Garbage Thoughts and Unwanted Reality

 

When thoughts pass through your mind, are they your thoughts?

This is a question that few people ask themselves unless or until they’ve experienced a mental health crisis. The regulation and/or elimination of “unwanted thoughts” is a central part of therapies used to treat a variety of disorders, but for the purpose of this discussion, let’s look specifically at obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Almost everyone has heard of OCD. It has become a staple of pop culture punchlines, and the premise of at least one execrable show (“Monk”) that treated the disorder as a quirky personality trait, one which may cause mild distress but is the source of much amusement for others. Tony Shalhoub’s Monk is, in essence, a clown; a jester with a schtick based on a real disorder.

In reality, as any mental health professional or trainee will tell you, OCD isn’t funny. It isn’t quirky. It’s a serious disorder that, in severe cases, can be so debilitating that sufferers can’t leave their homes, let alone work or form healthy relationships. These dismal effects can cause severe damage to what cognitive-behavioral therapists refer to as important elements of one’s “life domain.” I recently read Monica T. Williams and Chad T. Wetterneck’s Sexual Obsessions in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (2019), and found it unexpectedly revealing.

When most people think of OCD, they think of either contamination compulsions (hand-washing and doorknob avoidance, for example) or symmetry compulsions (straightening and arranging items, for example). Some might be aware of checking compulsions (repeatedly ensuring that the stove is off) or counting compulsions (touching an object a specified number of times, counting one’s steps, etc.). These are valid ways to think of OCD, but awareness of these specific rituals constitutes a shallow and limited conception of the illness – and of what OCD can tell us about those who are supposedly mentally healthy. As mental health professionals see it, obsessive thoughts and compulsive rituals are “disorders” because they disrupt the function of a healthy human mind and cause distress and inability to function. No psychologist or psychiatrist would dispute that statement.

Here's a slightly more controversial statement: obsessive thoughts and compulsive rituals disrupt the function of a “healthy” human mind in that they jar the machinery of illusion, the mechanisms buried in our brains which let us maintain the myth of an independent, free-willed self. Thomas Metzinger’s excellent The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self is a deconstruction of that illusory self from the standpoint of neuroscience, cognition, and philosophy. I cannot recommend it strongly enough. He’s hardly alone, either. The demolition of the long- and deeply-cherished illusion of selfhood is now being carried out by other bleeding-edge philosophers and scientists like Gregory Berns (The Self Delusion: The New Neuroscience of How We Invent – and Reinvent – Our Identities), Thomas Ligotti (The Conspiracy Against the Human Race), and Bruce Hood (The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity). The illusion of the self allows us to feel that we are in control of our destiny: that we, as concrete and unchanging personalities, decide things for ourselves – including what and how we think. Nothing could be further from the truth, but the machinery of illusory selfhood swaddles us in the merciful unawareness of our nature.

Even mentally “healthy” people experience negative thoughts that seem alien to their interests and desires. These are variously called garbage thoughts, intrusive thoughts, or unwanted thoughts. In high-functioning humans, these fleeting and unpleasant notions are quickly dispatched from their minds. Everybody has them, but not everyone can so easily dispose of them.

Regrettably, for those suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder, such garbage thoughts become obsessive thoughts.

I find the concept of intrusive or unwanted thoughts utterly fascinating. First of all, why do these thoughts cause such distress? In part, it is their content – especially, I’d imagine, for the unfortunate people suffering from pedophilia obsessive-compulsive disorder (POCD), a subtype of sexual obsessive-compulsive disorder. People with POCD are not pedophiles; I can’t emphasize that enough. The thoughts that intrude, however, are. You can imagine how awful this would be Other types of OCD intrusive thoughts might involve unsanitary acts, horrific violence, or self-harm. The rituals (compulsions) lampooned by wacky old Monk are parasitical thoughtforms that develop in a sufferer’s psyche in order to banish, mitigate, or prevent these deeply unsettling invasions. The vile and durable nature of these thoughts underscores their perceived alienness. Alien thoughts, both fleeting and tormentingly persistent, should give us pause when we consider thoughts of all sorts.

Take sexual orientation obsessive-compulsive disorder (SOOCD), for example. In SOOCD, people who self-identify as heterosexual are tormented by persistent homosexual thoughts, or vice-versa. These aren’t the titillating thoughts which might occur to one exploring a forbidden realm, like, say, a closeted fundamentalist Christian. These thoughts cause the sufferer intense distress and anxiety. The difference between gay fantasies in a gay person or in a person with SOOCD is this: in the former, such thoughts are ego syntonic, and in the latter, ego dystonic. Ego syntonic is a fancy way of saying that a thought or activity is compatible with one’s self-image at the time; ego dystonic thoughts and behaviors, on the other hand, are not compatible with one’s self-image at the time.

Thoughts that feel alien, intrusive, and opposed to our self-image and our self-known mental processes: where do they come from?

According to Edgar Allen Poe, such thoughts may be attributed to a semi-metaphorical “imp of the perverse.” To theists, they may be attributed to lack of self-mastery (Buddhism), demonic forces (most religions), humanity’s spiritually fallen nature (Christianity), or any number of external factors. In such cases, these intrusive thoughts are framed as literally intrusive, and any number of obsessions (rituals) may be recommended, many of which do more harm than good. Someone whose severe obsessive-compulsive disorder manifests itself in counting obsessions, for example, will hardly benefit from sacred numerology or performing a novena.

For nontheists, particularly staunch materialists, the answer might seem simple: some combination of brain abnormality, genetics, and environmental factors. I’ll gladly cede that much, since I don’t believe that mental illness is born of the muttering of demons or imbalanced humours. That still doesn’t resolve the real question. If “you” don’t “want” those garbage thoughts, who does?

Psychology has a hell of a long way to go as a science. Its protestations of pragmatism are a major weakness. While I endorse evidence-based treatment, I’m also aware of the replication crisis and thus reticent to put too much faith in psychology’s evidence, at least its evidence thus far. My dissatisfaction with behavioral psychology stems from the fact that its stated intention is to tame one’s anxieties, and to do so while spending little time exploring their form or substance.

Think of a child who has, somehow, realized that death exists (“a fish not flapping on the carpet”). The natural response to such unwelcome knowledge on the child’s part is to panic. That means my caretaker(s) will die one day! That means I will, too! The child might ask what comes after death, and so begin the lies. Alternately, an “honest” parent might respond with minimizing reassurances. Don’t worry, honey, I’m not going to be going anywhere for a long time. This is a dishonest answer without being outright fantasy. Sure, by some measures, the caretaker(s) might not die for “a long time.” Alternately, they might die of an undiagnosed cerebral aneurysm moments after issuing their reassurance.

The problem is, that child has seen the truth. Immediately, the machinery of illusion must be constructed and, at all times, kept engaged. The consciousness of death is, quite simply, too much for our illusory egos to cope with. And even worse; death hardly represents the worst of life. Unfulfilled desire. Suffering. Unrequited love.

To live as a sentient organic being is to be an object which thinks that it’s a subject. We’re driven by complicated internal processes we’re only just beginning to understand, and plenty of research shows that free will and independent self-determination aren’t part of reality so much as a shroud wound ‘round reality to shelter us from its cadaverous leer. Some obsessions – such as those concerned with harm befalling one’s loved ones – aren’t necessarily as irrational as psychiatry and psychology make them seem. They may consist of unwanted thoughts, true, but that doesn’t mean untrue thoughts.

Unwanted thoughts? Or glimpses of unwanted reality?