How to Write Intrusive Thoughts

Intrusive thoughts are a major part of OCD—they’re in the required diagnostic criteria, even. So if you’re writing a character with OCD, particularly if they get a point of view, intrusive thoughts are vital to understand. They’re defined by the OCD and Anxiety Center as “unwanted thoughts, images, impulses, or urges that can occur spontaneously or that can be cued by external/internal stimuli” and can be anything from images of germs and contamination to supposed urges to commit violent and sexual acts.

They can be very distressing.

It’s easy to find basic information about intrusive thoughts. You can quickly look up the definition, find colorful graphics of examples of intrusive thoughts by OCD type, and even locate people’s real specific experiences with them. But it can still be difficult to find a lot of detail. How exactly do intrusive thoughts feel, physically? What emotions do they provoke? What triggers them, or which kind of thoughts are more spontaneous?

So here is my experience with them, answering those questions. I’m giving a trigger warning upfront for discussing disturbing violent and sexual thoughts, though I’m being as clean as possible, and instrusive thoughts/OCD in general.

1. Harm Thoughts

One of my OCD intrusive thought topics is various violent harm to others. These thoughts typically involve children or pets—the young and innocent. My mind will show me an imagining of me breaking someone’s little neck or kicking a pet hard into the wall. Sometimes these thoughts even go into the aftermath of the incident, my family shunning me for killing a sibling or pet.

These thoughts are very disturbing, causing me to feel a general distress. My mind forces me to picture these scenes, not in great sensory detail, but more focusing on the events and the emotional impact they’d have.

The imagined social consequences, the aftermath, only appear when the thoughts cause enough distress. The aftermath isn’t as disturbing as the actual violent act, but it’s still part of it, my life being ruined and darkened along with no longer having the child or pet in my life.

These thoughts try to convince me I’m awful for having them, and that thinking of these violent acts means I would actually commit them. A supposed “urge” to act them out appears along with the images, feeling like it would be satisfying to kill, but I can quickly reassure myself that it’s just OCD, that I’d never do that.

These thoughts are spontaneous, attacking me randomly.

2. Sexual Thoughts

This is the most disturbing intrusive thought topic I have. My mind shows me brief flashes of images (briefer flashes than the harm thoughts because I push them away so quickly, due to their even more disturbing nature) of me having sex with people around me. It’s often family members, God, old people, or others it would be especially wrong or awkward to do so. Despite me being bi, the sexual partner in these intrusive thoughts is almost always a man since they are the “easiest” for my mind to conjure, as, I’ll be the vaguest I can here, they fit into the slot, and my mind finds the opposite sex’s genitals to be more disturbing than mine when I’m not interested in the person. My OCD therefore goes with that.

Like my harm thoughts, these appear spontaneously, with no obvious triggers.

3. Social Harm Thoughts

These are intrusive thoughts that show me scenes of what my mind thinks will happen if I hurt someone emotionally in specific ways. For example, what if I said that person’s really cute puppy was ugly? What if I betrayed my online friend and gave the whole Discord server her address?

More of the latter kind of thought, one that doesn’t revolve around something cute or innocent, tends to be more spontaneous. It makes me feel the person’s hurt and also imagine the fallout. How our relationship would be damaged, and I’d lose a friend.

More of the former kind of thought that does involve something cute, typically an animal or an artistic creation, is triggered by me viewing an image of that creature or thing. The thoughts might not pop up every time I view the image, but if I think something’s cute, particularly if it relates to me in some way such as when I was looking at a puppy my family is planning to adopt from someone or if a friend’s given me a cute gift, it is more likely to appear. Like the previous type of these thoughts, I feel the person’s hurt, though more acutely in this type in an almost searing pain this time because of the creature/thing’s cuteness. I experience hyperempathy due to my autism, and something being cute just makes it more “innocent” in my eyes, more hurtful if something happens to it.

4. Other

Some disturbing thoughts don’t really have a “category” they fit into. For example, the first sign I ever noticed that I might have OCD was that in sixth grade, I could not stop thinking of worms going down my throat during class. It wasn’t a contamination thought, just disturbing and uncomfortable to think about. Worms are slimy and gross and alive.

Nowadays, this category of thoughts is mostly my mind showing me committing crimes, but these thoughts had more variety and happened more frequently in the past. Though everyone’s intrusive thoughts tend to fall into one of the common OCD categories like contamination or harm, they can truly be anything that disturbs you (or in this case, your character) enough that they fear thinking about it, try to push the thoughts away. Like my current intrusive thoughts about crime, I once knew a girl in high school who had intrusive thoughts specifically that she would pull a fire alarm. Intrusive thoughts can be anything.

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One last important note about intrusive thoughts is that they are not only distressing, but the person with OCD will not act on them. Though the phrase “I let my intrusive thoughts win” is commonly said today, petting a pigeon on the street because you think it might be a fun experience is not an intrusive thought. Intrusive thoughts are disturbing. They would cause great distress if the person “gave in” to them. They are the last thing the person with OCD wants to do or experience.

Intrusive thoughts are a major part of OCD, so they’re important to understand. They can be about any topic, but commonly fall into one or more of the OCD types, such as harm, contamination, and relationships.

When deciding on the intrusive thoughts for your character, yourself: What thoughts would disturb my character the most? I’ve heard it said, though this probably isn’t backed up by research, that OCD attacks what’s most important to a person. Even if this isn’t true, however, OCD thoughts are disturbing and alarming. It’s okay if your character’s OCD chooses things that would disturb almost everyone like violent harm; they just have to distress your character.

Don’t include so many intrusive thoughts it disrupts the story, however, unless that has a specific story-enriching purpose, but do at least think about them. Even if the character doesn’t have a point of view and doesn’t talk about the thoughts to the main characters, it’s good to know what they fear.

There is especially a stigma that needs to be broken around sexual and violent intrusive thoughts. Many people experiencing those think they’re bad people, but talking about them in your story could show your readers that you can have those thoughts and still be a great human being.

And with all the research you’re doing, you’re on your way to creating a great character yourself.

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I am a sensitivity reader for OCD, anxiety, autism, and other related topics. Learn more here! I also have two articles on how to write about characters with mental health conditions in general here and here. Happy writing!