiet, because maybe it's not comfortable, but it's familiar. I know what's going to happen if I isolate. I know what's going to happen if I stay small and quiet. I don't know what's going to happen if I just let myself relax and be. I do know from past experience that I've experienced that I've that I've experienced a lot of hurt by just being and relaxing. So I want to do what I can to prevent that. And intrusive thoughts is a way your mind found that worked. So you don't experience, you don't struggle with intrusive thoughts because there is a risk that you will actually do the thing, or because there is a risk that that intrusive thought is true. You have the intrusive thoughts because they are false, because they are shocking. Now, if there was some truth to that thought, it wouldn't be powerful enough to make you stop. It wouldn't be powerful enough to control you. It has to be false. It has to be like a slap in the face, something that will make you stop and think and slow down. That is the point of intrusive thoughts, is to try and stop you from doing something, not to try and get you to do something. Now that you understand where intrusive thoughts come from and why they are there, use these three questions to explore yourself and also remember you're normal for having the intrusive thoughts. 95% of the population experience the same thing that you're experiencing. The difference is that they have not attached personal meaning to the thought. They don't, they don't take the thoughts personally. They notice them and maybe go, that's weird, and then they move on. And that's also what I do now. I still have intrusive thoughts. I still have weird, random thoughts that come into my head. And I'll think, that's fucking weird. And then I'll just move on with my day. I'll let it go because I know the thought means nothing about me. And sometimes I'll have just a little bit of a reaction to the thought, like, whoa, that's kind of disturbing, makes me a bit uncomfortable. But then I'll let go of it because I know it has nothing, it doesn't mean anything about who I am. And I'm at no risk of doing that thing. And when it comes to chronic skin picking and hair pulling and nail biting, when we can learn to stop taking the behavior so personally and stop and stop assuming that, oh, because I struggle with this this behavior, it means something about me. There's something wrong with me. And start recognizing that actually it's a normal behavior. Yes, it has become self-destructive, but on a healthy level, it's a normal behavior. And as we learn to better navigate intrusive thoughts, we learn how to have more compassion for ourselves. We learn how to let go. The intrusive thoughts are not the problem. It's what's fueling the thoughts. It's the pain that we hold underneath and the beliefs that we hold around not being lovable or enough or that we don't belong. It's the painful experiences that we had that confirm that to be true. It's not true, but we have parts of us that believe that that is. And they hold on to this painful emotion, and intrusive thoughts can become a symptom of that. It can become a tool that helps us to manage those emotions. Just like I said earlier in this episode, everything we do is for a reason. Every behavior we have is for a purpose. And at its core, it's actually there to help us, even if it feels destructive. I hope you found this really helpful. Make sure you write down those three questions. I'll actually leave them in the show notes so you can go there and copy them and paste them into your notes in your phone. And if you did enjoy this episode, please do leave a five-star review. Make sure you hit like and subscribe. Let me know what came up for you in the comments. I love to hear from you. And if you want to share your story with me, I would love to hear from you. So make sure you click on the link in the show notes, book in your free BFPA road mapping session. It will be incredible to meet you and to support you in whatever way I can. Thanks so much for hanging out. Have a lovely rest of your week. I will see you next Tuesday for the next episode of Beyond Skin Picking and Hair pulling.