I Might Be a Murderer.
I asked Shane if it was okay to post this, since it’s a pretty good example of what he goes through with OCD. Sometimes his thinking is so obsessive that it really does hamper his daily life – and I thought this was a pretty good example of his occasional bizarre thinking.
Shane was at his computer, playing video games, when he got angry. One of the other players did something that made him furious – so much so, that he stood up.
“For some reason,” Shane told me, “I thought I should get a knife. And I turned around like I was going to walk into the kitchen to where the knives were.”
“Okay…?” I said.
“And then I spent like 20 minutes thinking that I might be a murderer.”
Hm. I thought. This is a terrible way to feel. He doesn’t realize that we all have feelings like this, but that he was controlling his own anger, tackling his own impulses. Shane was worried that he was out of control, but Shane has the most controlled impulses of anyone I’ve ever seen.
So I talked to Shane about impulse control, about not being responsible for the thoughts that randomly fly into your head. The key to being okay, I said, is what you do or don’t do with those thoughts.
“You are testing your boundaries,” I told him. “Dylan does it all the time. Sometimes Dylan will pick up a knife and walk around with it. He’s testing himself, in a way, to make sure he has control of his impulses. And you were doing the same thing by turning around and thinking about the knives. You chose not to do anything about your thought, which means you have control over your own impulses.”
Shane seemed to understand, and I hope it helped to talk to me.
I know that talking about his wild thoughts – the kind he thinks are dangerous – can help him to recognize that they are just thoughts, that they don’t determine who he is. Shane sometimes thinks that because he has upsetting thoughts, or does questionable things accidentally, that he could end up imprisoned for life.
His OCD took a relatively normal thought and obsessively suggested that he was a murderer because he thought about picking up a knife.
I will be curious – when I talk to his therapist next – to find out whether the next rational step would be to hold the knife, and realize it’s not dangerous, or if it’s to play the thought through in his head, and have Shane realize that he would never do the things he thinks he “could” do.
Until then, though, I hope Shane knows: we all have angry thoughts. It’s what we do with those thoughts that matters most.