YOU ARE NOT ALONE - A companion online community discussion board for The Mental Illness Happy Hour podcast with Paul Gilmartin

Does anybody else find it's impossible to handle or be around particular objects without having intrusive thoughts?

I get a lot of them with knives, which I guess is fairly obvious. Some knives are worse than others, not necessarily based on how dangerous they actually are. My tiny little 2-inch pocket knife is one of the worst. I just can't stop picturing myself stabbing my own throat with it.

Which I'm not going to do. That's the thing. Even if I were going to kill myself, there wouldn't be a knife involved. I would never have the guts to just straight up stab myself in the throat. Holy shit.

Still. I think about it. All the time.

A weirder one is certain writing implements. Most pens are safe; most pencils are not. Especially mechanical pencils. I think I'm going to stab myself in the eye. Not by accident, but not in a way that would be in my control, either. I've written quite a few tests in school with a lovely montage of these thoughts running through my head the whole time. Yaaaay.

idk I'm aware enough that these are just thoughts and they're not going to escape my head and make themselves happen without my consent. I don't avoid the trigger objects, and I've been dealing with it long enough that I guess I have a pretty good poker face and just go one about my day. It just gets kind of exhausting, especially when I have a thought where I'm not the victim of my actions. It's always somebody more vulnerable than me, and since I'm currently surrounded by kids all day during the week, it's like "Jesus Christ, my job is hard enough without having to fight off this completely irrelevant thought about something that isn't going to happen because I WOULD NEVER STAB A BABY WITH A PENCIL."

Why is my brain so fucking stupid, geez?

I definitely identify with what you're feeling. There would be times when I'd be in a room with a knife and freak out, convinced I was going to hurt someone with it. And I really identify with the whole eye-stabbing thing. Sitting in class in high school, it felt almost as if I had to actively control myself from not picking up a pencil and stabbing it into my eye.

Thanks for helping me feel less alone, waffled.

I work with food and will constantly get images of me stabbing myself in the arm or in the stomach.
If i get an itch in my eye I imagine that I'll put up my hand to scratch it and forget that I'm holding the knife so I end up stabbing myself in the eye