I walked toward the stairs with my first newborn when a thought burst across my mind: my tiny, fragile infant flying from my arms and plummeting to his death.
My whole body seized. I squeezed my eyes shut and clenched my jaw. I demanded it leave, but the thought refused to stop — it continued to pound like a hammer to an anvil. My infant squirmed in my arms and I gripped him.
I had no label for my experience, but I knew I didn’t want anyone to find out about it. Surely, they’d take my child away if they knew the violent images that flung themselves across my vision. I’d be declared unfaithful, an immature Christian because I had yet to take “every thought captive” and “dwell on things above.”
As the thoughts increased my anxiety and paranoia, I began obsessive routines to protect my child. I checked his breathing while he napped. I avoided bathing him. I turned around in the passenger seat multiple times during a drive to make sure he hadn’t asphyxiated with his head leaned against his seat.
Five years since that first infant, I now know my story isn’t abnormal. This is the story of many other people in the world — around 1.2 percent of the population, in fact, and between 2001–2003 50 percent of those diagnosed with OCD in the United States said it caused severe impairment in their everyday lives. I later realized that what I experienced postpartum was also something I had suffered from in childhood: obsessive-compulsive disorder. The National Institute of Health defines OCD as “a long-lasting disorder in which a person experiences uncontrollable and recurring thoughts (obsessions), engages in repetitive behaviors (compulsions), or both.” Often, intrusive thoughts lead to compulsive behaviors, which is exactly what happened to me postpartum.
I was left asking: As believers, how do we deal with these thoughts and compulsions?
A Mind Broken by the Fall
I believed the thoughts that ransacked my brain mirrored a woman wrecked by an immature faith with no willpower against the siren calls of sin. Yet what truly reflected from my mind was the marring of creation by sin.
When I finally received psychiatric help during my second postpartum season, my counselor helped me unweave my identity from the thoughts that assailed my mind. The thoughts that fired in my brain were not my own, but misfirings. What I saw as a weakness she saw as mothering instincts experiencing a glitch.
As believers, we know the fall sent splinters and shards into every corner of creation. What God declared good now carries a permanent injury. Our Father’s perfect creation became marred by sin and its effects, and a misfiring mind is a part of that. Though we can’t see its brokenness like we can in a fractured limb, that doesn’t mean the injury is only spiritual.
I, like many Christians, can be tempted to assume that because intrusive thoughts happen in our minds, they must be a result of our own sin or a lack of faith. Because of that, I’d scrounge through the Bible for some exhortation that seems to apply to our mental anguish. Do not be anxious about anything. Take every thought captive. Think on these things. Set your mind … and so on. And I’d too often not only wrench these passages from their original context but unwittingly use them as a weapon against myself.
Meanwhile, it doesn’t help that every time I log onto Instagram, we’re bombarded by online mental health gurus who leave everyone believing they have some sort of mental illness and if only they’d take this class or buy into their secret, number one practice, or start their expensive supplements, we’d all be sorted out now.
The Fight to Lay Down Our Weapons
I learned in therapy that my constant fight with intrusive thoughts only made them worse. Like a child having a tantrum, I kept reinforcing the tantrum by giving in. When I fought against the intrusive thoughts, whether by weaponizing Bible verses, shaming myself, or trying to force them away, I only directed my mind to dwell on them more. It’s like when someone says, “Don’t think about pink elephants.” Now we are all imagining wrinkled beasts the color of blush, tusks and all. I did the same thing with the intrusive thoughts. While there are sins we wrangle with and thoughts we must take captive, intrusive thoughts work differently.
Over and over, professionals tell us to draw the least amount of attention possible to our intrusive thoughts. One medical doctor, Mike Emlet, who also holds a theology degree from Westminster Theological Seminary, says that we pull ourselves into a spiral of anxiety when we ruminate on the contents of the thought and attempt to judge ourselves by it. He encourages believers faced with intrusive thoughts to pray, “I don’t know where that came from, Lord, but I know that’s not true of my heart’s desire. Help me just to move on.”
Mainstream professionals give the same advice. “Unwanted intrusive thoughts are reinforced by getting entangled with them, worrying about them, struggling against them, trying to reason them away,” two doctors wrote for the Anxiety and Depression Association of America. “They are also made stronger by trying to avoid them. Leave the thoughts alone, treat them as if they are not even interesting, and they will eventually fade into the background.”
Psychiatrists and licensed counselors often use Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) to combat OCD. Through talk therapy, they help us find the root of our intrusive thoughts and understand the negative thought patterns we’ve developed. They also use Exposure and Response Prevention Therapy (ERP) to expose sufferers of OCD to their obsessive triggers in safe settings to teach their minds and bodies that they don’t need to complete their repetitive behavior in order to be safe. For me, this looked like resisting the urge to repeatedly check my children’s breathing or bedrooms to see if their windows were locked and instead rehearsing the truth to myself: I need sleep, and I already checked on them to ensure their safety.
We know the adamant calls to pick up our arms and go to battle with sin. How can I remain so passive against unwelcome, violent, sexual, and gruesome thoughts?
We can remain passive because those thoughts are not our own.
We aren’t fighting against ourselves, but against a brain that produces thoughts counter to the protective instincts God instilled in us. We’re fighting the brokenness of sin, not sin inside ourselves. Emlet reminds us “that the mere presence of a thought doesn’t necessarily mean that it reflects our true heart’s desire. In fact, your being upset over the presence of the thought is a sign of that.”
As Kerry Ann Williams, a lecturer in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, writes, “Think to yourself, ‘That’s just an intrusive thought; it’s not how I think, it’s not what I believe, and it’s not what I want to do.’” What makes an intrusive thought intrusive is that it goes against our strongest beliefs and desires, and this is how we know it’s not truly a thought that originated in our own hearts.
This isn’t a resignation in our battle, but an acceptance that the world is not how it should be. Just as we wouldn’t fight against our body to walk with a broken leg, we don’t need to fight against intrusive thoughts. It will only fuel more anxiety.
No dichotomy stands, only two separate realities: My faith can remain strong and mature even as I notice and allow intrusive thoughts to pass by.
Set Your Mind
Our passive stance against our intrusive thoughts isn’t in disobedience to God’s commands to “set our minds on things above” or “dwell on these things” but rather a way of living out those directives in a world marred by sin. When we choose to not fixate on the images that assail our minds but to let them pass, we give ourselves the ability to dwell on what is lovely, noble, and right.