I have been reading that anxiety and panic can produce intrusive; disturbing thoughts and feelings that are hard or seemingly impossible to resist. I have struggled with anxiety and stress this year in particular and intrusive and disturbing thoughts have clouded my days on too many occasions to count. I have times seriously wondered if there is something really wrong with me and that I'm not safe or trustworthy. This link: http://www.calmclinic.com/anxiety/signs/intrusive-thoughts is a good introduction and has some good information on anxiety and intrusive thoughts. Now that I am a counsellor these intrusive thoughts can be the images or feelings conjured by my mind in response to another's trauma, along with older ones that are results of my own historic events and fears. Thankfully now that I am a counsellor I attend one-to-one supervision and have been able to discuss this issue with another counsellor and learn helpful techniques but more vital to my heart that I am not the only one, that it isn't the end of the world and it doesn't make me a bad person.  If any of this resonates with you then I urge you to seek help and speak to someone you can trust. The clouded heavens have cleared only when I recognise these thoughts as malfunctions of a stressed and anxious mind and not secret, oppressed desires or memories that I am helpless before. I need not add to them weight that will only further embed the track-ways they create through my beautiful but complicated and imperfect mind. Our TV culture can also be unhelpful. I have tried to limit how much news I watch as the negative can flood an already stretched mind. News of murders, rapes, assaults, children being harmed can leave my beleaguered brain ravaged like a sea cliff face during a tempest. I am learning (all too slowly it can feel) to give over these unhelpful thoughts to someone who can be trusted to remind this world wrecked heart of the truth of me.
And I pray for myself and others from Romans 12:2 - Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is--his good, pleasing and perfect will.