For the past 4 months, I have been plagued by very sick and demonic intrusive thoughts. I pray constantly, but they do not go away.
Is there a reason why this is happening?
Edit: I used to have them constantly for most of 2023, but they mostly went away after I stopped watching porn and cleaned my life up. Then they came roaring back around mid August of this year out of the blue.
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Breadpilled on scored.co
7 days ago7 points(+0/-0/+7Score on mirror)
First off—it's not demons. Ignore every person telling you it's demons. Believing that shit is *guaranteed* to make it worse.
At minimum, it means you're an intelligent individual with a rich internal architecture and a functioning imagination. You might have OCD-adjacent wiring. Your brain is perfectly capable of spontaneously generating thoughts, images, even "voices" inside your head that don't require an outside source. Half the battle is in how you choose to perceive such stimuli.
Making it a spiritual issue when it isn't one strips away the sobriety that *should* be your greatest defense. If you sincerely believe that your own thoughts are the direct oppression of an external, malevolent force, two things will happen:
1. They will become more vivid on account of this willful detachment from reality. Similar principle to getting immersed in a film.
2. Your brain will panic at this perceived threat, and produce intrusive stimuli at a heightened frequency.
That second point is key to understanding why this happens. A lot of the intrusive imagery you experience is your brain compulsively conjuring worst case scenarios *in response* to certain thoughts, subjects, or stimuli.
Example: You see a child waiting at a bus stop. Your brain, with distress, thinks "God, it would be horrible if I pushed that child into traffic."
But you don't experience that thought as a verbal musing. What you experience instead is an immediate, brief but vivid image of you pushing the child into traffic.
Paradoxically, your brain is trying to warn you *against* the thing you're afraid of doing, by making you "experience" the discomfort of doing it. It's skipping words altogether and going straight to mental simulation. It actually speaks to you having a *stronger* moral compass than average.
These are the two biggest things you can do to make it better:
1. When intrusive thoughts happen, consciously address them, and explicitly name it for what it is. See if you can trace it back to the source. "This is my brain conjuring spontaneous imagery. It's conjuring this specific image because I have X feelings towards Y subject. It has no moral implications."
The more you strip intrusive thoughts of having any meaning or grandeur, the less vivid they become. Once you realize it's just your brain doing its thing, you can cease to be bothered by them altogether.
2. Try to reduce chronic stress in your life as much as possible. This is the #1 hugest thing that makes this sort of issue worse. If you can instead feel calm and at peace 24/7 as your default state, your brain will be infinitely less inclined to spin its wheels with drastic scenarios. Take stock of your life. Anything agitating you? It could be something you're not consciously aware of (a bad relationship, nutritional deficiency, etc.)
Lastly, I want to make clear that I'm not attempting to mock or dismiss the faith aspect outright. I'm just trying to illuminate how it's a *categorical mismatch* with the issue you're describing. At worst, it's like a lesser version of those "faith healers" who let their kids die of a common illness because they prayed instead of just getting him medicine.
Quick experiment you can do if you want to qualify this against your spiritual rubric: Rebuke the intrusive thoughts in the name of Jesus.
Does it have no effect? Does it go away and come right back? Does it become worse?
If so, cool. You've just confirmed it's not demons. Demons are banished if you invoke Jesus' name, so if that does nothing subtantial, you're dealing with something psychological in nature.
All this is me speaking out of my own life experience. I dealt with distressing intrusive thoughts for several years, almost schizophrenia-like at points. Everything I just described was the road map that made me go from that level of vividness to literally never having them again. Spiritualizing the issue made it significantly worse, and contributed heavily to proliferating it. Reframing it as a quirk of my brain, reducing stress, and practicing mindfulness made it go away entirely.
At minimum, it means you're an intelligent individual with a rich internal architecture and a functioning imagination. You might have OCD-adjacent wiring. Your brain is perfectly capable of spontaneously generating thoughts, images, even "voices" inside your head that don't require an outside source. Half the battle is in how you choose to perceive such stimuli.
Making it a spiritual issue when it isn't one strips away the sobriety that *should* be your greatest defense. If you sincerely believe that your own thoughts are the direct oppression of an external, malevolent force, two things will happen:
1. They will become more vivid on account of this willful detachment from reality. Similar principle to getting immersed in a film.
2. Your brain will panic at this perceived threat, and produce intrusive stimuli at a heightened frequency.
That second point is key to understanding why this happens. A lot of the intrusive imagery you experience is your brain compulsively conjuring worst case scenarios *in response* to certain thoughts, subjects, or stimuli.
Example: You see a child waiting at a bus stop. Your brain, with distress, thinks "God, it would be horrible if I pushed that child into traffic."
But you don't experience that thought as a verbal musing. What you experience instead is an immediate, brief but vivid image of you pushing the child into traffic.
Paradoxically, your brain is trying to warn you *against* the thing you're afraid of doing, by making you "experience" the discomfort of doing it. It's skipping words altogether and going straight to mental simulation. It actually speaks to you having a *stronger* moral compass than average.
These are the two biggest things you can do to make it better:
1. When intrusive thoughts happen, consciously address them, and explicitly name it for what it is. See if you can trace it back to the source. "This is my brain conjuring spontaneous imagery. It's conjuring this specific image because I have X feelings towards Y subject. It has no moral implications."
The more you strip intrusive thoughts of having any meaning or grandeur, the less vivid they become. Once you realize it's just your brain doing its thing, you can cease to be bothered by them altogether.
2. Try to reduce chronic stress in your life as much as possible. This is the #1 hugest thing that makes this sort of issue worse. If you can instead feel calm and at peace 24/7 as your default state, your brain will be infinitely less inclined to spin its wheels with drastic scenarios. Take stock of your life. Anything agitating you? It could be something you're not consciously aware of (a bad relationship, nutritional deficiency, etc.)
Lastly, I want to make clear that I'm not attempting to mock or dismiss the faith aspect outright. I'm just trying to illuminate how it's a *categorical mismatch* with the issue you're describing. At worst, it's like a lesser version of those "faith healers" who let their kids die of a common illness because they prayed instead of just getting him medicine.
Quick experiment you can do if you want to qualify this against your spiritual rubric: Rebuke the intrusive thoughts in the name of Jesus.
Does it have no effect? Does it go away and come right back? Does it become worse?
If so, cool. You've just confirmed it's not demons. Demons are banished if you invoke Jesus' name, so if that does nothing subtantial, you're dealing with something psychological in nature.
All this is me speaking out of my own life experience. I dealt with distressing intrusive thoughts for several years, almost schizophrenia-like at points. Everything I just described was the road map that made me go from that level of vividness to literally never having them again. Spiritualizing the issue made it significantly worse, and contributed heavily to proliferating it. Reframing it as a quirk of my brain, reducing stress, and practicing mindfulness made it go away entirely.