Hey everyone. Been going through some pretty traumatic stuff over the course of several years that looks like it's going to stay for a long time, and am wondering if it has affected my capacity for love and selflessness. Just last night I was imagining the following scenario: me and someone I really care about are on a hot air balloon, bound for escape from something terrible happening on the ground. Our combined weight is too heavy for the balloon to rise, so something has to go. In my head, I chose to push the other person off. It felt like something I wanted to do. I was so horrified by this thought later on that I tried to recall all the memories of the two of us that are really close to my heart, to remind myself of how much I care about this person. All that did was leave me numb. I feel so guilty and disgusted with myself, and I keep wondering about whether I really would have considered doing that if the situation I described above had actually happened. I'm confused too, because I know how much this person means to me. I almost feel compelled to confess this to him and break off our friendship because I think he deserves someone better. Is what I thought normal? Is this something that other people have experienced in some form or other? Am I just fundamentally a terrible person, haha. Please be as honest as you can.
Basically: yes, this is normal. You're definitely not the only perfectly good person who has thought stuff like that. It sounds kind of like something your brain just made up to distress you, like an intrusive thought/fantasy, and the thing about the particular imagined scenario is that it really seems like something that'll never happen, so the idea that maybe you would, in fact, do something like this if that scenario happened (and I'm not saying you would--not even you can know that) isn't really relevant to anything, and certainly not your friendship with this person. A thought crime is not a real crime. I have definitely had intrusive thoughts of hurting people I love very much not because I actually wanted to hurt them, but just because the thought came into my brain and I couldn't get it out. It's something that happens a lot with anxiety. Just because fiction-you wanted to do it doesn't mean that real-you would ever hurt your friend in any way. There really are LOTS of people who have intrusive thoughts of hurting people they love and/or care about a lot, like people with harm OCD where they obsess over hurting themselves or others and have nasty impulses that they'd NEVER act on but that are really scary anyway. I know that having these thoughts can make you feel evil, but you're not evil or a bad friend for imagining a scenario like this. Also, people imagine "what would I do in this situation" scenarios ALL THE TIME, with them as villains or heroes. Like when there are shootings, a bunch of jerks come out of the woodwork saying 'well, I would've saved the day! Yeah, I would've punched the shooter right in the FACE! Those victims were wusses!' when in reality they can't know that they would've done that, and there's a huge probability that they would've done no such thing. But they'll probably never be in that situation anyway, so they can keep on reassuring themselves that they would be total badasses in a terrible situation and trash-talking actual victims who were normal humans just like them. Conversely, I've known/seen a bunch of people who 'admit' to themselves that 'yeah, in a horrible situation I'd probably turn into a SELFISH BASTARD who would totally sacrifice my friend over myself', or 'if I'd grown up in a particular environment I would've been an, idk, Evil Terrorist', but they can't know that either. So actually this is something "normal people" do too. It's certainly not something to break a friendship over, even if you feel really guilty, because, again, you didn't do anything. This doesn't have anything to do with your capacity for love and selflessness; it's your brain being weird and scary and human. This is...really long and I'm not sure if it's totally coherent, but I hope there's something helpful in here and I didn't just make things worse?
Idk dude this definitely didn't feel like an intrusive thought. I basically voluntarily thought this, and what scared me the most was that I imagined it because it felt like something I wanted to do at the time. I was in a pretty weird state though, it felt like big parts of me were asleep, parts of me that loved and cared and felt deeply for other people. I don't know what the hell was up with that
self preservation is a really powerful modivator and it doesnt make you a bad person to -- in a hypothetical case of life-or-death -- value your life as the most important.
(Disclaimer: I wouldn't say this for anyone but me, I wouldn't impose this standard on anyone else) I guess I just feel as if true love would mean putting the other person's safety and wellbeing above my own, no matter how dire the situation, and I also feel like I especially owe it to him because he's done so much for me. What I thought makes me feel especially bad because I know that if he were in that situation, he would sacrifice himself for me in a heartbeat
Yeah, the second part of my response was mostly for if it WASN'T an intrusive thought, to say that even if it wasn't an intrusive thought, it IS a thing in general among people. Where you think things and kind of get satisfaction from thinking them and then feel bad for thinking them, and a lot of people even fantasize about doing things that they'd never do without it being an intrusive thought--say, punching someone they don't like when they're not a violent person at all, and feeling awesome about it when really they'd feel awful. And obviously you were also feeling weird, which clearly made it really disturbing and unprecedented, and it just might not be that, idk, necessary to judge yourself so harshly on the basis of something you thought about when you were in a weird place. You clearly love your friend in reality, and that seems more important than a scenario that never happened that you thought of in an isolated moment when you felt really weird. Also, you still don't know what you'd do in that situation, since you can't. You don't know that you wouldn't sacrifice yourself for him. Though I don't really suggest ruminating on that very much. But in any case, I still think that the most important part is that you care about your friend a lot and appreciate him a lot irl, and that's what really matters when it comes to friendship. Idk, that definitely wasn't very coherent, but I wanted to respond.
No worries it made perfect sense to me. You have a lot of really good points there. Thanks so much. I think I'm so depressed that I'm starting to feel guilty about all kinds of shit haha. Thanks for knocking some sense into me.
