The mind is a thought generating machine and these thoughts can either be ego syntonic, thoughts that align with your belief, or ego dystonic, thoughts do not align with your beliefs. Ego dystonic thoughts or intrusive thoughts are thoughts that people do not enjoy thinking. Sadly, people believe they are morally deficient for having intrusive thoughts. However, all thoughts are generated randomly from the mind, and people are not able to control what the mind thinks of. What matters in a moral sense is whether people choose to act on or believe those thoughts or not.
An intrusive thought often comes from a samskara because they are subconscious balls of energy that echo in the mind from past experiences. If you observe an intrusive thought and study its nature, then you will realize that it is not random and actually comes from within the subconscious. In contrast, the Indriyas or sense organs take in information and generate thoughts.
While in some cases, like in those with OCPD, people will have random intrusive thoughts that are not based on their past experiences. For 90% of people, intrusive thoughts come from within our minds.
Go see a Licensed Mental Health Professional - Negative intrusive thoughts can often bring guilt and shame that people are not prepared to deal with and people deserve professional help to work through those feelings, especially if negative intrusive thoughts are impairing you from functioning. These negative thoughts could even be symptoms of of OCD, meaning that it would be even more important to see a professional
Cultivate a way of Thinking - Negative intrusive thoughts, as mentioned before, can be from incidents and traumatic experiences. Therefore working through those past experiences or feelings can lessen or eliminate the thoughts, and finding a medical professional can help immensely.
Overall, have a mental health evaluation whether you think you have struggle with intrusive thoughts or not because there could be a number of reasons for those negative intrusive thoughts to come up.
We can deal with intrusive thoughts in the same way that you deal with a room that has an echoing sound. You open the door and let that energy dissipate.
We can let that emotional energy of that samskara dissipate by taking ourselves back to that point and processing those emotions. You don’t have to do anything — you just have to sit with the door open. But when we wall off that emotion with humor and other coping mechanisms. As a result, it can never get out, and it always stays there. Therefore, to get rid of it, you have to go back and process it.
If you pass gas, then that is going to be in your room. How do you get rid of it? You open the door.
You can do the processing with a therapist, a coach, through meditation, taking walks, etc. Just let yourself feel those things and let them out. Often times crying and laughing are good ways to let things out.
We instinctively know these things. When someone is crying, we tell them to “let it out”. But that means feeling that emotion intensely for that amount of time. What keeps us from digesting intrusive thoughts is that we wall off the origin of these thoughts.
The echo is so painful that the core of that energy inside can feel really overwhelming to deal with. We think that if the echo is so damaging, then the source would be even worse to deal with. It must be really traumatic.
Therefore, we must process them little by little, and with the guidance of a therapist, or a coach. Otherwise, it can be really overwhelming and hard to do on your own.