Why do I think things I would never do?

Why would my own mind produce something I find horrifying?

Because a working mind throws up possibilities, and it does not filter out the ones you cannot bear.

The thought arrives on its own. You are loading the dishwasher, or driving a familiar road, or holding your baby, and an image goes through you that has nothing to do with what you want. It lasts a second. The fright it leaves behind lasts the rest of the day.

This is far more ordinary than it feels at 3 in the morning. In a study of 683 university students across 15 sites in 13 countries, 93.6% reported at least one such intrusion in the previous 3 months.¹ Students are a narrow group and the figure says nothing exact about anybody else, but the direction of it matters: the experience is close to universal, and almost nobody discusses it. So the thought is common and your sense of being alone with it is also real.

What is not ordinary is how much of your attention it has taken. That part is worth understanding, and it is not a question about the content of the thought.

Does the thought mean something about who I am?

The content of the thought tells you very little. Where it lands tells you what you would least bear to lose.

These thoughts are not random in their choice of target. A new mother gets them about the baby. Someone who has built a life on being gentle gets the violent one. A person with a faith gets the blasphemy. The thought goes for whatever you have made most sacred, because that is the only place it can produce this much alarm.

In the way I was trained to look at it, the psyche is not a single voice. Assagioli described it as made up of parts, each carrying something, and Jung wrote about the material a person has had to keep out of their picture of themselves. An unwanted thought is often the appearance of something that has no other route in: an irritation you are not permitted to feel, a doubt about a life you have already committed to, a wish that is not allowed. That does not make the thought a plan. It makes it a message with the postage still on it.

So when a client asks me whether the thought means they are secretly capable of it, my answer is usually that the alarm itself is the answer. A wish does not announce itself with dread.

Why does it come back harder when I try to stop it?

Trying to look away is probably not what keeps it alive. What keeps it alive is what you decide the return of it proves.

The advice everybody has heard is that pushing a thought away makes it stronger. It is less settled than it sounds. A 2026 review of the suppression research describes the rebound effect as weak, poorly replicated and shaped by which results got published, and concludes that deliberately setting a thought aside can work in people who are not unwell.² It is a review rather than a trial, and it does not tell you what to do on a Tuesday.

What I see in the room fits it. The people who come to me are rarely in trouble because they looked away. They are in trouble because the thought came back and they read the return as a verdict. It came again, so it must mean something. That reading is what turns a second of unpleasantness into an afternoon of investigation.

The difference is between closing a door and standing at it to listen. One takes a moment. The other takes the day.

Why do I keep checking, and why does the relief never hold?

Because what you are asking for is certainty about a thought, and that is the one thing no amount of checking can produce.

Checking takes forms people do not recognise as checking. Running the thought again to see whether it still disgusts you. Rehearsing what you would do if it were true. Asking a partner, lightly, whether they think you are a good person. Moving the knife block. Finding a reason not to bath the baby on your own. Confessing a version of it to somebody who will say it is nothing.

Each one works. That is the problem. The relief arrives, and so does the lesson that you needed it, and the next arrival of the thought now has a procedure attached to it. Clients describe this as the thought getting worse. What has usually got worse is the amount of life the procedure is taking up.

There is a cost in the relationship too. The person giving the reassurance learns that something is wrong and that they are not allowed to know what, and that distance tends to arrive long before the subject does.

What helps, and when is this past managing on your own?

Changing what you do with the thought moves things more than changing the thought, and part of this is not a self-management problem at all.

• Let it be a thought that arrived rather than one you had. The grammar matters more than it looks. You are not the author of everything that crosses your mind.
• Watch the checking, not the thinking. The thought is not the habit. The 20 minutes afterwards is the habit, and it is the part you can get hold of.
• Leave the question open on purpose. Not answering it is uncomfortable for a while and then it is quieter. Answering it is comfortable for an hour and then louder.
• Say it out loud to one person. Shame does most of its work in private, and a thought spoken in an ordinary voice rarely sounds the way it did in your head.
• Notice what the day is doing to it. Tiredness, long stretches alone and pressure you have not admitted to all turn the volume up, and that is often easier to change than the thought.

These suit someone whose life is still mostly intact around the thought. They are not enough everywhere. Where the thought has taken hours out of most days, where the avoiding has started to reshape what you do, where you have stopped driving or stopped being alone with your own child, or where you have been carrying it in silence for years, that is past what reading can settle. It needs attention of its own rather than more effort from you, and more effort is usually what has already been tried.

What I cannot tell you from here is which of these you are in, because the two describe themselves in almost the same words. That is the sort of thing that becomes clear quickly once there is somewhere to say the thought plainly and look at what has grown up around it. If you want to do that, it is what a session is for, in psychotherapy in Copenhagen or on a free 30-minute call first.

Questions people ask

Do I have to describe the thought in detail?

No. You can tell me the shape of it and leave the content out. Most of the useful work is about what happens after the thought, not about the thought itself.

Will you think I am a danger if I tell you?

No. The thoughts people are most ashamed of are among the commonest things said to me. Recognising one as an unwanted intrusion rather than an intention is part of the work.

Is talking therapy the right form for this, or do I need a technique?

Both approaches exist and they suit different people. Structured work on the checking is one route; understanding what the thought is carrying is another, and some people want both.

How soon does anything change?

The checking usually loosens before the thoughts quieten. That order surprises people, and it is the change worth watching for rather than a date.

Can I do this in English in Copenhagen?

Yes. I work in English, in person and online. Plenty of clients find a thought like this easier to say in a language that is not the one it was formed in.

If unwanted thoughts frighten you, I offer intrusive thoughts therapy as a calm, non-judging place to understand them.

Sources

1. Part 1. You can run but you can’t hide: intrusive thoughts on six continents. Journal of Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders, 2014.
2. The effectiveness and adaptiveness of suppressing unwanted thoughts. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 2026.

How this article was written: I choose the subject and the angle. An AI assistant researches and drafts. I read the draft, correct and improve it and stand behind every clinical statement. The professional and clinical judgement is mine.