“Why are her thoughts so dark?”

A note to the parent who also has intrusive thoughts—but can’t understand their child’s

It’s a quiet thought. Often unspoken. But it shows up across many of our parent sessions—sometimes with guilt, sometimes with confusion:

“I get intrusive thoughts too…

But why are hers so morbid? So detailed? So… heinous?”

This is a fair question.

Most adults, if they pause long enough, recognise having had flashes of strange or unwelcome thoughts: a sharp image, a violent what-if, a sexual thought that doesn’t fit. These are part of the human experience. The mind experiments. It plays with danger and consequence as a way of knowing where it stands.

But here’s what matters: the adult mind usually has some structure in place to hold these thoughts.

It recognises them as odd, passing, symbolic, even absurd.

The adolescent with OCD often does not have this structure—yet. Her thoughts don’t feel like metaphors.

They feel like truths. Like threats. Like tests she might fail at any moment.

So when she says:

“I had a thought I could stab my sister and I liked it,”

she isn’t exploring fantasy.

She’s enduring a collapse of symbolic space.

Bion taught us something simple but profound: thoughts need somewhere to go.

If the mind doesn’t have the inner space to hold them, they don’t feel like thoughts anymore—they feel real. Heavy. Dangerous. This is often what happens in obsessive states. The mind tries to make sense of something it can’t yet process—so the content becomes more vivid, more detailed, more disturbing. Not because your daughter is damaged, but because her mind is working overtime to digest something it hasn’t yet learned how to hold.

We work with this clinically—not by challenging the thought, but by helping the adolescent build the internal space that lets it be a thought. Nothing more.

So if you’re wondering why hers are so much worse, the answer is not weakness or pathology.

It’s about timing. Structure. Containment.

And what you’re doing—holding her, listening, wondering aloud—is already part of that scaffolding.

Let the thought be spoken.

Let the meaning emerge later.

Let the darkness be survivable in language.

That is the symbolic task.

That is the Bionian task.

That is the task we do together.