In this case, we are talking about the erroneous belief that only people with mental disabilities face obsessive or strange thoughts.
Fact: everyone has strange, disgusting and disturbing thoughts from time to time. This means that virtually everyone you know, including friends, colleagues, teachers, and doctors, has also experienced obsessive thoughts. Mother Teresa also had obsessive thoughts (Teresa, 2009). Thus, most likely, such thoughts appear in your idol among popular artists, and in your priest.
A significant difference is that obsessive thoughts periodically occur in almost everyone, and your own seem to be somehow special, because they are repeated and sometimes get stuck. Because of this, they look extremely disturbing, as if they were a sign of a mental disorder. However, getting stuck in these thoughts doesn’t say anything about your character or value as a person. And they certainly have nothing to do with mental disorders. Getting stuck in your thoughts has a lot to do with the way you think and the feelings that those thoughts cause you, as well as the methods and intensity with which you try to get rid of them.
In the fifth chapter, we will show how the recurring obsessive thoughts that everyone has get stuck and turn into obsessive thoughts without any guilt, personal defect or mental abnormalities of the person himself.