Dark Thoughts Part 1 – By @PhilipLeBrun
By Phil Le Brun
Dark Thoughts Part 1
I’m going to start with a simple question.
What are you thinking right now?
‘Why am I hungry again?’, ’What am I doing tonight?’, ‘I’ve got a song in my head’, ‘I should get off Facebook’ or bigger thoughts, ‘I’m not good enough’, ‘I wish I could help my brother’, ‘Will I always be alone?’.
We do a lot of thinking. Perhaps too much. Sometimes I’m guilty of overthinking and not seeing the bigger picture. When I was working I didn’t have as much time to think. I was busy sure, but I spent a lot of time doing what other people were thinking.
Now all I do is think. Reflecting, obsessing, mulling things over again and again.
Which begs the question are the thoughts we have related to our inner wishes and do they reveal who you really are.
So get ready for Part 1 of this SCAB trilogy about thoughts. The answers to the questions above can have profound consequences for your life, so lets get into the guts of this beast.
I’m going to focus on that last bigger subset of darker thoughts. The ‘maybe I’m not good enough’ thoughts. And the even darker, the flicker of jumping off the tracks as the overground rumbles past on a Tuesday morning. (Mum if you’re reading this, don’t worry I always stand behind the yellow line and everyone has these thoughts).
This brings me to a story I heard a year or so ago. A newly married man sat down one evening to watch ‘City of God’ with his wife.
An incredible Brazilian film about drug trafficking in Rio de Janeiro. One of my favourite films. Gripping, hard to watch in places and above all else more violent than a scorpion with a switchblade.
In the film gangs fight amongst each other and kill each other. There is graphic, graphic violence. Shooting. Raping. Mutilation. And about midway through the movie, the man sat with his arm around his wife started getting inundated with violent thoughts. ‘What if I were to brutally stab someone or shoot someone or harm my wife?’
Now this guy was a chiller surfer who’d never had violent thoughts like this go through his mind before. But he couldn’t get rid of them. Stabbing her. Slicing open her torso. Gouging out her eyes. Flashes of violence every time he would close his eyes. He couldn’t sleep. He lost weight. He would try and close his eyes and get rid of these thoughts but they came again and again and again. The same thought : what if I were to murder my wife. Murder my wife. Murder my wife….
One day his wife found him in a ball and he blurted it all out. But she was completely unfazed. She knew her husband as a sweet and gentle man.
So what was this disconnect between thoughts and how he really felt. Did he on some level want to murder his wife ? Was there something wrong with him? Was he a psychopath?
Read Part 2 of this SCAB to find out more. Or don’t. Either way is fine.