Understanding Intrusive Thoughts in Motherhood
This is truly distressing to experience. It's your brain making you anxious for seemingly no reason. You don't even watch horror movies, and yet the stuff your brain makes up is Tarantino-level creative. It's gruesome. It's horrible. And no one is giving you any Oscars for the visuals.
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This is truly distressing to experience. It's your brain making you anxious for seemingly no reason. You don't even watch horror movies, and yet the stuff your brain makes up is Tarantino-level creative. It's gruesome. It's horrible. And no one is giving you any Oscars for the visuals.
For me, they came up in the most ordinary moments: walking to the kitchen, sitting and reading my baby her book, washing a bottle.
I would be having a nice moment, doing something I do all the time, and then all of a sudden: a crap thought makes its grand entrance. My brain says: "Are you feeling calm? Cool, let me hit you with a deleted scene from The Exorcist, but it's your baby, and it's also all your fault."
In that moment, my nervous system would spike, my body would go into overdrive, my calm thermometer would go from a 2 to a 9, and I would have to do all my exercises to regulate my body and mind. It's emotionally exhausting. And I could not, for the life of me, understand why this was supposed to make me a better mom.
I never heard about intrusive thoughts before I experienced them. Honestly, I never truly understood any of the perinatal hardship before going through it myself. How do you tell a new mom without scaring her? How do you hear it while you're trying to get pregnant and not think, It'll be different for me? I'm a therapist specialising in maternal mental health, for goodness sake.
Did you know that studies have shown up to 90% of new parents experience intrusive thoughts? I would not say that 90% of new parents talk about it. I wouldn't even say half. It is so lonely to have intrusive thoughts, even though they are so incredibly, universally common.
You're not alone in what you're thinking. Intrusive thoughts in the perinatal period tend to cluster around a few common themes:
- fears of accidentally harming the baby,
- fears of intentional harm,
- fears about the baby's health or death,
- sexual thoughts that feel deeply disturbing,
- and fears about being an unfit mother.
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They can arrive as images, words, impulses, or as that particular dread of "what if I did something terrible and didn't realise it."
None of these themes make you a bad mother. All of them are documented, recognised clinical experiences.
There's actually an explanation, and it helps to know.
This might bring some relief (just in case you think you're nuts and it's all your fault... it's not, my friend).
One widely accepted explanation is that intrusive thoughts are a survival mechanism. Evolution has adjusted our brains, specifically the threat-detection system, to spot danger and keep our babies safe. When we have intrusive thoughts, it's the brain scanning for every possible threat, even the unrealistic ones. So when you're imagining that gruesome, terrifying, vivid thing happening to the most important person in your life, it's your way of protecting your baby and the lineage of our species. Great! Cool! Love it for us.
Here's something that might bring even more relief: there's a clinical term for what you're experiencing, and it's called ego-dystonic. It means the thought goes against your values, your character, and who you actually are as a person. That's precisely why it feels so awful. The thought horrifies you because it is the opposite of what you want. You are not the thought. The thought is your brain misfiring, loudly and vividly, in an attempt to keep your baby safe.
The disturbing content of the thought is not a window into your character. It is a window into how much you love your child and how hard your nervous system works to protect them. The horror you feel when the thought arrives? That horror is the data. It tells you everything about who you are as a mother.
How do you know if it might be something more? For most mothers, intrusive thoughts are a normal, miserable part of the perinatal period that can be treated. But sometimes, they point to something more clinical.
A few things to watch out for. If you're caught in a daily loop of thoughts, reassurance-seeking, and mental rituals that only bring temporary relief, that pattern may indicate perinatal OCD rather than postpartum anxiety. They're related, but they respond to different treatments.
If a thought about harming yourself or your baby doesn't feel like a horror, if it feels more like a possibility than an intrusion, please reach out to a provider right away. That is a different clinical experience, and it deserves immediate support. You will not be judged. You will be helped.
Not sure which category you're in? That uncertainty is itself a reason to talk to someone. You deserve an actual answer, not more Googling at 2 am.
This is Part 1 of 2. In Part 2, I share the specific tools I use in therapy and in my own life to navigate intrusive thoughts when they arrive.
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